Marooned: Mad Dog
04 Jan 2024Creamy Goodness III
Marooned Part One
Look as your mind's eye swoops down to a Yellow-white planet lit by a blue star somewhere to the east of the bubble. Puncturing streaky clouds, the sound of wind accompanies your journey over an emerald green ocean. Enormous waves crest like pyramids of ice, capped with white foam that is carried away in the gale. You weave between islands and braker-battered coastlines that shine like polished bronze under the blue star.
You are not seeing hills heavy with ore; it is the indigenous orange flora growing thick and unhindered on a land able to support the endless diversity of life that thrives in these thick heavy forests, sturdy enough to withstand the almost constant gale force winds. Ahead of you, over the verdant ocean, a mountain of silver appears on the horizon.
Approaching, you discover the mountain is only sand rising and falling, lifted and dropped by unrelenting wind. Diving into the swirling mass, a white mist of glassy grit fills your vision, but soon a blurred figure comes into view. He’s running, running for his life.
Running against the wind didn't help, but he ran on. Sand battered his lizard skin hood, and the wind caused his long cloak to whip around his legs. He would have to abandon the staff he had spent so many days making. It was his most important tool, but running with it slowed him down, just like the bottles around his waist. Pulling on the end of a knot, Creamy let his water bottles drop and paused to ram his staff into the sand. They are all important to his survival, but without them, he would be faster and maybe survive this attack.
Another moment was risked sliding a chime made of bottle caps and broken glass into a slot atop the staff. The noise the shambles made gave him a slim chance of finding his staff again. A dark shape low to the ground streaked by on his left, making Creamy take off again and run, abandoning his all important water. Both the bottles and the water were beyond valuable, but all the water in the desert would be worth nothing if the swoops caught him now.
Forcing himself to breathe through his nose, he tried to keep his strides long and even. Sweat was already forming on his brow, and now most of his water was behind him, he had to do what he could to preserve the moisture in his body. Following the flock had been the best way to find water, and they had kept Creamy’s bottles filled for weeks. When Creamy had first started stalking the swoops with a mind to eat them, the creatures had been weary of him, and chose flight over fight when he had got too close.
Eventually, Creamy gave up trying to catch swoops as he was already very good at hunting the basking lizards with his sling. Besides, the swoops seemed to sense him if he found one grounded in sling range. What was far more valuable than their meat and skins was the flock's ability to find water uncovered by the shifting tides of the desert. If Creamy was quick, he could follow the strange whooping call the dog-like creature made when they found water, and dig enough of a hollow to fill his bottles before the desert buried the puddle of life sustaining water once again.
This time, the creatures had realised they had a numbers advantage, and Creamy was a lot of moist meat there for the taking. He had seen the pack hunting baskers plenty of times now. Once they spotted their pray, some of the pack would run by to cut off the creatures' escape, and herd it into the wind. Other swoops behind it were waiting for that moment. Once they had the wind on their backs, they opened out the membrane wings to catch the wind and pounced, gliding in to their target undetected by the baskers.
Again, another Swoop ran by on his left, making Creamy veer right. The thing stayed with him, close enough to be a shadow in the sandstorm pushing him further off his path, meaning he may never find his staff-marked stash in the sandstorm.
Sweat was soaking into the lizard skin mask that kept his forehead covered, and his bottle-bottom sand-goggles on his face. He remembered the hunting pattern, so he knew what was coming. Taking a bone shiv out of his belt, Creamy braced himself. Before he saw it, Creamy had often wondered how something about the size of a dog managed to get airborne on a planet that felt heavy to a guy that had spent most of his life on a planet with over two and a half Gs. Now he was about to experience their trick from the prays point of view.
Hissing sand rained against his hood making it hard to hear, but he listened for the slightest change, his life depended on it. A change came all too soon. Twisting around with the shiv raised, Creamy caught the swoop flying at him. He couldn’t see the animal clearly enough to make out details, but he knew where its fang-filled jaws were, and its claws.
Catching the creature by its shoulder, Creamy stabbed it over and over prison style as the rest of the pack made their move. Creamy had lost a lot of his muscle mass over the months, but not an ounce of his speed, and he was fighting for his life. Using the swoop in his hand as a shield, Creamy blocked a second flying at his head stinking out with his weapon. To an observer, his jabs and slashes would seem wild; but for anyone experienced in close combat, his attacks were controlled and deadly.
Another swoop bounced onto his legs, instantly Creamy fell onto it, grinding his knee into its soft body. He felt its bones crack and its body pop like a balloon. A swoop taking advantage of the distraction leapt on his back, its jaws trying to close around Creamy’s neck. Jumping up, he curled into a ball and came down on his back, crushing the life out of the creature. More swoops attacked, and each one was killed, but the pack sensed blood and the precious moisture it offered.
A sound he didn’t know he could make freed itself from the primal depth of his mind and body. He felt the skin at the back of his throat strain as if it was going to tear, but still a declaration of dominance, rage and despair forced itself out into the world. Nothing in the desert had made a sound like that before. Even with their atrophied hearing, the swoops heard it. More than that, they felt down to their core. It carried on the wind to a rookery where a flock of swoops took to the air in, flying on fear as much as gliding on the wind, never to return.
The ability to comprehend language was not needed to understand the cry. Creamy had challenged them, and pack did not accept. Indifferent to the struggle that had taken place, the sandstorm assaulted Creamy as he struggled back to his knees. He watched the last shadow of retreating swoops dissapper into the billowing sands. The sound of his breath against his mask and his heart pounding in his ears was drowned by the endless assault of a million grains, slowly braking his mind as well as his body.
Sitting on his haunches, back hunched, Creamy looked at his feet, watching the sand slowly burying them. The path that had led him here played in the theatre of his mind. He watched the show alone. Of all the people he had met, befriended and loved, no one had stayed by his side or seemed to care what happened to him. At this moment in time, Creamy didn't care if he lived or not. The sands were welcome to bury him as he lost himself in his memories.
He remembered the first time he had been abducted as a child. It was scary, but at least the people that took him understood how to treat a boy that was only being used to force his mother to change her political leanings. The third time, amateurs had taken him, and they didn’t understand the Imperial landscape of abduction. Thay had been nasty and abusive, but still Creamy knew they were going to let him go eventually; there would be a way back to safety, and back to his life. There was no escaping the desert.
The memory of safety made him remember Séraphine, the first woman Creamy had ever loved. Also, the first woman to break his heart. Their love was forbidden, making their passion even more intense. Never had Creamy felt as warm and safe as he did in his teacher's embrace. His arms holding her body to his, and Séraphine holding on to him had been as she put it, un petit paradis, but now that was gone forever.
Thoughts of lost love brought Nerys to the surface of his reverie. He reached out to touch a face that wasn't there, and the ghost of her scent haunted his mind. Warm and nervous, generous and secretive, naive and experienced. She was her own contradiction, and the second woman to make Creamy stop and appreciate the person he was with, and not just what she offered in the moment.
She had caused him to be uncharacteristically apprehensive the first time he took her out, but seeing her stood in the doorway of the Inner Ring wearing an unforgettable green dress had dismissed his nerves, filling him with enthusiasm to be worthy of her time. The Doctor and Creamy had a complicated affair. Short but so very full of unforgettable moments. It was also a liaison that never had a chance to become anything more thanks to Vodan and others. The Doctor had become the most important person in his life, and fate's flow had carried her way from him, never to be seen again.
At least that time it was fate ditching him, and not judgment. Being labeled a villain and then left, unwashed, unfed, and unwanted by people that had been paid to recover Creamy from Vodan and his masters' prison, had deeply wounded him.
Mowers and her partner took both Creamy and a slave from the clutches of Vengerfield. His rescuers made it clear early on that they had the same opinion of Creamy, as they did of froth from a toilet bowl that had made it onto their finger.
Creamy had been kept in a container, fed once a day, and given a bucket to relieve himself. He had to swap his bucket through the same slot he was given his daily scraps of food and bottle of water. That dark solitary confinement had lasted over a week before he was bound, put in a tailor made cell, and then presented to the pirate master Vengerfield. The man beat Creamy to within an inch of his life every day, trying to make Creamy tell him where Nerys had gone. Every evening Jacqueline, the slave, was sent to Creamy's cell to patch him up, so he was fit enough for tomorrow's torture.
First time he saw her through bruised and blurred eyes, he mistook her for Doctor Nerys Nymei, but Jacqueline put him right by telling him her story. She had been abducted, surgically altered to look like Nerys, then forced to tend to Creamy. Hearing her French accent and seeing her resemblance to the Doctor, Creamy could see what was going to happen.
If he didn't give up what he knew about Nerys, Vengerfield would give him enough time to bond with Jacqueline, and then make him watch as Vengerfield tortured her in his place. Knowing this, Creamy did all he could to comfort Jacqueline no matter how badly he had been beaten, and did all he could to at least let her smile while he prepared to say something to the pirate lord knowing, truth or lie, would result in his death, just to save a stranger.
Fortune smiled, sending Mowers and another mercenary to pluck them both from Vengerfields prison before that happened, but somehow Creamy was branded scum for putting Jacqueline in that situation. Being imperial, he was used to being set upon for no good reason, but after everything he had just experienced, he felt he deserved more than unfocused scorn. The bounty hunters attitude had made it clear asking them for further help would be pointless, and didn't complain when they left him at the dock with nothing but dirty prison clothes on his back, and half a reheated kebab in his belly.
At least he was on a station at that point. Surrounded by uncaring people, but people nonetheless, and help was no more than a reverse-charge call away. Here the sand filled air wouldn't even let his echo answer him if he screamed to the sky for help. Tears were threatening to come, but he couldn’t waste yet more water on self-pity, and sulking never got anything done. Picking up the surrounding corpses, Creamy walked into the wind, listening for his chimes. A wave of relief washed over when his hand clasped the bone and sinew staff he had made, and his questing fingers found the bottles buried at its foot. Taking the cap of a repurposed perfume bottle, Creamy let himself take a deep drink.
The water was warm, but it was cooler than he was, so he still felt a little refreshment. A lul in the wind let him leave his face uncovered so Creamy lent on the staff enjoying the feeling of breathing without a layer of animal skin covering his nose and mouth. Ahead, an impossibly tall shadow climbed into the sky. Dust and sand still filled the air, but Creamy slid his hand made sand goggles up his forehead, so he could get a better look and check it wasn't another mirage. When the wind dropped, the partials in the air did strange things to the blue light of the system's star, creating some very solid looking images.
This one could really be there. It looked quite close, and it wasn't shimmering at all. A tall hoodoo strived to touch the white-blue star and around its base, a spine of rocks jutted from the sand. The pillar of stone stood so wide and tall it had a good chance of resisting the all-devouring sand. It was something that could remain proud of the dry sea forever.
