Filched Fluid's Flight
Fellowship's Flooded Folly
Filched Fluid's Flight
by Von Krieger
"Now Brother Heckel, bring forth the blood of the Fire Ibix and pour it into the Grand Cauldron of Mysteries." rumbled a deep voice, filled with barely restrained menace, sparking with power, filled to the very brim with malice. It was nice at first, but once you'd heard it droning on and on at a slow pace at biweekly meetings for several months, it got pretty annoying. Some people were born with good public speaking voices, it was a shame that so few of them were born with the minds that could churn out ideas and concepts that people would actually want to listen to.
Brother Fallrush was beginning to think that taking a job with the Fellowship of the Fallen Flood wasn't all that the pamphlets had pumped it up to be. It was supposed to be an evil religious cult after all. Though Fallrush was rapidly discovering that evil cults didn't seem to live up to their sinister reputations.
They were supposed to be all about drunken debauchery, of mass orgies of sex, of beautiful maidens cut up bloodily on stone alters, of books with writings in them so monstrous that they would drive a man insane if he so much as looked at it cross-eyed. So far there had been no drinking, no orgies, and no humans sacrifices. Though there had been some writings that would drive a man mad if he read them cover to cover. Dark writings inscribed by mad men, inspired by terrible beings that floated in the cold depths of the void between worlds, labyrinthine texts that would drive men to gouge out their own eyes in failed attempts to remove the taint from their minds.
However filling out the forms to get him placed in the proper tax bracket for religious services workers was not what he had been expecting. It was in Common, but yet it seemed like there was a completely different language being spoken. Words with meanings beyond the words themselves. Webs of dark text that required one to give up his very soul to understand them.
So he had gotten Brother Bernie to fill them out for him. He was a lawyer after all, tearing out the immortal soul was something that happened on the third day of law school, or maybe first thing on the fourth. Regardless, it happened and allowed them to read and compose such compositions of babble. After all, the most feared texts in existence had been written by lawyers. No one dared but read a few words before giving their consent whenever they were presented with the dreaded Tomes of Service.
Anyway, no booze, no orgies, no sacrifices of beautiful vestigial virgins. There had been a sacrifice, but it had just been an arthritic old chicken, and that had been due to them running out of deli meat at the catering table. It wasn't very fulfilling work at all. Brother Fallrush had expected to be out performing dark, dastardly deeds. Slipping poison into goblets, creating dark, loathsome abominations in the dead of night and unleashing them upon an unsuspecting world, searching for the child with the mark of evil (which looked kind of like the letter E tilted on one side) emblazoned as a birthmark on its left buttock, who would bring about the demise of millions, and so on and so forth.
Most of Fallrush's time with the Fellowship of the Fallen Flood was spent on trivial things. Like giving the ceremonial black robes a little spritz of something every now and then so they'd keep the traditional musty scent that the black robes of all evil fanatics were required to have. He'd jumped at the opportunity to take on clerical work, until he found out that they meant jotting down notes and running messages through the tower, rather than participating in profane rituals.
Mother had been right, bless her black heart, Fallrush should have gone into politics. All this secret dark order nonsense was getting old. If something exciting didn't occur soon, Brother Fallrush was going to take full advantage of his 90 day introductory trial period and find himself another career. He'd majored in Conjuring and Curses at a very prestigious mage's college, he didn't need this sort of aggravation.
He'd just been walking down the hall, and they'd snagged him into this... whatever this was. The way the Deepest Darkness was droning on, it was probably another one of those community soup things where everybody brought something. It certainly sounded like it, the way he was rattling down the list.
"Brother Algore, bring forth the horn shavings of the aqua dragon." said the Deepest Darkness. Definitely a community soup meet, aqua dragon horns contained the recommended daily allowance of several key vitamins and minerals essential to thinking proper evil thoughts. Though you didn't want to get TOO much of them. You'd get the urge to open a used cart dealership.
Brother Fallrush pulled his hood forward and leaned his chin against his chest, beginning to doze off in his chair. Though the smelled like the regulation musty robes, they had padded seats and backrests and were quite comfortable. Cross your hands in your lap, head down, eyes closed. You could be napping, or you could be praying to He Who Lives Within the Depths to come and drown the sorrows of the world in an eternal torrent of pure water.
That was how the Fellowship made most of its money, summoning the purest waters from the Damned Depths, and selling it to rich, uppity nobles who wouldn't stoop to drinking water from places as silly as the ground or the sky. No, they had to have it fresh and bottled from a plane of infinite empty seas, free of the filthy taint of life.
Though Fallrush had to admit, it did have a clean, crisp taste, and while on occasion it made somebody sprout fins or tentacles, you wouldn't end up with dysentery from drinking it. Much better to have a squid for a head, or a lobster claw for a hand than to spend a week or two with your intestines trying to make a break for it out your rump.
In a few moments Fallrush began to doze off, visions of torture chambers and blessed screams filling his mind when he was elbowed in the ribs.
"Brother Fallrush," repeated the Deepest Darkness, "Bring forth the living water."
Fallrush looked around, trying to find the other Fallrush that didn't bring the whatever. Calling everybody Brother, their last name, tended to have some problems. It was why no one ever asked Brother Smith to do anything. They'd begun instituting a unique name scheme for every new Brother that came in, but they hadn't gotten around to assigning names like "Blackfear," "Bloodwrencher," "Soulharvester," and "Revenueserviceman" to the existing members yet.
"Brother Fallrush? The living water?"
Everybody was looking at him. Well... eyes pointed in his general direction, probably. It was hard to tell with the shadowy hoods. "Bring the what, now?" Fallrush asked, scratching his head.
The Deepest Darkness sighed, "The White Shadow of the 33rd House ALWAYS brings the living water!"
"You're making this all up as you go along, aren't you?" Brother Fallrush said, crossing his arms. He hadn't wanted to be here in the first place. He was walking back to his room, and basically had gotten shanghaied into the ritual.
"What!? I... uh... um..." the Deepest Darkness stuttered, clearly panicking, "No, it's in your handbook!"
"Alright everybody, hands up if you've actually read beyond the opening few pages of the handbook!" Fallrush said smugly.
No hands were raised.
"Urgh! Well the Red Shadow..."
"White. You are! You're making it up as you go along!"
"No, I'm not! Look, all we need is the living water thing from the storage room at the end of the hall. It's a bluish clear thing slithering around trying to get out of a big glass jar. Just go get it and our summoning ritual will be complete."
Fallrush sighed and left the room to gather the living water, whatever it was. At least they were summoning SOMETHING!
"We're summoning something?" said one of the other Brothers, one of the mad ones. He heard narration.
"I thought this was the community soup dinner." added another.
"Oh for..." muttered the Deepest Darkness under his breath, following it with a few choice phrases used to redden the cheeks of sailors.
-o-
"Of course I have to to be the one who gets things. Pull the guy out of the hall and order him about like a puppet on a string." Fallrush muttered, stomping down the hallway towards the storage closet.
"Should've gone into politics. I bet I'd have a dozen orphans crying in the street by now. A whole lower class of downtrodden masses to trod upon.... trode upon... tread! Tread upon! Yeah, I'm putting in my resignation in the morning. Then it's off to biting hands and kicking babies!" he continued, opening the door to the storage closet, and with a moment of looking over the shelves found what he was looking for.
A thick blue liquid lapped at the sides of the large glass jar nestled tightly in between two bits of foam, making it so the captive liquid couldn't slosh around and get up enough motion to get the jar rolling off the shelf. It wouldn't be rolling anywhere with Fallrush's grip on it either.
The soon to be ex-Brother walked out of the closet, continuing his muttering. He kicked at a stone in a fit of anger. While the standard issue black robes did have the proper musty scent that all robes of evil individuals in a dark order ought to, they weren't really made for kicking things in. Especially when paired with standard issue sandals.
Fallrush's foot snagged in the robe coming down, making him misstep and go teetering forward. He reached out to catch himself on the windowsill. Thankfully he caught it, the jar however did not. The glass struck the very edge of the sill, shattering and sending the blue gunk flying into the air.
The blob made a pleased burbling sound and immediately spread outward, taking on a parachute shape and gliding slowly and steadily away from the tower to freedom. "Hey! Come back!" Brother Fallrush said, not at all expecting the slime thing to do anything of the sort, but then again, you never knew if something stupid and unlikely would work.
"Well bugger." Fallrush said with a sigh, watching the slime thing drift out of sight.
-o-
Meanwhile several blocks away, a young salamander anthro name Valdka Gearhalt was taking his afternoon bath. Now, Valdka was an odd sort of lizard. Popular styles said he dressed funny, the social ways of the times said that he acted funny, and he had a rather odd job. He was a tinkerer, a gearsmith, a maker of clockwork devices. Most of which ended up exploding, or spitting out gouts of greasy black smoke.
And it was such gouts, the tendency for things to spit oil, or to spew soot in his face, that Valdka had to take several baths a day. He didn't mind, unlike the rest of the city, he had plenty of somewhat fresh, clean water, due to the abandoned water tower just on the other side of the rooftop shack where he lived and worked.
The water tower was one of the old city designs, back in the good old days when magic had been the field of choice for many intellectuals and dabblers. Magic took hard work, dedication, and tended to leave you exhausted. By comparison, tinkering with stuff just made you physically exhausted and a little dirty. Though both fields did have a tendency to produce things that blew up in your face.
Anyway, this water tower was one of the few that still refilled itself via some sort of magical enchantment inscribed in the runes inscribed in the metal plates that made up the bowl shaped tower. The cone shaped top had probably blown off in a storm a few years back, or had been stolen for scrap by the less well of inhabitants of the city. Or even commandeered by the Decency Committee to use as a pastie to cover the nipple-type naughty bits of one of the gigantic female, some debatably so, lizards that seemed to stomp through Oreska on a bi-monthly basis.
Valdka was enjoying the sunshine of a fine Summer day. Well... what sunshine got through the layers of clouds and smog. Dark and ominous clouds. Of course that was normal, for the most part dark and ominous clouds always hung over Oreska. With so many evil cults headquartered here, there was always one or the other right in the final stages of summoning everlasting doom upon the world.
The place was always crawling with heroes and such, but the only thing that kept the world ending cults from ending the world was that the other world ending cults want to be the ones that actually ended up ending the world. So, in the end they put an end to ending the world ending ends of the other cults. So they all kind of balanced themselves out.
There was always the prospect of rain, though Oreska had rather novel weather. On occasion it rained things that were not rain. Rains of blood and frogs happened several times a season, though at times it went beyond that. Like the time that it had rained baked potatoes. They'd had an entire week of potato themed weather once, a mashed potato fog rolled in on Monday, stayed until Tuesday evening, when it got a bit chilly and began a sleet of shoestring fries. The potato fog returned, accompanied by a light drizzle of gravy on Wednesday. On Thursday there was a terrible blizzard of chips, original at first, but drifting through ranch, sour cream and onion, dill pickle, barbecue, cheddar, and charred rat flavors. The last was much to the enjoyment of Oreska's homeless population. A hail of baked potatos kept everyone in doors Saturday evening, and a flurry of potato pancakes arrived just in time for most religious services on Sunday morning.
Valdka had long since realized that the strange city had food fall from the sky at least once a fortnight, a little more often if you could stomach things like frogs and grasshoppers. Though the grasshoppers usually drew out the 100 foot tall sticky tongue lizard that would stomp parts of the down flat, amongst other things. And with the proper collection, preparation and preservation techniques, one could keep oneself in edibles for next to nothing. Which is what Valdka did most of the time.
His line of work was accompanied by large expenses, and seldom did his experimentation turn up anything of real value. Mostly his pay came from repairing things in his small shop below, clocks, watches, toys, and the like. Though his real work, in his eyes, was making clockwork creatures. Most of the ones he made were smaller, able to be held in one's hand. Mice, frogs, kittens, puppies, snakes, that sort of thing.
Though he occasionally made things larger. His assistant and best friend was one of his clockwork creation, a giant clockwork lobster that was slightly larger, and much heavier, than Valdka himself that was actually quite intelligent. Well, for a big pile of metal and gears, Valdka figured Hubert was about as smart as a really smart dog by himself. And he could understand commands from Valdka, though he never seemed to hear anybody else.
Hubert was probably scuttling around the workshop, making sure none of the smaller clockwork creatures got out of their tanks. Valdka recalled when one of his spiders had gotten out, the shrieks from the building next door had cracked one of his windows. His building was a story taller than all it's neighbors as well, so thankfully Valdka didn't have to worry about people running boards across the roofs and hopping over to diddle in his workshop.
The salamander sighed softly, happily, rinsing the soap from his smooth scaled body, ducking down into the water to scrub the suds off his head. He rose up from the water, shaking himself off, looking for all the world like one of those adverts for expensive soaps and shampoos that one sees in the glossy paged magazines. The ones that were printed on the expensive, smooth paper. Not the rough stuff that still had flecks of bark in it that you could use to sand wood. The kind that the unfortunate and impoverished were forced to resort to for privy paper.
Ahh, the sun managed to find a hole in the cloud cover and wash shining for a few minutes. Sunshine, a pleasant bath, and enough money to continue work on his true to life, giant clockwork spider. It was the size of a Rottweiler and could cling to the walls and ceiling. Well, eventually. Valdka still had to get four more legs and the head done. At the moment it just limped around the workshop and crashed into things. The day couldn't get any better, and he'd like to see anyone try to make it worse!
And then the day got worse. Somewhere up in the heavens, a lesser snow deity reared his head back and sneezed forth a gigantic spray of chilly snot into the world. Or at least that's what it felt like to Valdka, who suddenly found himself covered from head to waist in a thick curtain of translucent blue slime.
"Bleh!" he said, unthinkingly making the noise that people instinctively make when they've suddenly found themselves covered in an unpleasant substance without warning. The salamander began to peel the stuff off, only to find that it didn't seem to want to come off. The snot had apparently decided it was rather alive and began to wiggle, squirming out of Valdka's grip, remaining quite stuck to the artificer.
"Blast it, hold still so I can get you off of me!" Valdka growled, seizing two handfuls of the ooze at its base, where it was the thickest, and heaved it over his head into the water, freeing himself from the rather sticky substance. He felt like he needed another bath now. But the slime thing was in the water.
Oh blast where was it?! Valdka looked around, trying to see the slime in the water, but the top was clouded by oil, murk, and soap suds. He could scrub himself off in the washbowl from the pump, he wasn't going to share a bathtub with a big blob of who knows what. The salamander began to walk towards the ladder when he felt something cold and slimy on his legs.
"Oh no! No you're not going to get me! No sir!" he grunted, continuing to move towards the ladder, slime creeping up his legs and grabbing a hold of his tail, pulling itself further upward. Pressing up against...
"AAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIE!"
In to Valdka's rump. The chill liquid flowing into him was a horrific sensation, it kind of burned it was so cold. The lizard scrambled to pull himself out of the water, unceremoniously bonking his head on the lip of the water tower, knocking himself unconscious and sending him splashing back into the water below.
-o-
Valdka awoke sometime later, finding himself half floating in the water, his tail curled around the side of the ladder. His head hurt. The salamander stood up in the water, he moaned softly and felt the tender bump on his head. He recalled the slimy thing and looked down into the water, the flow into the filter device having taken care of the impurities that were floating on the top before.
Try as he might, he couldn't see the blue goop on the bottom. Bottom. Brr. He shivered, recalling the experience with the slime and his own rump. He looked down at his belly, and found it to be as trim as it was supposed to be. So there definitely wasn't any gunk hiding inside of him. As much of the stuff as there was, it would have shown.
He snorted in annoyance, probably something with the weather, or one of the cults casting a hallucination spell on the city again to drive them into the depths of despair, preparing them for the coming of some dark lord or another. They never did show up, though. It was quite annoying. What with the followers shouting in the streets of impending doom day after day, and no evil, city devouring monsters ever appearing.
Well, except for that giant he-she lizard that came around every now and then. But that wasn't the way an evil cult worked, the lizard gal was too cute and playful. And no destroyer of worlds worth his, her, or its salt would descend upon the world, and use hop scotch and building humping as their preferred methods of terror infliction. None of them were that original.
Unformed monsters from five dimensional space that you could go mad at just gazing upon were a dime a dozen, quite frankly. One cult had actually been five minutes away from summoning their dread lord into the physical plane. Sadly Ulgorrak the Great Formless One had to cancel at the last minute, apparently his dinner reservations had come through, and it was this really posh place where all the Great Old Ones ate every so often, so of course he couldn't pass up a chance to rub tentacles with some of the big movers and shakers of the outer dimensions.
That was the problem with demons and deities and whatnot, so unreliable. Always speaking in parables and similes and obfuscated imagery that could really mean just about anything. 'When the young black lion rises in the House of Ka'thar, the old seagull will fall, and the walls of Ka'thar will be red as blood.'
Bleh, it could be a prophecy of a dark figure with the symbol of a lion overthrowing the grizzled sea captain who ran House Ka'thar. Or it could be that they hired a painter to redo the outside of the place since it was flaking. The young black lion would climb up a ladder with his bucket of red paint, and startle a senile old gull out of its nest.
Magic. Peh. Give him some gears, pulleys, and oil any day. With clockwork you never had to worry about secret divine agendas and the hidden meaning behind words. You had to watch what you said around clockwork, as they'd take things quite literally. Before he had explained to Hubert what the term meant, every time Valdka said 'Put the lamp out' the clockwork lobster would literally take the lamp outside and place it on the doorstep. That was the good thing about clockwork creatures, they only made the same mistake once. Much better than people. Especially the people downstairs.
Valdka shivered at the thought and went inside. Hubert was there with his towel, the fluffy white terrycloth folded over the lobster's claw, rather like a butler would do it. Valdka wasn't exactly sure where Hubert had picked up that particular way of holding towels, but he had to admit that it was cute.
"Thank, Hubert. Put the lights out in about ten minutes. That'll give me enough time to brush my teeth and get ready for bed." the salamander said to his clockwork companion.
The lobster made a few whirs and clicks in response.
"Don't pull that with me, you know very well what I mean." the artificer scolded playfully.
The lobster clattered of accompanied by the sound of gears and pulleys to tend to his master's orders, making a soft buzzing sound that Valdka could almost swear was a chuckle. Clockwork pets were much tidier than real ones, all they needed was a few briquettes of charcoal and some water, and all that resulted in was some easily disposable ash and a little smoke.
He yawned and stretched, brushing his teeth, putting his nightshirt on, then slipping into bed. While he was a little lonely, Valdka was content with his life. He was more well off than most of the city, had a steady job, and got to do what he loved in his spare time. Plus he didn't have any of the skills that made a good adventurer, so he didn't have to worry about being dragged into some highly dangerous, yet dramatic and exciting journey to save the world.
Though he didn't know it, all that was about to change.