rocksrule (rocksrule) wrote in light_of_may, @ 2009-11-27 21:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | #solo, 2009-06-24 |
Who: Hier
When: 3:30 pm
Where: After school enrichment program
What:Story time!
After the fight with the Chiropirates, Lavinia’s Revenge was found to be in sore need of repairs. Riyah and his sister spent a day and a night without sleep at the helm, bringing the fat, lilting airship safely into port in an airship berth south of Qaum. The pilots, the boiler crew, and the knowledgeable or able-bodied circus performers were all recruited to help with the work, so as to lessen the price the circus would have to pay for repairs.
Mohini the wild girl and Lutfi the robot boy were too small to help, but the grown-ups were all very busy. The airship port was fun for a little while, but after they’d bothered all the crews and ridden the rickety lifts up and down and tricked the flight controllers into letting them look at all the beeping instruments, their options seemed exhausted.
The port was on the far edge of the city, so the smoke and noise wouldn’t bother the inhabitants. Out beyond all the airships and smaller craft, there was nothing but open savanna. Mohini took two bottles of sarsaparilla, a hat, and some binoculars. She wound up Lutfi’s key as tight as it would go and the two of them set out to see what they could see out among the wild grasses.
It didn’t take long for them to leave the road behind. The road into the city was very wide and busy and full of mechanical elephants and steam wagons, but they’d seen all those things hundreds of times. They’d seen the wide-open grasslands before, too, but not without a grown-up to spoil all their fun. Away from the road, they saw real elephants, a mommy and a baby. They saw a herd of wildebeests and a small pack of Utahraptors following close on their tails, looking for stragglers. They saw a very nice gazelle who gave them directions to where the elephant graveyard could be seen, even though Mohini spoke with a dreadful accent.
On the way to the elephant graveyard, Lutfi nearly fell straight into a big hole in the ground. It was disguised by grasses and rocks all piled up around it. They thought it was only a mean trick before they heard someone calling and calling for help at the bottom. The calls sounded like hyena, which Mohini didn’t speak very well, but she understood the idea.
Lutfi unscrewed his hands and Mohini took the extender attachments from the pocket inside his chest. He slowly stretched his hands down, down, down into the hole. He was very strong, being made of metal, but Mohini still had to hold onto his waist to pluck the poor hyena from the bottom of the hole. It went a very long way down.
When they had lifted the hyena out, he very quickly changed into a boy and thanked them very politely for their help. Mohini spoke boy much better than she spoke hyena, so that worked out nicely. They let him borrow a handkerchief and covered up his bruises with bandages. His name was Ghubari, and he invited them home to meet his mommy and have some juice, for being so very nice as to help him out of the giant hole.
On the way to Ghubari’s house, Lutfi asked him how he’d been so unlucky as to fall into that hole, and who might have set the trap. Ghubari told them about a wicked creature named the Great Green Poobah who quite disliked all the werehyenas and other creatures. He set traps all over the grasslands so as to greatly inconvenience everybody. There had once been an equally wily and strong, and slightly less wicked creature called the Leucrotta, but he had disappeared and nobody knew what had become of him.
When the reached Ghubari’s house, his Mommy gave Mohini a glass of cold tamarind juice and Lutfi a nice drink of oil so he wouldn’t feel stiff and dried out in the hot sun. She thanked them for pulling Ghubari out of the hole and told them again how terribly things had gone since the Great Green Poobah had learned the Leucrotta was no longer protecting the plains.
Mohini wasn’t scared of anything and Lutfi was scared of a lot of things, but that made him even sorrier for the werehyenas and the other people and creatures on the savanna. He and Mohini offered to help look for the leucrotta, since they didn’t know anything about the Great Green Poobah and hadn’t brought any explosives with them. Ghubari’s mother didn’t know anything that might help them, but she did thank them very kindly for their offered assistance. For ordinary children, such an endeavor would be terribly dangerous, but Ghubari’s mother was a very sensible woman and saw that a wild girl and a robot might be just the thing to find their protector.
Our on the grasslands again, Mohini asked the little birds for directions. Little birds can be quite silly and seldom talk very much with big, earthbound creatures, but Mohini knew that their little eyes saw everything under the sun.
One tickbird eating bugs from a rhino’s back told them that the Great Green Poobah went everyday over the top of the highest of high mountains on some errand. Mohini and Lutfi laced up their boots extra tight and made their way stone by stone up over the icy peak, where a yeti gave them milky coffee and warmer socks, and slid all the way down on sleds.
At the bottom, A white-headed vulture halfway through his stinky luncheon told them that a white barge took off from the sinewy, silvery river at the same time every afternoon. Mohini and Lutfi took a break to drink their sarsaparilla and followed the wending waterway down, bidding polite but distant good afternoons to the hippos and crocodiles they passed, skipping through the mud flats until they came up on the white barge tied up to a hiccup nut tree.
While Lutfi picked a few nuts, for one never knew when such things might be useful, Mohini spoke to a handsome hammerkop who said that the Great Green Poobah left his white barge every day and walked down a hidden staircase into the earth. The wild girl and the robot boy peeked underneath the big rock the gray bird had pointed out and found a spiraling staircase cut into the bedrock. It was very dark, but Lutfi’s eyes lit up with a calming blue, and neither he nor Mohini skipped a step the whole way down.
At the bottom of the staircase was a door. Outside the door were two guards with big, mean-looking clubs and cold glares. Mohini put on her best smile and her cutest giggle. She knew how to deal with grown-ups. She skipped up to the guards and beamed. “Hello, Mr. Very Strong Men. Will you please let me in to see my uncle, the Great Green Poobah?”
“I’m sorry, little girl. No one is allowed to enter,” said the taller guard, who had a very splendidly big nose.
“Oh, well, I just wanted to bring him a special treat for a snack. Would you give him these? They’re very rare and delicious, and they give you very powerful magic if you eat them. How do you imagine he became the Great Green Poobah?” And she handed them the hiccup nuts and skipped away again.
In about two minutes, but the guards were trying to scare each other and hold their breath at the same time, and Lutfi and Mohini sneaked right past.
Beyond the door was a big room where the light was all green. Lutfi turned off his eye-lights so as not to spoil the effect. The Great Green Poobah was sitting in a chair made from elephant bones, which was in terribly poor taste, and he held in his hands a shiny green bowl. Though it was hard to make out when he was saying, he sounded amused and nasty.
Shining bowls had a distinct tendency to be magic. Mohini pulled out her binoculars and took a closer look. All across the green surface of the bowl, a little shadow was running about, its shape that of a very strange beast indeed.
That bowl was nothing good. It only took Lutfi a moment to rig up the bolt gun in his wrist and aim with the help of Mohini’s binoculars. It was a long, tough shot, but being a robot had its benefits, and he lined it up perfectly. The screw blasted straight through the green bowl. Rather than shattering, it melted into green smoke while the Great Green Poobah howled.
From the smoke, a creature appeared. It was big as a horse with point hooves, a lion’s tail and hyena spots on its reddish fur, its big, big mouth full of only two immense teeth that extended all across each jaw. It laughed a laugh that sounded like holiday gongs and angry waves and the laugh of a happy hyena, and butted the Great Green Poobah to the floor with its huge, handsome head.
The great beast, who must be the leucrotta, galloped across the room and let the two children leap onto his back, hurrying away as the Great Green Poobah raged and roared. Past the hiccupping guards, up the twisty stairs, and out into the open air.
The leucrotta plucked each by turn from his back and set them on the ground. “Thank you, Mohini and Lutfi,” he said, and bowed very politely. So many strange people had a way of knowing their names that neither child found that really distressing. “I suppose I owe you a boon.”
Lutfi was about to say that they were really quite willing to be of assistance entirely out of the goodness of their hearts, but Mohini didn’t believe in politeness. She covered his mouth and said, “Yes, sir, thank you very much.”
The leucrotta turned his immense head to the side and winked his left eye until a single tear slipped out. It hardened into a perfect, clear sphere before it hit the ground and bounced. “That is a leucrotta’s stone. It will afford clear sight in times of trouble.”
“Thank you, sir!” Mohini opened the door on Lutfi’s chest and tucked it away for safe keeping. “We’d better head back now. It’s a long way, and if we’re not back before dark we’ll miss dinner.”
The leucrotta summoned them a ride, two young bull elephants who carried them to their backs with their trunks and walked them all the way back to the airstrip in the height of style."
Hier downed his water in one go. "And that's that. Now, I think some of your moms are here, and the rest are off to craft time. Is it lanyards today? Man, I never get to make lanyards."