Fiction Spawning of Bob - Blood Dish (discussion thread open)

1. The Bowl

To say that Kuada-Boc had been assigned a very difficult and dangerous task of leading his patrol into the Northern Amaxon Wastes would be not quite accurate. He had volunteered for the job. His patrol had crept out of Tlanxla, the Temple City of the Sky and into just about the least civilised region of Lustria, and it wasn't helping that the bone-head beside him was making as much noise as a carnosaur in rut. Even the kroxigor, Ta'kul moved more quietly than Brocnos.

The patrol's route more or less split areas infested with Amaxonian savages on one side and the Orc Land on the other. And Kuada-boc was in the middle with a bored saurus scar leader who wanted to hack through every jungle vine like it was a skaven neck. The intended mission of "intelligence gathering" was looking more like "stupid declaring". Just like usual.

"For the Old One's sake, be quiet, Brocnos." Kuada-Boc could see one of the forward scouts darting back through the tree trunks. "Resva is returning with a report."

"Run-back-and-report Resva? The spineless worm just had us go miles out of our way to avoid a single river troll." Brocnos shook his shield and toothed mace to demonstrate his desire to splatter something semi-sentient. "When do we fight?"

Kuada-Boc shook his head. All saurus were spawned like this. If they went too long without clubbing something, their natural aggression would bubble out in some counterproductive way. Which was fine in the middle of a battle, but having them assigned to patrols "just in case there was trouble" was a vexed issue for the skink patrol leader. He had led enough sorties into the wild to establish that saurus warriors were usually the cause of trouble.

Resva dodged through the last thicket and bobbed his head with excitement. "I spied something strange ahead." He gestured with his blow pipe.

Kuada-Boc cut him off. “Please, Resva, not this again.”

"Was it enemies?" Brocnos practiced a decapitating strike on an innocent shrub.

"No, bone-head. An old empty temple... Or something."

Kuada-Boc took a cautious step back. Calling the bone-head "bone-head" to his face was asking for saurus size trouble, and if it came to a hand to hand fight the likely outcome was far from clear. Brocnos was a brawler, and if he could grapple him, Resva would get snapped in half. But on the other side, the skink was unbelievably fast. Kuada-Boc had seen the scout snatch stingwings out of the air on more than one occasion.

As there was no instant conflagration, Kuada-Boc pressed for more information. "How can there be a temple? We have done this patrol many times before without seeing a temple."

"We've never diverted this far west before," Resva explained, "and you can't see it unless you trip over it. It doesn't go up," he steepled his hands like a temple city. The he brought the heels of his hands together and flared his palms and fingers out. "It’s like a bowl."

"Then run-back Resva, show us." Brocnos snorted at the veiled insult he had returned to his rival.

Resva was right about the hidden nature of the structure. The jungle grew thickly right up to the brink and from there the stepped sides dropped away to a rectangular floor far below. It appeared that the bowl was a vast amphitheatre. Kuada-Boc's heart began hammering with excitement. It was as if the unfamiliar scene had stirred some forgotten memory.

The patrol lizards all filtered down onto the first tier of the bowl.

"A funny temple that has no statues or carvings." Brocnos was uncharacteristically thoughtful.

"Look behind you, bone-head." Resva continued to be uncharacteristically brash.

The boundary wall of the first tier was carved with detailed images interspersed with blocks of unintelligible text.

"The carvings start there. They are interesting."

"Interesting" was a vast understatement. Kuada-Boc's jaw dropped open and stayed that way for a long period as he interpreted what he was seeing. He had seen similarly detailed carvings and mysterious script in the roots of the great temple pyramids. What he was examining now was clearly the craft of...

"The Old Ones?" Brocnos asked. "Is that a sky barge of the Old Ones?"

The carving showed the sleek vessel floating above a bowl shaped depression. It had a huge monolith somehow hanging below it.

"What is it doing?"

"Building." Ta'kul the kroxigor rarely spoke, but this amazing place had transformed him into a babbling fool. Relatively speaking.

"For what purpose?"

"To make this." Ta'kul punctuated his verbal diarrhea by stamping his foot on the massive stone works that they were standing on.

"I can see that the Old Ones built this place, you lump," Brocnos snapped. "No earthly power could move stones this size. I meant, what did they build it for?"

The kroxigor's long speech had depleted his limited vocabulary. He started to recycle words from others. "Lump?"

Kuada-Boc moved from the first delicate frieze to the next. The Old One's script was unknown to all but the slann mage priests, but the images were so lifelike that he was able understand that he was seeing a history which stretched back to the dawn of time.

On the second panel he saw a depiction of the completed bowl. On the next he saw the first spawning of lizardmen. They sprang out of the spawning pools fully formed. Bone helmeted saurus, hulking kroxigor and lithe skinks emerged together with no sign of the insularity and rivalry which plagued them now. The next showed them training their bodies together, but it was the one after which made Kuada-Boc stop for a long period.

That panel showed equally matched forces of lizardmen striving against each other in what seemed like unarmed combat. There were no bodies to show who had fallen and who was victor. As he examined the image of bloodless strife more carefully he saw that the battle seemed to be fought for possession of a head-sized ovoid. Was it an object of sacred significance? It seemed unlikely that there would have been a civil war over a hardboiled egg, no matter its size or magnificence.

The next few panels showed similar scenes, each played out on a rectangular arena marked with transverse lines. Surrounding the quadrangle, the tiers of seating were filled with tiny representations of lizardmen leaping and waving banners.

Kuada-Boc turned and tottered to the edge of the terrace. He gazed across to the other side of the vast bowl and imagined himself to be one of ten thousand spectators. Then he looked down and thought about what it would feel like to be heaped with glory on the pitch below. That must have been a special egg.



edit 3/3/16 - changed character name.
edit 6/3/16 - added Temple City Name
edit 6/3/16 - changed a gesture
edit 7/3/16 - title and chapter heading changes. Other tweaks.
edit 8/3/16 - geography details
edit 9/3/16 - set up for later gag

I'm struggling to work out if this is literally just bloodbowl fanfic or if you're aware of real mayan sports... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame (it's a fun story either way!)

I don't know if you've ever seen the insane carvings of decapitations and other gory sacrifices at chichen itza or elsewhere, but the idea that the games were "bloodless strife" is possibly a rare instance of history being made LESS epic/horrible in its transition into fantasy

In many ways, not having a major lizardmen team in bloodbowl is like not having an english team in cricket

For years I have wanted to try out blood bowl, now that I have a vast lizardman army I would like to try it some time. But no lizard team. Anyway I like the set up so far.

Love it! Maybe blood bowl was just based on the ancient game originally played by the Lizardmen after all? They did create all the other species of the Old World...

I really like your writing Lord Bob I can't wait to see where this story goes. I especially liked the line about the "insularity and rivalry which plagued them now," really fantastic.

Great stuff, Blood Bowl is the best thing GW ever did! Definitely need to see more fluff.

Interesting piece of writing! Really enjoyed reading it!

2. Spawned for This

“Elves!”

Patrol leader Kuada-Boc dropped into a crouch with his javelin arm cocked and ready to throw. The Second Race created by the Old Ones were swift and deadly foes, and he was not going to be caught unready. He scanned the edge of the basin and his troops to find the reason for the warning.

“Elves,” Brocnos repeated. He had moved a few panels ahead and was poking a claw at the image. “Look at them, they are so skinny.”

After a brief internal debate, Kuada-Boc chose to put his javelin on the ground, rather than through the scar leader. Then he came over to examine the carving in question. There were indeed elves, and they were facing lizardmen in the arena in the same kind of egg-obsessed combat that the skink had seen before.

These elves were very clearly the same or similar to the willowy enemies that Kuada-Boc knew, but the armour they wore was different to any he had seen before, and it was interesting in itself. The stout helmets they had on, and the plates and padding that they wore on their shoulders and chest mimicked the forms of protection that lizardmen were spawned with. The only thing the bone-headed, broad-shouldered and thick-hided elves lacked were tails.

“Elves, yes. And I spied the Third Race.” Resva had quickly perused the plaques when he had first found the temple, so he knew what was coming next.

The dwarfs he was alluding to didn’t need quite so much embellishment to make them as durable as lizardmen, and they made up for their lesser speed by forming a kind of mobile shield wall to give them mastery of the arena against their lizardmen combatants. If the body language of the crowd could be interpreted, the dwarfs were victors. In the following frame, dwarfs faced elves, and in the next they faced lizardmen again. This time the lizards adopted some of the dwarf formations and were victorious.

“And here are men,” Resva indicated another addition. The Fourth Race were halfway between dwarfs and elfs in stature and speed, but closer to lizardmen in savagery than both. In the next few panels two other races appeared - hulking ogres and sturdy halflings. With that, the collector’s set of Old Ones Created Races was complete.

The six races took turns to face each other in the arena. Lizards were victorious as often as not, but each set of combatants used new and unique strategies which demanded constant adaptation to eke out each hard won victory. Elegant strategy gave way to brute force again when another faction appeared.

Kuada-Boc hissed. “Greenskins?” The brutish tribes had indeed joined the contest. “They always show up eventually. Where did they come from?”

“Here.” Ta’kul was being a veritable chatterbox this day. Because of his ingrained interest in masonry and lifting heavy things, he had not moved away from the first panel, and that is why he had seen what the others had missed.

They hurried back and saw that there were indeed tiny orcs and goblins, hanging back at the periphery of the image, waiting and watching as the Old Ones built their edifice. Close inspection of all of the other panels showed that the greenskins were in the distant background of each, watching the mock battles and not smashing anything. By the time that men had appeared in the arena, the some greenskins were even mixing amicably with other races in the top tiers of the bowl.

Kuada-Boc was staggered by the implications. “This all but indicates that there were greenskins before the spawning of the First.”

“I think it indicates they were here before the Old Ones came, too.” Resva shook his head. “Which is funny - if I was coming to colonise a planet, and it had greenskins on it, I would find a different planet.”

“Or have some plan to pacify them.” Brocnos was a big fan of pacification.

By the time the greenskins appeared in the arena, the other races were getting pretty good at… at whatever they were doing. The first panel which showed conflict between lizardman and orc was very instructive. The greenskin force was physically diverse - ranging from rock-headed trolls to impish goblins. The lizardmen seemed to be almost tailored to be their physical match. Kroxigor lined up against troll, saurus champion wrestled with black orc, and skink matched speed and agility with goblin. There were still no weapons and no deaths, but there were casualties who were being dragged away from the melee concussed or with broken bones.

Subsequent depictions of the inter-race contests got progressively more formulaic until they abruptly ceased. The last panel had been begun, but the fine carving suddenly turned into a deep score which sliced down through the wall and part way across the terrace. The glassy edges of the cut made it look like the stone had been melted rather than cracked or cut.

“The Great Catastrophe.” It was a bold inference, but it made perfect sense to Kuada-Boc. “When Chaos came, the Old Ones were lost. The races were assailed by evil and this all ended.”

“The Old Ones certainly departed, but what makes you think this ended?” Resva had his head cocked thoughtfully. “Someone has been tending this place. Otherwise the jungle would have claimed it long ago.”

There was nothing left to see at the top edge of the bowl and the patrol eventually made their way down to the arena floor. There, in the middle, was the egg.

“I know it should seem suspicious that this is just lying here, but…” Kuada-Boc picked it up.

Brocnos poked it. “What kind of egg is worth all that fuss?"

"Haven’t you heard of the legendary quango?”

“The quango is legendary because it doesn’t exist. Like skink bravery.”

Kuada-Boc poked it himself and discovered it was tough and leathery. “I don’t know about it being an egg. It is more like a reed-rat hide, turned inside out and inflated with marsh gas.”

“Big for a reed-rat,” grunted Brocnos. “I say armadillo skin.”

“Or a sloth.” The patrol leader tossed it from hand to hand. "Do you want to try it out?”

"Try it out?" Brocnos frowned. "Do you mean eat it?"

"I mean do the thing that we saw on the plaques."

The scar leader snorted. "I was spawned for battle, not sport."

"Is that so? The plaques seem to show it the other way around," Resva had the kind of smirk on his muzzle that presaged a venomous attack, "and all other evidence indicates that you were spawned to produce untidy topiary."

Brocnos looked thoughtfully at the toothed mace in his claws. He was probably considering using it on the skink, but even he had to concede that it was somewhat covered in sap and bits of foliage. He quietly walked to the arena wall, leaned the mace carefully against it and unbuckled his shield. He gestured to his seven saurus brethren to do the same, and then he made them form a row near one end of the pitch.

He shouted back to Kuada-Boc and the remaining lizards in the middle of the field. "If I have understood this... sport. I would stand with my saurian spawn brothers and defend this line while you attack us with an egg. The "play" ends with Resva picking his teeth up out of the dirt."

Considering that the scar leader had never shown an aptitude for learning in the past, Kuada-Boc was surprised that he had so quickly grasped the general idea of the activity.


Edit: 5/3/16 - added ogres and halflings.
Edit 7/3/16 - added details about the quango, cleaned up messy grammar
Edit 8/3/16 - cleaned up details about quango

The interaction between the characters is hilarious! Good stuff. Can't wait for the next portion of the story!

"...if I was coming to colonise a planet, and it had greenskins on it, I would find a different planet.”

Click to expand...

This quote made me chuckle. Great story.

I want the match! I'm really interested if some other races will join in! And is Resva really going to lose all his teeth?!...

3. Grudge Match

Kuada-Boc surveyed the remnant of his patrol. A ten skink cohort weighed considerably less than eight hulking saurus warriors, and their speed would only partially compensate. Fortunately he had a secret weapon. He called his troop into a little huddle, ostensibly to make a "battle" plan. When they were assembled, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the saurian defensive line.

"Hey, Ta'kul. What was it Scar Brocnos called you earlier?"

The kroxigor and squinted intently at the saurian line.

"Brocnos is the big one in the middle."

The squint turned into a dark scowl. "Lump?"

"I think I heard Rendev, Guarsaj and Natsni saying it, too."

The squint returned.

"The three saurus warriors on the left."

The squint gave way to a cross eyed look of bewilderment.

"Every lizard on that side" Kuada-Boc assisted by pointing them out.

The dark scowl reappeared. The left flank would be taken care of.

"Centra, you start with the egg and throw it back to me when I give the signal. Resva wait behind the line near me. That leaves Chaffi and the rest of you redirecting the right flankers." He got vigorous head bobs in response. Skinks were good redirectors, if a little bit on the expendable side.

Chaffi’s skinks lined up a pace in front of their brutish counterparts with nervously fluttering crests. Their anxious appearance was mirrored by the twitching saurian tails of three warriors on the left who had just realised they were about to be the objects of Ta'kul's imminent attention.

As Centra crouched over the egg, Kuada-Boc’s mind entered a strangely focussed state. He could perceive every minor shuffle in position of the two squads as time warped around him. External sounds became muted and the dirt floored arena became the whole universe for him. Despite this hyper-reality, some corner of his mind imagined the upper levels of the bowl filling with spectators who murmured with excitement and rapt appreciation. As the frozen moment stretched, Kuada-Boc’s chest began to hurt from lack of breathing and he noticed that Centra had bent his head down so far that he was looking at his leader from between his legs. His mouth slowly formed the words, “what … was … the … signal … going … to … be?”

“Oh, ah… Quango..?” As Kuada-Boc stuttered the words, time sped up again with a sound like a roar in his earholes. Centra snapped the quango back and it thudded hard into the patrol leader’s chest, leaving him flat footed and a little bit stunned. Ahead of him he saw that Ta’kul had somehow gathered the three left flankers into a painful looking embrace and that Centra had managed to tangle Brocnos’ legs to block his movement.

Chaffi’s redirectors had defaulted to the famously unheroic “double flee” manoeuvre, which did little to impede the right flankers’ momentum as they charged on the quango carrier, whom Kuada-Boc belatedly identified as himself. He bought some space by stumbling back and to the right, and the saurus block wheeled toward him like a good formation of infantry should.

Resva and Kuada-Boc simultaneously saw the opening appear, and relying on some deep grained instinct they pounced on the opportunity it afforded like a ripperdactyl on an unwary blot toad.

The skink leader continued to fall back and right, and as he did so he transferred the quango into his right hand. It made no sense to him, but the leathery ovoid felt as well balanced in his hand as any javelin. As he snapped his arm forward he rolled his wrist and imparted spin on the projectile and it left his hand true, skimming over the heads of the flankers into open space.

His feigned retreat had given time for Resva to dart to the left and then diagonally behind the saurus line. He leapt and turned in the air, snatching the flying quango with sure hands. His feet reconnected with the ground with barely a dozen paces to go before the end zone of the pitch. The only defender within stegadon’s bellow of him was Brocnos himself, and the scar leader was still entangled with the insanely courageous Centra. There was nothing between Resva and the line, except for-

Crunch. Sound muted and time slowed again. Brocnos had given up trying to free himself from Centra’s grip. Instead he used the skink as a pivot point and he swung his hindquarters around hard. A saurian tail is as heavy and solid as sack of tubers, and this tail bisected Resva’s path. With considerable force.

Kuada-Boc heard the loud roar of reality’s return and saw Resva totter a few steps onwards and stop. “Brocnos! What have you done?” the skink leader lamented. “You have broken his spine.”

The saurus actually looked mildly concerned at the possibility he had made a misjudgement and permanently damaged his best rival.

“No, my spine is intact,” Resva coughed then winced. “My ribs are another matter. And I believe I am supposed to do this.” He raised the quango above his head and spiked it down hard into the ground in the end zone where he stood. The quango bounced erratically and rolled to Kuada-Boc’s feet. “I would do a celebratory dance as well, but I fear I am going to pass out.”

There was another roar, and a thudding vibration that Kuada-Boc suddenly realised had no relationship to time’s recent erratic course. He lifted his head and discovered that he and his cohort were surrounded and outnumbered by a host of screaming, foot stamping, and spear waving Amaxon savages. They had swarmed into the upper tiers of the bowl while the lizards has been so exclusively focussed on their contest.

Brocnos snarled. “I don’t understand monkey-babble. What do they want?”

Kuada-Boc turned slowly to estimate the amount of peril they were in. “I understand pointy-stick. They want us to not make any sudden moves.”



edit 6/3/16 - removed name of magic spell.
edit 7/3/16 - grammar and clarity fixes
edit 10/3/16 - changed number of skinks

spawning of Bob said:

“I would do a celebratory dance as well, but I fear I am going to pass out.”

Click to expand...

I can't even tell you how many times I have said this exact quote this week. This gets more exciting with each part! Can't wait for the halftime show!

4. Time Out

One of the Amaxon elders, barely taller than a pygmy but for his tall headdress of bright Culchan feathers, led a stream of his people down from the top of the bowl. The lizardmen gathered behind their skink leader and gazed wistfully at the weapons they had left neatly stacked near the halfway line.

The elder stopped a pace away and swept his arm out, indicating his people. “Fahanns,” he grunted. Then he slapped his own chest. “Biggest Fahann.”

Resva coughed again and whimpered. “Ooh. I think that is its name. ‘Biggest Fahann’.”

Nothing else seemed to be happening, so Kuada-Boc patted his own chest. “Kuada-Boc.”

The reverent murmurs of the crowd and the way they passed the name among themselves like… like a holy quango egg seemed out of proportion with the fact that it belonged to a lowly patrol leader.

Biggest Fahann’s face split horizontally and he displayed two rows of square yellow teeth. “Kuada-Boc, you good name. You team play here. Raiders. Next big moon.”

The crowd parted, leaving an avenue open from the arena floor to the top of the terrace on one side. It was an obvious invitation for the lizards to depart the bowl, and they did not hesitate in taking the opportunity to collect their weapons and withdraw. However, their smooth progress off the sand was impeded by a single ancient human who wore terrifying face paint and a necklace made of finger bones.

He waved his skinny arms to block the lizard's progress, then he shouldered his way between Kuada-Boc and Brocnos and circled around Resva. As he did so, he jabbered toothlessly in his own language. The injured skink's eyes rotated like they were on gimbals as he tracked the human’s movement.

"The warm bloods always either run away or attack the First on sight. What is going on? Ow!"

The human had poked him on his bruised side, then crowed with triumph at the reaction he had drawn. He raised his skinny arms again and performed an arcane gesture - he held one hand flat, palm downwards. His other hand was held vertically below it, and he jabbed his fingertips repeatedly into the turned down palm. The crowd saw the gesture and went, "oooooh."

"Get away from me, Face-paint."

"Settle down, Resva. Don't aggravate him."

"Ouch," the scout slapped at the probing hands. "If you want to torture a prisoner, why don't you start with the bone-head over there?"

"I don't think you are a prisoner," said Kuada-Boc uncertainty. "They let us collect our weapons, after all."

Face-paint's gesticulations had attracted two more painted savages who carried a heavy reed-woven bundle between them. They lowered it carefully before taking a step back and squatting in the dust. The old savage threw the bundle open with a flourish. It contained small flint and bone tools, wooden bowls of various sizes, small clay flasks with stoppers and a variety of dried and fresh jungle fruits, roots and leaves.

The painted savage also squatted down in front of the collection. He selected two large bowls. Into the first he tore a number of fragrant leaves, and then he placed it aside. Into the second bowl he poured a mixture of oils and astringent liquids. Then he unstoppered some of the flasks and sprinkled in a variety of coloured powders and tiny seeds. Last of all he scooped two large handfuls of arena dirt into the bowl and stirred the mixture with his finger.

"Ugh. If I'm not a prisoner, am I a guest? I hope this is a not a meal he is about to offer."

Face-paint finished stirring, and he scooped the thick, muddy paste into both of his hands and leapt back to his feet. He approached Resva with an intense look in his eyes.

The skink cringed away, "I'm really not hungry... I had a big breakfast..." but Face-paint continued his menacing advance. With nowhere to run or hide, Resva tightly screwed his mouth and eyes shut and turned his head away.

To his surprise, he didn't get a mud facial. Instead, Face-paint slapped the cool mixture on Resva's flank and smoothed it out over the bruised area. The mud pie had an agreeable odour of spice from the powders and seeds in the formulation. The savage stepped back and toothlessly grinned at his work for a moment before returning to squat in front of his collection of unguents.

Resva took a deep breath, then another. His chest still hurt, but not as badly. And now it smelled delicious.

"Well. Okay, then.

Kuada-Boc looked back at the pathway out of the bowl that the Amaxons had left for them.

"They are still expecting us to leave. We aren't guests. Are we supposed to be allies?"

Face-paint came back with his other bowl, the one with the fragrant leaves. He actually giggled as he danced around and sprinkled the leafy green garnish over the skink. Some of it stuck to the mud poultice. A lot of it just sat on his head.

"Does he think this makes me his friend? What am I supposed to be?" Resva moaned.

Brocnos had a big toothy grin at the sight of his discomfited rival. "I know what you are."

"What? What am I?"

"Tenderised, marinaded and garnished. You are lunch."




Edit 7/3/16 - Amaxon chief name change, grammar and clarity corrections.
Edit 8/3/16 - Amaxon tribe named.
Edit 9/8/16 - aaaaand renamed. New lines for chief.

Gotta love field medics. Never sure what they are on about.

Great job, @spawning of Bob ! Day one was a success!

5. Set Play

The lizards warily climbed out of the arena and a kind of honour guard of the largest, most menacing Amaxon warriors formed on the stairs. They were unarmed, but it was their garb that was inherently threatening. Each one wore the polished skull of a saurus warrior on his head, and the bony scales of a kroxigor strapped to his shoulders. The guards let the patrol pass, then fell into step behind them until they reached the bowl’s brim.

As the lizards hurried into the darkening jungle, the honour guard stopped. One of them shook his head and called after them, “Ork land hard.”

If that was intended as a warning about running hard away from the nearby orc lands, it was scarcely useful. The patrol was too busy running hard away from the Amaxons.

The injured Resva quickly lagged behind as they plunged into the gloom. “Slow down, damn you. It’s crazy to run through the jungle at night.”

Brocnos didn’t break stride. “Kuada-Boc, how long do you think it takes to heat up a really big stew-pot?” he asked loudly.

Resva soon overtook his compatriots, and in turn they struggled to keep up with him.

Dawn found them pausing beside a turgid stream. Kuada-Boc was parched, but he didn’t quench his thirst until after he had commented on something that was bothering him.

“Even if we weren’t being chased by hungry warmbloods, there was no moon to see by. Even Chaffi was making as much noise as a stegadon in the dark. We should have stumbled onto some deadly jungle hazard or other.”

Centra had been bending his muzzle down to the stream for a drink when, suddenly, he splurted water out of his mouth and nostrils. “Like that one?” he gasped. An unusually large bole-spider was floating past directly in front of his snout. Legs up.

“Yes. That is the kind of hazard I was thinking of.” Kuada-Boc hooked the dead spider with his javelin and pulled it to the bank and then he got Ta’kul to heave it over. The cause of its lack of vigour was a bone handled tomahawk which was embedded between its jewelled compound eyes. “It looks like an Amaxon got this one. But with the way we were sploshing through this stream earlier, we were still lucky not to have disturbed a-”

“Greater lake-serpent.” Resva was pointing out towards midstream. Thirty feet long and slowly drifting past was the contorting dead body of a powerful python. It had a half dozen stubby arrows stuck in it. “That one would have been big enough to swallow Brocnos. Assuming it had no sense of taste.”

“I prefer not to be appetising like you, skink salad.”

Kuada-Boc gaped after the serpent. “Okay. Maybe it isn’t luck that we didn’t run into those ones. Our savage Fahanns-”

“They aren’t my Fahanns.”

“Our savage… savage…um. Those heathen savages may be clearing our path of-”

He paused as a carnosaur drifted past. Its belly had been split open and its entrails were spilled into the water where they bobbed like swollen purple tentacles.

“Look, I’m not actually thirsty any more. We should move on.”

-----

The unseen protectors made for an unusually straight forward return to Tlanxla, Temple City of the Sky. Kuada-Boc abandoned the usual practice of edging forward with a scout screen. This was because every hazard his scouts encountered had been chopped, spiked, stabbed, disembowelled or otherwise neutralised before they happened upon it.

Paradoxically, the lack of peril was having a bad effect on Brocnos and his saurus kin. They were laying waste to just about every piece of herbiage that was less than sixty feet tall. As they chopped down a particularly innocent spineburl tree, it tore a hole through the canopy and undergrowth as it fell. This created a forest window which revealed the spires of Tlanxla.

“Wait a moment, Brocnos. No wait. No no no, just… What was it doing to you?”

The saurus scar leader was standing over the crushed remains of a honey orchid. “It may have provided cover for our enemies.”

“It was three inches tall. Just stop a minute, please. When we get to the gate, we will need to give a patrol report to the warden. I have had a good think about it, and I think we should say-”

“That we have discovered that the Amaxonian Savages exist with much greater numbers and organisation than heretofore believed, and furthermore that we have discovered evidence which shakes our conception of the Old Ones, the creation of the world and our purpose upon it.” Centra was counting off on his claws as he provided the commendably succinct but accurate summary.

“Actually, I was planning to provide a bit less detail. I wasn’t going to say anything about that stuff.”

“So, you won’t be saying that anything unusual happened at all?”

“In an eggshell, yes.”

Centra crossed his arms. “Then you might as well let Ta’kul give the report. Isn’t that right, Ta’kul? You could give a more detailed report.”

The kroxigor stopped doing the nothing much that had been occupying his full concentration and raised his brow ridges. He put his palm on his chest. “Report?”

“That is what I said.” Centra turned back to Kuada-Boc. “What are you trying to avoid by being secretive?”

“Being labelled a heretic.”

“And being interrogated,” added Brocnos.

“And being interrogated.”

“And tortured.”

“Yes, and that.”

“And having your still beating heart torn out of your chest and offered to-”

Yes, yes, yes. All of those things, thank you, Brocnos. So then, we all keep quiet or we all line up at the Altar of Sotek, got it?”

Even Centra grudgingly accepted the plan, with a bit of encouragement from Brocnos’ scaly fist.

-----

As they approached Tlanxlan, they crossed paths with the usual traffic of troops and work parties which crowded around any temple city. However, they kept quiet, especially Centra, in response to the normal showers of insults that were sent their way by the disparate classes of lizards they passed.

“Do you know why I volunteer to lead jungle patrols?” asked Kuada-Boc of no-one in particular.

-----

As the lizards drew under the shadow of the Tlanxla’s massive gates, their leader’s heart sank when he saw that the duty gate warden was Under-Chief Brillo. The under-chief was an extraordinarily abrasive and fastidious skink functionary of limited merit. Grossly limited merit. Indeed, if merit could be measured with integers, the integer which corresponded with Brillo's merit would be preceded by a “-” symbol.

In bold typeface.

“Your patrol is back early, skink. Or late. It is certainly not on time.” The under-chief was all charm this day. “You had better have a good explanation for your tardiness. Or alternatively you should have a good explanation of your lack of perseverance in the pursuit of the Old Ones’ Great Plan of Endless War.”

Kuada-Boc took a slow breath as he tried to decide which kind of failure of duty would land him in less trouble. As he did so, fate handed him a choice he was planning not to take.

“What is that?”



Edit 8/3/16 - minor detail.
Edit 9/3/16 - switched characters for some dialogue, changed the interaction with the savages

Those amaxons are quite ... Deadly for the Lustrian fauna...
Nice idea of adding the dates of edits to the previous chapters... Otherwise I would have over read some important changes... Really like the"Big Fahann" ... Is the new title referring to the skink who got "tenderised, marinaded and garnished"?

Oh big trouble in little Tlanxla!
Did they
Seriously can't wait to see how this goes!

6. Breakdown

Kuada-Boc had no idea why, but he had been carrying the bowl egg with him for the three days it had taken to return to Tlanxla. Under-Chief Brillo was pointing at the unfamiliar object, with a quizzical expression on his officious snout. “What is that thing? Report!”

Ta’kul jolted to his impressive full height as if something had short circuited in his brain. Actually something had, to the extent that two usually lonely neurons go zap when they synapse. He suddenly recalled that he had been given an instruction to report something. “Quango,” he said proudly.

Under-Chief Brillo’s mouth dropped open stupidly, and Ta’kul suddenly worried that what he had said had been somehow unclear. He filled his chest and throat sacs with air, and bent down nose-to-nose with the officer. “Quango!” he bellowed in a voice which startled all of Tlanxla’s terradons into flight and put the Solar Bastiladon off its food for a week.

“Quango?” Brillo mouthed the word silently. He backed away until he was pressed against the city wall. Finding himself pinned, he stabbed a wavering claw towards Kuada-Boc. “Don’t point it at me, you imbecile. What if it goes off?” He scraped his back along the wall until he could feel the edge of the gate opening with his tail. “Wait here. No. Wait over there. The further the better.” He slid through the arch and disappeared.

The patrol leader sighed and looked heavenwards for some sort of relief from this unusual and distressing circumstance. What he saw instead was row upon row of bulging eyes peering down anxiously from the city walls and watch towers. There were few who hadn’t heard Ta’kul’s terse report, and of those who did, most knew the potential consequences of the hatching of a furious quango. That they knew this without actually ever having seen a quango, or indeed having the vaguest idea of what a quango was, gave instant credence to the theory that race-memories might not always be helpful.

Ta’kul gently put a claw the size of a bastiladon club on Kuada-Boc’s shoulder. “I reported,” he said.

-----

Some-time later Dar, the chief-beast master creaked out of the city. He was wearing bastiladon scutes from head to toe and he had his ceremonial goad spear with him. It had been hastily tied to the end of a very long stick with rough twine.

“Let me see that, would you, fellow,” he called in a muffled voice as he extended his droopy probe.

Kuada-Boc rolled his eyes and tossed the egg from one hand to the other as he had developed the habit of doing. There was a city-wide gasp, and all of the peering eyes disappeared behind the parapets. Chief Dar’s probe wavered erratically, but he persevered with his mission. He courageously poked the quango egg.

Nothing happened.

The rows of eyes reappeared.

Nothing continued to happen.

Dar shook his bony helmet off and it thudded onto the ground.

Nothing stubbornly persisted in its suppression of all other possible quantum states.

“It seems to be..." Chief Dar considered the range of words which would imply that nothing had happened without precluding the possibility that nothing might violently stop happening at some indeterminate future time. "It seems to be... dormant.”

There was a city wide sigh of relief. There were even a few nervous cheers.

Under-Chief Brillo poked his head around the corner of the gate. “This is above my rating. Colonel Kellink needs to deal with this.”

Another finely decorated skink head appeared around the other side of the gate. “I’m in charge of internal security. Internal, as in inside the city. The quango is outside, ergo it’s not my problem. General Fliroda-Gotar has supreme military authority out there.”

A voice boomed from the top of the third watchtower to the left of the gate. It was the magnificent Oldblood General Fliroda-Gotar himself. “That is so, but I believe that anything relating to extremely dangerous unhatched mythical creatures is a matter for the priesthood, not the military. In addition, my lumbago is giving me gyp.”

From a turret which was still further back from the gate, a thin voice quavered, “Oh yes, oh yes. It’s always up to the priesthood to pull the bone-skulls’ tails out of the fire… pull them out of the fire and put them out... pull them out and then put them... out. We priests would put the fire out first.”

Fliroda-Gotar spluttered. “Then put this one out, Tedroit. Don’t make me come up there and make you do it.”

“Ah ha ha ha. You wouldn’t make it up all the stairs, old-fossil.”

The magnificent Old Blood General abandoned the use of grown up words and starting snapping off bits of stone parapet with his teeth.

“This is why I volunteer to go on jungle patrol,” Kuada-Boc remarked to no-one in particular. “I hate this place.”

-----

Despite the usual inter class animosity, the priesthood actually did make a decision about how to deal with the quango threat. They decided to bump it upstairs, literally. However, getting a potentially volatile quango egg through the city and to the top of the Pyramid of the Sky was something to be approached cautiously.

Priest Tedroit led a troop of his acolytes out of the city and they spread around the patrol like a crescent moon. “From the writings, I would have expected the quango egg to be more… to be more more. Who has touched this?” he asked.

Kuada-Boc indicated Resva. “I threw it to him once.”

“I poked it first,” said Brocnos.

“Both of you stand with the bearer. You others, go away and do the things you do when you are not… when you are not doing the things you do.”

The rest of the patrol looked a little lost. Strangely, Ta’kul gave a decisive nod and ambled through the gate without hesitation. For a kroxigor, there is nothing like a clear instruction, and this particular instruction was nothing like clear - which was good enough for him. The others followed.

Priest Tedroit stepped back and gestured to his juniors with his feathered staff. “We do not want the quango to be more…more more… before it has been delivered to Slann Lord Jeri’joens. Hold the icons high. Yes, high and… not low, but not as high as… too high. Possibly a bit lower...ish.”

The acolytes were used to this kind of thing and had a strategy to deal with it. Four of them formed a square around the patrol lizards, and they each raised the arcane objects they carried to a different and completely random height. They reasoned that the chances that one of them would have it right would be maximised this way.

“Now you all, do the thing… those of you who are not doing the other thing… the other other thing. The ritual of stasis is the thing you should do... if you are not doing something else… something else very, very important."

The priest took another step back and looked into Kuada-Boc’s eyes. “You may feel something unusual… or it may feel usual if you have felt something before… assuming it was this specific something that you felt… when you felt the something… or probably didn't... because that would be unusual in itself... much like the feeling that I referred to... a moment ago. The unusual one. Follow me.”

The other acolytes began a low chant and the priest turned and hurried back towards the gate. As he approached it he began to move slower and slower until he was barely creeping. Ambient sounds became muffled as if Kuada-Boc was hearing them from underwater. He looked at Brocnos and Resva who were glancing around at the almost frozen acolytes who hemmed them in.


Edit 9/3/16 - one single measly word.
Edit 12/3/16 - changed general's name

Are you sure this is Tlanxla and not the brilliant temple city of Los’tmabo’tl?
I do enjoy a good bomb squad with a long pointy stick and good game of hot potato!