(This story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

“You’re standing straighter this morning, Number One,” Raleigh said.

“Yes, I am worse each day,” Number One replied, though of course not as if unhappy.

They had been curious days – Number One had known much of human life, as an intruder and predator; living it was new to her. As well, memories of her human victims as Uklag hovered behind everything: it took great coaxing and comforting for her to use certain closets, and she absolutely refused to look at or touch any broom.

She was now making her way with them to the breakfast table, dressed in an actual dress, bought for her by Gareth in a very strange outing with Nurse Kley. It was burgundy, with eastern floral print, at once rich and simple; even Gibbsen didn’t mind it.

Dr. Kilver joined them at the table; while Number One always appeared glad to see him, she behaved very nervously when he spoke. The mention of her brother clearly made her so uncomfortable that they had ceased to speak of him or his progress in her presence. It had been hard even in the large station to avoid hearing her brother’s uproar when he was in greater pain. For some days now though, it had been quiet.

With her meals she took the doctor’s prescribed broth to help build her up, which she thoroughly relished (Gibbsen would have liked it better if she had slipped it to him to finish for her). Certain prescribed herbs she made faces over, but laughed (Gibbsen would not have eaten such strong tasting things if she had offered anyway).

After the meal, Dr. Kilver wiped his dense moustache, and made eye contact with Number One. She immediately looked away, as if thinking.

“Number One,” the doctor said, “it is at last safe to give you some certain news: your brother is fully conscious, and he wishes to speak with his little sister.”

Her hand began to tremble, and she quickly hid it under the table – where Gibbsen could watch it trembling clearly. She still looked away as she replied,

“Is he sick?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, with a glimmer of subdued humour, “he is very sick.”

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/11/02

(The story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

Number One bowed her head in affirmation. Gibbsen could not tell how affected she was by the prospect of her previous kind and companions being hailed with bullets, but no doubt it had happened before. She followed without hesitation when SAC Gharial beckoned her to come with him closer to the silk screen, while movement could begin to be seen on the other side, connected with the nearing cries and breaking of undergrowth.

“Turn on the floodlights,” the SAC ordered.

“It will enrage them, sir,” the aide-de-camp said as he jogged to the light controls.

“She needs to see,” the SAC said. “Only long enough for that.”

As expected, when the blackness turned to the various shades of dust and dry growth, and the devilish gang stood out suddenly like huge, badly made puppets without a stage, they reared in anger, and their chorus was like an avalanche of slate. Their darts, hurled stones, and javelins striking the silk screen made it ripple like water; however, this did not affect the visibility nearly so much as seeing through water would.

Number One was about to point out one of the beasts, when there was a sharp clink, and one of the floodlights blinked and flickered, no doubt struck by one of the gluckast projectiles (these were not great cat’s eyes, but of some yet larger, reptilian creature). When Number One again found the one she had chosen, she pointed.

“There, is with the broken horn on his head, the left side. That one is my brother. I like him more than my mother.”

“Do you wish to leave before we begin?” the SAC asked. She said simply, “No.”

SAC Gharial gave his orders – the blackness returned, and was perforated with gunfire (the bullets peering from the goblin-arm-wielded guns could see in the dark).

An oblong cage rolled on wheels through the left-hand barricade. This cage’s operation could not clearly be seen, but Gibbsen knew it well: its open end was mounted with several long appendages, like cougars’ tails but at least twice as long. These pulled it forward, and it would snare the limb of a gluckast, holding it to be shot, or catch hold of any that came to succour the first. This it carried on until it reached Number One’s brother, when it employed all its arms to drag the creature inside the cage and immobilise it. Cables hooked to the rear of the cage began to draw it back to the barricade.

A gluckast managed to evade the wall guns, and charge the silk screen with an axe. On the inside Gareth walked to meet it, and when within five yards he put a rifle bullet between the beast’s eyes. The silk had followed the bullet the entire way, and when the fiend stumbled to the ground, the light from the bay glinted off the bullet, dangling from the exit wound in a transparent bubble of the silk amidst the hair and scales. The great ripple was still spreading across the screen. Gareth’s lips, grey as gun-smoke, did not move in the slightest smile.

The survivors became disgusted with the contest, and made off, cursing and gnashing their fangs over their shoulders as they went.

Yet the battle did not feel over, as the caged prisoner, shrieking and yammering, was now inside the barricade. It was a frightening thing, though the gluckast was enveloped in iron bars and pinioned by many living ropes. SAC Gharial’s horse wheels carried him across the bay towards the loud cage, with Number One and Gareth and Gibbsen behind him.

“Now,” he said with simplicity in the midst of the tumult, “let us see what we have for Dr. Kilver.”

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/29

(The story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

The red indicator light crawled up the map to sit behind the very station where they were. So, an attack, Gibbsen thought to himself. Both halves of his head were quite awake now, and he followed Gareth and Gharial, the Station Arms Commander (SAC), to the wing of the station where the enemy was approaching. SAC Gharial was missing both his legs, and for his wheelchair he rode a thing like a dark dappled grullo horse with four large bicycle wheels for legs (and with very many needle-like teeth).

Living goblin arms mounted on the upper angles of the building outside were handed semi-automatic rifles through trapdoors. A sheet of transparent spider silk was lowered in a great frame to cover the open end of the receiving bay, which faced a dirty slope into the nearest arm of the forest. Around the silk screen and over barriers of high bars a contingent of infrared cameras entered, borne on flitting membranous wings, to drop photo prints into SAC Gharial’s hands.

“Fifteen gluckasts,” he said, shuffling through the prints, “at a fair clip as well. Number One will have to hurry.”

A skinny aide-de-camp jogged to the SAC’s side.

“Number One is on the way; she is very sleepy.”

“Understood.”

It was in fact nearly half a minute before Gibbsen could see Nurse Kley leading the little bent figure, dressed now in nightclothes consisting of a long-sleeved shirt and pyjamas, both in a light, feminine, robin’s egg blue. The aide-de-camp tipped his cap to her, and she grinned as though he had made a joke. The SAC beckoned the nurse with his finger and whispered,

“Why is she barefoot?”

“Because the slippers hurt her feet.” And apparently concrete floors did not. But this made some sense. SAC Gharial continued with a quirked eyebrow,

“And her hair?”

“A comb is not a magician,” Nurse Kley said with a huffed tone. The nurse’s own hair, which the military-minded SAC frequently made reference to, was rarely in better order than Number One’s tufted mass.

The rough yells of the gluckasts could now be heard, drawing closer: chilling, gravelly sounds. SAC Gharial looked over his shoulder to where Number One was attempting to pat the sleepiness from her face.

“Number One, Good Morning,” he said, a frank salutation in great contrast to the savage approaching roars.

“Haho,” she replied, with an odd, rising accent. The SAC gestured with his infrared photos to the darkness full of ominous snarls beyond the silk screen.

“We are equipped to take one of these freaks alive, which Dr. Kilver has requested that I do, but the rest we must kill or drive off. As you may know some of them, would you like to choose which one we will take?”

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/26

(The story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

Doubt was gone from Raleigh’s face, and he leaned awkwardly against the table, his chin on his chest. The crushed sound of the girl’s voice was certain to break the humans’ hearts. Mundbern’s eyes were glassy, and he left the room, whether to hide his reaction, or out of politeness, having suddenly become the spectator of a pain clearly private in its depth. Raleigh looked up, and followed him out.

Dr. Kilver waited quietly, with animal-like patience, until the throbs of Number One’s tears were slower and calmer. Then he stepped to a small wire grid track which ran at eye-level along the wall. At the end of this track was a creature with greenish brown fur, a little larger than a human’s hand, hanging motionlessly from the underside of the grid with all four feet like a sloth. Dr. Kilver spoke to it,

“Nurse Kley, please come to my office.”

The creature, called a parroter, darted along the underside of the track speedily as a fly, and popped through a flap door in the wall. The parroter was not itself Nurse Kley, but would find her and imitate the words Dr. Kilver had said.

The doctor then came to the bent and twisted heap of the desolate girl, sat down with one knee on the floor, and gently replaced the gluckast claw in Number One’s hand with a handkerchief.

“This is for you to wipe your face,” he told her. She revealed herself, reddened and smeared, to glance at the cloth curiously, then wiped her face much as a small boy would. The doctor rose and took her elbow; Gareth stood also, and together they helped Number One up to her hampered approximation of verticality. Her stoop at the moment could have been to all appearances wholly from grave exhaustion. After her tears, she looked much more the woman that she was, rather than the child she seemed at times by her newness to being a human.

“Come, we’ll bring you to a room you can have.” said Dr. Kilver. “It’s high time you were clothed in human fashion.”

Gibbsen nodded. And she needed a wash – he knew there were some smells even humans could detect.

Nurse Kley met them as they left, to whom Dr. Kilver explained briefly and discretely. Gareth gave Number One’s hand to the nurse at the door of her room. Then he went to a bench in the receiving bay, where he folded his arms and bowed his hooded head to sleep. Gibbsen only slept with half his brain at a time, as with dolphins, so he sent the right half to sleep and went to finish his Tough Krunchies.

Hours later, in the darkest hour before dawn, a banshee screamed again.

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/24

(The story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

(This point has some disturbing subject matter.)

There was a silence as the humans considered the import of this statement. Gibbsen appreciated when humans stopped talking to think – one reason he liked Gareth particularly. This new girl was making a good impression on him as well.

Raleigh opened his mouth to say something to the girl, and stopped, clearly because he did not know her name, which he then asked.

“Uklag,” she said, then burst into a laugh. “A funny name!”

So, thought Gibbsen, her gluckast name sounded funny to her human ears. Another good sign. Gareth spoke after her laugh:

“She will be given a new name,” he said.

She looked up at him with eyes full of a curious amount of joy.

“I will be named?”

“Until then,” said Raleigh, “we can of course dispense with an uncouth name which really refers to something you aren’t anymore. Until a proper name has been settled, what should we call you?”

She seemed too absorbed with the thought of her coming name to give any thoughts on how she should be referred to meanwhile. Dr. Kilver made the decision for them:

“We’ll call her ‘Number One’, because she’s the first gluckast-turned-human that we’ve found, perhaps the first to ever be.”

“Yes,” said Raleigh, “that’s the question. Number One, do you know when it was that you caught this disease?”

Number One gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling (which was covered in racks and storage compartments, in some of which shadows moved).

“When I ate the little black-hair girl. We ate her brother, and, because I was not full, Father said I could eat her. She was crying, but she did not yell like her bigger brother. She was talking, and I remember it very hard what she talked. She said, ‘Make me a poison that will completely destroy all of them.’ And then she did not yell while I ate her.”

The girl seemed too absorbed in remembering to notice the look of horror and doubt on Raleigh’s face at her casual tone, as if she was recounting an ordinary meal. A question had entered the room again: was she human in frame only, and a gluckast still in spirit?

Abruptly, she vomited the water she had drunk onto her knees. Then her face was pulled into a tight mask, and she sobbed heavily. It seemed that, like even her own name had startled her by sounding different to her, she had not hitherto remembered any such horror with her now human mind, and it had unexpectedly overwhelmed her.

She slid from the divan to crouch instead on the floor, and twisted herself to hide her face from them on her arm as she cried with all her small strength and voice, and all her flesh shivered. Her father’s claw she held no longer like it was a doll, but like a toy she clung to because she had forgotten about it. Gareth did not move, and did not let go of her hand.

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/22

(The story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

Gibbsen always liked Dr. Kilver’s office: despite the great variety of implements, many of them living, the doctor kept an air of scientific tightness about the place.

Gareth sat on a minimalistic divan. Though now in a seat, the girl still squatted, holding Gareth’s hand again, and in her other hand she held her father’s hand (that is, his claw). Mundbern stood at the door like a guard. Raleigh seemed the most anxious person in the whole business, and spoke with the doctor by one of the testing tables. Dr. Kilver was smiling under his heavy moustache.

“No,” he reassured, “her disease cannot be caught by any human.”

A different concern then filled Raleigh’s face.

“Then, since she has it, she is not human at all?”

Dr. Kilver shook his head.

“It cannot be caught by a human, because we already have it. In a gluckast, the first symptoms of this disease are a loss of scales, horns, and nails, followed by great pain and stupour as the body is all but liquefied like a worm in a chrysalis. The peak of the disease is reached as a perfectly healthy human being. Her disease is the disease of humanity itself.”

Mundbern raised his thick eyebrows.

“You call humanity a disease?”

“For a gluckast, very much so.”

Raleigh looked quite mystified.

“Then,” said he, “you mean that every human is the same as a diseased gluckast?”

“There is one thing unique to her case,” the doctor said, placing his finger down in the midst of his medical hieroglyphic notations.

“Her disease is highly contagious.”

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/19

(The story so far resides here: ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue )

Gibbsen moved over so that Gareth could take up a long thin ear that sprouted from the instrument panel. Into this ear Gareth spoke:

“Received one woman, suffering from an unknown illness, all of us uninjured: when I arrive, have Dr. Kilver, Mundbern, and Raleigh ready to meet us. My thanks.”

Dr. Kilver of course, but Gibbsen was puzzled by Gareth’s request for the other two: a technician and a cook?

As the chopper settled at the station, the girl’s eyes gleamed in the bright lights, and she pressed close to Gareth. But when they had ceased to move she got out of his lap, staggered, and put her hands on the floor. Gareth told her she could be carried on a stretcher, but she shook her head.

“Flying feels good. Hold my hand.”

She walked beside him with an odd gait, and an odd stoop, hanging much of her (little) weight on his wiry grip.

Dr. Kilver met them, carrying a prickly worm in a test-tube, into which he introduced some of the girl’s spittle; he also had a thing like a television remote control, with a reptilian snout protruding from one end, to which he fed a little bit of the girl’s hair. Then he gave her some water, put a blanket over her shoulders, and hurried away.

Mundbern approached, in his plain military uniform, which looked like it had been died in, perhaps more than once. Raleigh was currently dressed in something which might have been worn at an old theatre; by an actor or spectator, Gibbsen didn’t see much difference.

“Judging by the placement,” Mundbern said, “I’m sure this one was a most difficult extraction.”

Gareth nodded.

“But,” Mundbern went on, pointing a black metal rod at the girl, “how do you know this is a human?”

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/16

With her human shape, it was strange that she smelled like some other creature. He could not recognise the smell of her illness either. Her smell of gluckast he would expect of anything found lying in the intestines of a gluckast pile, but it began to tug at his mind that some of that foul smell may be originating in herself, which was a more disturbing sensation.

With a mobility unexpected for her state of health, she got onto her hands and climbed up into Gareth’s lap. He did not seem concerned with catching whatever she had. She settled herself, and looked up at him.

“Can I trust you, please?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Gareth said.

“Can I use the machine?”

Gareth allowed her to hold the steering lever, but kept his hand on it as well. It was an odd picture: her hand, pale from weakness, holding it like a candy bar, above Gareth’s gaunt hand, narrow and grey. The lever was in fact a giant insect antenna, and could be guided by simple motions, but if you had experience with it (and it with you) it could be guided by the slightest movement of a finger or two, if not by mere thought.

The moon came out.

“Oha, your animal is… looks good!” the girl said. Gibbsen growled, but quietly so as not to offend her. In moonlight the long hairs of his back had a faint variegated sheen of iridescence, which he disliked. In his youth he had once rolled in cairnbird glue to try and be rid of it.

This human seemed harmless and pleasant, for all she disturbed and puzzled him. He was intensely curious what would happen when they reached the station with her.

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/10/13