Hero's Quest
Short fiction
Splish splash splosh
Trapper Roland trod with some trepidation through the pink wetlands of the Miasmic Portions, where thick mangroves of blockish pastel-green closed tight in around the waters. Creatures chittered and called but he was listening to one call only.
They’d told him that to venture so far out of the Prince's Hundreds into this wild wetland was to invite attack by bloodmallard and scythe-swan, that alligators resplendent in hides of rhinestone spangle would snap sudden round his ankles and drag him down to mingle his scarlet essence in the roseate morass. Nevertheless, his hunt continued.
The second moon of Wylopan rose full over the swamp as the first crescent moon descended. It glimmered out a metallic overlay across all the pink, as if silver leaf had been scattered over thick smeared pastel paints on waterlogged vellum. It was the steel edge of a sacrificer’s blade laid on the neck of this lush succulent vegetation.
Roland halted and took in the swamp’s stillness. For a moment all was silent. Then a blithe-owl cooed once and sudden. A slithering thing near the base of a mangrove shrieked and bolted, and the owl dove down into the water. Not managing to get a grip on its prey, the bird returned to the quag’s surface and then took to the silvered sky, hooting sadly at its failure. The Trapper pushed on.
The king beast’s chiming discordant wail got ever louder as Roland splashed toward the its lair. Approaching his ultimate quarry, this last creature in the family that he'd stalked so patiently, he thought of the other twenty-two heads on his trophy wall, members of the Aurifaunt clan culled and taken, their essences belonging now to him.
To catch the King Aurifaunt, the father of all his race, would be to multiply a thousandfold the karmic essence-power of what he'd already taken. The entire blood-substance of the Aurifaunt line would then be Roland's to command. It was this promise which had brought him away from the safe refuge of the Prince's Hundreds and the Bastion of the Hierarch, and out into these Miasmic Portions, this immense pink unknown.
Out over the waters, spiralling in through the trees, the eerie ululations of the beast resumed once more. Roland started off in the direction of the wild keening. King Aurifaunt’s eldritch yodelling was inhuman, yes – but not proper to any worldly creature either. Its unnameable tones spoke of something from another reality, not our own...
He halted suddenly, alarmed, his heart thudding to his throat. Something was gripping his ankle. An alligator’s jaws? He looked down, expecting to see that rhinestone hide glimmering its tough diamond menace at him in the moonlight.
Instead he saw a man on the ground, ragged and scrawny, holding his leg. A wraith? A stench of meat and waste rose to his nostrils at the same time as the rosy world of Wylopan dissolved all around him. He pulled off his glasses and stared down at the wretch.
What the fuck you doin in our alleyway? said the man. We tryin to sleep here, brother.
With his virtual glasses off, the world of Wylopan fell away, the pink sheen of the moonlight was gone now, and Roland was lost in the damp and cold of a city night where sodium lamps shone a dim pissy-amber sheen over the ragged streets.
I said what, motherfucker, are you doin in our alleyway? snarled the man with his grip held tight round his ankle.
Roland was stunned momentarily by his abrupt transition from the high fantasy enchantment of the virtual world into this rank reality. The smell, which before had seemed to emanate from the effluvial rot of an exotic quagmire, was now revealed to be the mundane stink of a downtown sidestreet. The ethereal call of the King Aurifaunt was transmuted into the siren of a passing ambulance a block away.
He stood there uncertainly as the man shook his ankle back and forth, as if trying to pull him down.
You gonna stomp all over me without even the respec’ of sayin whatchoo doin here? called out the man, and then of a sudden released his grip.
Roland stepped back. He shook his head and he readjusted. Now he knew where he was, this forlorn lost place back in the forgotten corners of his gray world, and it made his heart sink. To take off those glasses and re-enter the everyday world was to drown in tiny disappointments that trickled and then flooded over you. A sea of blear ordinariness that you could drown in.
He opened his mouth to babble out his story to the man: how he was a player of RealWorld Trapper®, the very greatest player in the world, in fact, and how he needed now only to venture into the wetland and trap the King Aurifant at the heart of the Pink Miasma in order to top out his score and achieve TripleGoldTrophy player status and unprecedented legendary fame among the streamers.
He thought of telling this man how he’d left his dull real-world job to play this great game. How even now he was streaming his quest to many thousands of his followers, perhaps to a million or more, using his glasses as his window of opportunity. How he’d become royalty in the blocky rose world of Wylopan, the land behind his glasses. He might even become prince or king there soon.
All this he thought to say. But then he thought better of it. What would all his followers on the stream think if they saw him justifying himself to a street bum? He could imagine the reaction videos, all the cringy memes...
A royal-level Trapper has no call to explain his ways to some lowly creature of the swamp.
He replaced his earbuds and straightened his glasses, turning them for now to real-world clarity and set to record. He’d need that if he was going to administer – not a kick exactly – a kind of nudge with his feet – to the homeless man. A full-on kick would be too much, but he had to exert his authority somehow and save face on the stream. It’d probably be good for the numbers.
But when he looked up again after adjusting his kit, the bum was gone. There were blue and red flashing lights in the alleyway, and as he took out the earbuds he could hear the wail, not of the King Aurifaunt, but a police prowl car screeching to a halt beside him.
He looked round and smiled sympathetically to the cops as they jumped out of the car. They had no need to save him anymore. He would be doing fine without them now.
The bum’s body was leaking blood and urine onto the backseat vinyl leatherette, but the upholstery could be hosed down easily enough by the garage staff back at the station. Some spectacles rattled around on the floor back there. Pretty fancy glasses for a homeless dude, but all busted up now.
Where to dump the bum? The usual place, a sluice tank just out of town at the sewage treatment place. The stagnant water there had turned a greasy blotched gray with the decomposing remains discarded inside. Plaques of soft matter floated on the surface and fluoresced green and violet in the nighttime, seething in a bacterial soup.
That’ll be twenty-two bums taken care of just this week, said Officer Harris to his partner. Th’ unhoused reduction program’s startin’ to achieve real success, I’d say.
Naw – twenty-three, I reckon, said Officer Kyle. Makes us top performers on our watch.
He punched a few keys on a gadget on the dashboard, and Relocations: 23 flashed out at them in silver digits.
Confirmed, said Officer Kyle. Lookin’ to win that free donut breakfast all next month.
Hot dawg! cooed Officer Harris. What a time to be alive! Coffee’s on me this mornin’, Josh!
As the patrol car carrying the lifeless across the river passed a parapet on the bridge, an owl took flight, seeking the safety of the high-tension power pylon up above.
The sky was beginning to lighten. The owl, from where it perched on the humming powerlines, gazed out over the roseate puffy clouds clustering in the sun’s attendance to the east. The dry crackle of electricity buzzed through the air around the bird as the police vehicle approached the circular tanks of the sewage plant below.
NOTE
This flash fiction story derives from a prompt posted by Fictionistas:
Your character is someone who wears spectacles (glasses), and is a trapper.
Your story is about a quest. No longer than 1000 words
(I did go a tad over the word limit, but that’s inevaitable for a long-winded bloke like me)
Dedicated to my bruv PDM, one of the wicked clique who created the Pokémon Go game and trapped a generation in its clutches.
