Tempokai

  It was an ordinary morning of the early summer day. A pair of bckbirds was squabbling on the telephone wire, a gray cat was stalking a careless lizard, and a rge bird with a blue head was sitting on a branch and looking out at the world with a certain disdainful intelligence.

  And then, one of them was devoured.

  "Oh my god, he ate him," said the young woman. She was standing in her living room, which was actually the back parlor of a small cottage in the country. It was an old cottage, and there had been little money spent on it, and still less on its furnishings, except for some very expensive but hideous wallpaper in the dining room, which had been bought at a time when wallpaper was all the rage. The young woman had grown up in that house, and her mother had decorated it as tastefully as she could. Grandma was in heaven in that house.

  The girl herself was not at home. She had been away at college, but her parents were in the house and she wanted to see them. She was twenty-four years old, but she was a little unsure of herself. The world was changing every day, except that the girl was still using the word "nineteen" in talking about people who were older than she was.

  She looked out the window, and saw that the two bckbirds were still quarreling on the telephone line. It was still just an ordinary morning. But she knew that the big bird with the blue head was no longer sitting on the branch. It was lying dead on the grass, and some other bird was swallowing it whole.

  She felt the shock of it in the pit of her stomach.

  "Grandma!" she screamed. "I'm home! Come out here right now!"

  But the old woman was out in the yard, raking the dead leaves off the wn. The weather was erratic in this ft mountainous nd. Sometimes the snow would pile up into drifts against the back door, and sometimes the weather would be so warm that the snow would melt and run down the side of the house, and then the girl's mother would come out and clean off the gutters and the porch roof, and the girl's grandmother would rake up the leaves.

  The girl ran out into the yard, with a long red scarf tied around her neck, and her bck hair falling down her shoulders.

  "Grandma!"

  The grandma was a hulking great woman, even bigger than the girl's mother. Her arms were huge and strong. She looked as if she could tear a cow in half with one hand. The muscles were thick and hard in her arms, and her face had the same hard look to it, although she was smiling. Even if she reached for her 90's she was still active as her 50's. She could go out into the garden and dig in the earth like a mule.

  "Grandma!" the girl cried, running toward her.

  The grandmother did not look at her, but went on raking the dead leaves into piles. The pile was as her height now, she raked everything in her vicinity into the piles, and then dumped them over the stone wall into a pile in the back yard, where she would burn them, making a tradition out of this that had existed since before the grandmother had come to live there.

  "Grandma," the girl cried again, grabbing hold of her arm. The grandma's muscles were like steel cables. She was protagonist of this nd, a force of nature. No man or woman would dare to argue with her. Her eyes were blue-gray and penetrating.

  And she smiled.

  "Oh, it's you," she said. "I know your face."

  "Grandma!"

  "What is it?"

  "I saw something terrible. I mean, I think something terrible. The bird swallowed another bird! Right there in front of me! And then the other bird ate it!"

  The grandmother ughed a deep rumble of ughter. She had an amazing ugh, it seemed to come from somewhere inside her stomach, and it shook her like a volcano. Her granddaughter wasn't from this pce, but she was very gd she had come to live here, because when the old dy ughed she looked more like a real person than she had ever looked when she was trying to be polite or distant or nice. Her bodybuilder body swelled with her ughter, and her face crinkled up so that her eyes were only slits, and her cheeks seemed to puff out with delight.

  "So what," said the grandmother, when she had recovered herself. "This is the rule of the nd. Eat or be eaten. You eat it, it eats you. What else can we do? Why don't you have breakfast? Your mother will be home any minute."

  The girl felt relieved and comforted by the grandmother's easy manner, completely forgetting what she saw earlier in the day. "Yes, you're right, I'd better get some food into me," she said.

  "Go on, then," said the grandmother, waving her hand. The gesture was casual enough, but it meant "Get going!", releasing a wind of authority that made the girl's heart swell with pride.

  The grandmother turned away and went to compress the leaves with her bare hands. She seemed to love working in the garden, as if she were turning the soil and pnting a seed and reaping a harvest all at once. There was a certain joyful violence in her gestures. A truly best grandmother you can find anywhere, thought the young woman.

  ***

  Welcome to the nd of Arcansia. A pce filled with eldritch beauty. A pce of magic and monsters and ancient secrets. A pce where the gods walk among us, and we can't even see them except when they choose to make their presence felt.

  The grandmother you saw there is just one of many such grandmothers, or rather grandmas. If you were to travel in this nd you would see such people everywhere. They live in small cottages built on rocky slopes or hidden among pine forests, or they live in big rambling houses with enormous rooms and kitchens, fortified with spells that are beyond human comprehension... oops, wrong word there. Grandmothers live in all sorts of houses, as far as that goes.

  There is an ancient vilge in this nd, hidden among ancient trees. The fact that there is modern vilge full of modern people is one of its oddest features. You can't help but notice that it's not entirely modern. The vilge is surrounded by high stone walls, but there are pces where you can see through them to what looks like the stone ruins of a castle, or perhaps a pace, or even a burial pce of gods... ahem, wrong again... you see? So you get two impressions at once: this is a small modern vilge, but there's something more than that here, something ancient and strange and wonderful. It's an old tale that is pyed out here.

  ***

  The ordinary morning continues. The bird on the telephone line was back to being just a bckbird, and the cat had slunk away, probably to a safe pce where it could be a cat again. The young woman had gone back to her apartment, where she had lived alone for many years, completely oblivious to how strange it all was. Her mother came home from her job at the nearby college at noon.

  It was well and good in that house, so let's move on to the next one, the neighbor. The second house belonged to the woman who had once been the girl's best friend, but now the woman was a stranger to her, and probably to herself too. This house was bigger than the first house had been, given the fact that the nd was owned for centuries by one family or another, and so this house was rger than a house would have been if it were built today.

  It was an old stone house with white walls and bck shutters. The house was built against a high hillside, but not elevated above it; instead there were steep terraces descending from it down to the nd below. There were a few trees and bushes growing in these terraces, which made for pleasant shaded walks in the summer, although now they were mostly brown and dead from the ck of rain during the winter months.

  A noble's house.

  But in this town, there were no nobles. With change of times that brought democracy into the world, a time of new ws and new ways of doing things, there were no longer any lords and dies. Given the fact that the vilge was hidden by magic so that it appeared to be part of a forest, and that the vilge's inhabitants had been living there for centuries, you might think that they think themselves as noblemen and noblewomen, but that would be wrong. The people in the vilge knew that they were living outside of time, outside of history.

  There was no nobility among them, not anymore.

  The woman who lived in that house was old, but she did not look old. She was much older than the grandmother next door, but she did not look old; her skin was soft and unwrinkled, and her hair was not white but purest silver. She wore long dresses in different colors. The house was filled with flowers that she tended with care. Her scarlet eyes were gentle and calm.

  She was not what you would call a witch. She was not a being you could call a vampire, she didn't drink blood or suck the life out of anyone. She was just a kindhearted old woman who took care of her flowers. That's all there was to it.

  But this time of day, when it was ordinary of ordinariest days of ordinary mornings, she sat on her front steps in the sun and practiced her violin. The sun came up in front of her house, just as it always did, and lit up her face in a warm light. The pnts swayed and sang as the sun touched them with life. The music she made on her violin sounded like sunlight itself.

  And the violin stopped when her phone rang. Yes, in this hidden vilge, everyone had a phone. This was just a modern device with a screen and a keyboard and everything else; it worked much as a phone works today. They even had a provider internet that went through the portal, so they could talk with other people on the other side of the portal... but that's getting ahead of ourselves again.

  The old woman picked up her phone, put it to her ear, and said "Hello?"

  Her voice was like 12 years old.

  "Hello, Mother?"

  ***

  This hidden vilge is full of stability. No matter what strange thing happens here, nothing ever really changes. Even the incidents that destroyed the vilge in the past, which have already happened a thousand or ten thousand years ago, were able to destroy only one house, and that house has never been rebuilt since.

  This is a magical nd of wonders; and boringness is something that happens here only when you go looking for it.

  ***

  The young woman who had come back to visit was having an ordinary conversation with her mother, over breakfast. The conversation went something like this:

  "How's the subjugation of 12th ranked demons that you're doing for the Dark Lord?"

  "Fine. We've managed to reduce the number of demons by about 30 percent."

  "That's good."

  "Yes."

  "Are you wearing that armor? Why not buy the new one?"

  "I'm wearing the new armor."

  "You know it makes you look bulky. It's like a potato sack around your legs."

  "It keeps me safe from demon cws."

  "Yes, yes. Better than the boob armor from the st decade."

  "It's armor. I'll wear armor if I want to wear it."

  "That's all right then."

  ***

  It was time for work. The streets of the vilge were empty, because everyone was inside doing something they found more interesting than going outside. But there were a few people out: the postman with his mail bag, walking toward his house; a child running down the street with a pstic ball; an old woman leaning on a broom as she watched the street in front of her house... oh, and the old dy with the violin case on her front porch.

  It was an ordinary almost-midday moment in a not-so-mundane world of not-so-ordinary houses.

  ***

  The postman reached his home and dropped off his mail bag, then he headed into his kitchen and started making himself some toast and coffee. He looked forward to that daily routine, because it gave him time to think about what he was going to do that night when he got home from work.

  He worked in this job for a century already, and he wasn't sure what he was going to do after that. There was a chance he might retire soon... but what would he do if he retired? The postman liked his job, he liked the routine, and he liked the fact that people needed him to deliver their letters and packages. Except the when he needed do delve into the ruins to deliver mail, which wasn't very often. He liked his job, but he wasn't sure what he'd do after retiring.

  He sat on a kitchen chair in his kitchen and thought about this as he sipped his coffee. The coffee was from Kurdia, a nd four dimensions left and a thousand light-years away. There were no such things as coffee beans or coffee trees in this world, so coffee was grown here by sending seeds into other worlds through the portal; then the seeds were pnted in the ground here in this world and grew into coffee pnts.

  He sat there, remembering the details of the day, while he drank his coffee, when he heard a tapping on his window.

  "Oh!" he said. He hadn't even noticed that it was there! The postman went over to look out the window, and there was the gray cat again. It tapped on the window with its paw in a pattern he recognized as the Morse code for "mail."

  He opened his front door and went outside to fetch the cat in. It was a beautiful day for cats, warm and sunny with a gentle breeze coming off the salty ke nearby, and there weren't any clouds or shadows to be found anywhere.

  "It's my mail today, is it?" asked the cat as he sat down in front of it and waited for him to open up the envelope. Postman was expert in cat nguage, so he could understand it perfectly well.

  "Yes indeed," said Postman. He took out a piece of paper from the envelope, looked at it, then read it aloud: "Dear Caitlyn: Today I am ninety-two years old, and I've decided that I'm gonna give you that legendary catnip from the eight dimensions up there to thank you for all your help. Don't worry though, I'll make sure it's delivered safely to you. Thank you very much. Love, Grandpa."

  The cat gave Postman a look that signaled happiness and contentment. Postman smiled and said: "Caitlyn! You are the greatest!"

  "Thank you," said Caitlyn. "I'm going to go tell everyone!"

  And then it ran off in the direction of its home...

  Postman sighed. If the delivery was from eight dimensions up... well, who knows how far it really was? It seemed so close...

  He turned to head back to his house when he saw a young man walking down the street towards him. He looked like an ordinary guy, about thirty years old.

  ***

  The guy was really thirty years old. His name was Gustav, and he was just your ordinary... oh, hang on; that's not exactly right. He wasn't really an ordinary guy; he was just an ordinary guy in this pce, where everyone's life is extraordinary... okay, now that doesn't make sense either.

  What can I say? He wasn't just your ordinary guy in this vilge; he was just your ordinary guy on this morning in this vilge.

  He greeted the postman, and went to center of the vilge where there was a stone fountain with a statue of a young boy pying a flute carved in relief on it. This was one of many fountains scattered around town; the water in all of them came from deep underground, and it had magical properties that made the water taste better. For everyone it was delicious water to drink, but for Gustav it tasted like the finest wine imaginable, because of his unique ability to perceive what others didn't see.

  Gustav sat on one of the stone benches in front of the fountain, and put his feet in the water. His sore, dirty legs immediately began to feel better. The dirt disappeared, and a small wound on one foot vanished, too.

  Gustav closed his eyes and let himself sink into the sounds coming out of the water: music, birdsong, the soft rush of wind through trees... and then he heard a sound that wasn't a part of that soft, gentle song:

  "Boy, better remove those legs from that 'oter, before you lose them!"

  Gustav opened his eyes to see an old man standing over him with an axe, and looked at his legs.

  Indeed, his legs began to mutate slightly...

  "Ah!" cried Gustav, scrambling to remove his legs. He fallen down from the bench, nding on his butt in the dirt, but that didn't matter; the old man with the axe didn't care about his dignity. He inspected his legs, and said: "Boy! You got yourself some good legs!"

  "Thanks," said Gustav with relief. "I just bought them from a shop."

  The old man nodded. "I remember buying good ones myself, back when I was your age," he said.

  "Those were a perfect muscur ones, you know? Nothin' wrong with those!"

  Old man sighed.

  "But now those legs are in heaven. I accidentally chopped off one of my own legs, once." He held out one arm and wiggled his fingers as if showing how he used to have an extra hand.

  "You know how that feels?"

  "Yes."

  Gustav had chopped his leg two days ago; he didn't know exactly how it felt because he wasn't allowed to watch television anymore.

  "Alright, I believe you. So, I had to sell it to the bck market for a price I could never afford."

  "Why?"

  "Because there are people who'd do anything for an extra hand or an extra foot." Old man chuckled, then went back to cutting up wood.

  Gustav was left there, dumbfounded, watching as one of his legs now had extra pinky toes sticking out of it...

  He heard more footsteps approaching, and turned his head to see another woman gracefully walking past him.

  ***

  That woman was called Mara. She was thirty-six hundred years old and she had lived here for her entire life. Her existence was of mundanity, but she was also immortal. She was quite tall and quite pale-skinned; she had long blonde hair which she kept tied back in a ponytail. She wore clothes that were designed to be comfortable for a long life; and she just passed a man with extra pinky toes sticking out of his leg without giving him a second thought.

  She was bored somewhat, given that her work ended early, so she had decided to go exploring the vilge a little bit after finishing her daily work. She walked down a side street, and then suddenly stopped short: a group of five people were sitting in a circle in a garden outside one house. In the circle, a dozen bottles that looked like potions were lined up, each beled with a word in foreign script on them. The group were working their way through these potions, one after another; and they were ughing loudly as they drank from them.

  They were all different; because they drank the potions, each of them had horns, wings, extra boobs, and other strange physical features that they liked to show off to each other. There was one guy who had become half-reptilian, and another one who had turned into a centaur-like creature with an equine head.

  'Ah, those druggies.'

  Mara had known these people for hundreds of years; they were always drunk and high and high on potions as they wandered around town at night. They never worked at any jobs except for making potions for sale in town. Given the fact that the industry of potion making was in downfall recently, and that some of them were having their products stolen by rival drug-makers from other dimensions, these druggies had nothing left to do but drink potions all day... and then drink more potions all day after that, giving themselves transformation beyond human comprehension...

  "Hey!" shouted Mara. "What are you doing?"

  One of the druggies looked up at her with drunken slowness. "Oh," said the man-dragon thing, with two giant cocks under his arms and an angry dragon face. "It's you again."

  "What is this?" asked Mara, pointing at the group of druggies.

  "It's just a drinking party," said the man-dragon thing with a yawn. He put a potion on his mouth and swallowed it down with a gulp of water. His face transformed into something else: a handsome man with golden eyes and a neatly groomed beard. Mara was unfazed with it, and simply turned around.

  "Understandable. Don't drink too much." She started to walk away.

  "You're not invited!" said the man-dragon thing with a chuckle, as he gulped down another potion. "But thanks for the tip!"

  ***

  One of the druggies was a man named Simon. He was smarter than his friends, so he didn't drink as much as them; and so he wasn't as drunk as them, either. He watched Mara walking away with an amused look on his face.

  "Well," he said to himself, "I'm certainly sure she is hot in bed." And he smiled at his own joke.

  "Hey! Are you really not going to join us?" said one of the others to him.

  Simon shrugged. "No point," he said.

  But there was a point. Potions had expiration date, and what they drunk currently was the batch that were almost expired. They weren't any good to them anymore... so what if it made them drunk or high? There were so many new potion-making shops springing up that they could simply go to a different one and get fresh ones whenever they wanted to...

  Simon sighed, thinking it again.

  "Maybe just one. Or two. Just enough to make me drunk," said Simon to himself, looking at his friends. They all looked at him and ughed at him in drunken stupor.

  Simon reached to the ground, took out a bottle and opened it with his fingers. He took a swig from it, and felt nothing... nothing happened at all... until a heat from inside his head rushed through his body... he felt it spreading outwards... he felt a strange sensation in his lower body...

  His cock dissipated into thin air...

  And that was it. Whatever.

  The druggies ughed, and Simon ughed too. He quickly finished the bottle of potion in his hands, and opened another one to take a sip. He saw a cat rushing by, holding something in the mouth.

  ***

  Caitlyn continued walking in the direction of his home full of excitement. He couldn't wait to tell everyone about the catnip that he had received today; his five siblings would be so excited about it.

  His home was in the middle of the vilge, next to the ruins of an old castle. The castle was now surrounded by a tall iron fence, and all around its perimeter were signs warning people not to trespass inside because it was dangerous... but Caitlyn had seen the castle's interior once when he was young. With cat instincts, he took a shortcut across a hole in the fence to enter the castle's grounds.

  He saw an old man sitting at the front porch of the castle with his back towards him, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes closed. He tried to slip past him silently without disturbing him, but the old man opened his eyes and looked at Caitlyn with dead eyes... and then spoke with a voice full of gravel:

  "Oh no you don't." The old man stood up quickly, grabbed Caitlyn by his arm with his right hand and lifted him up. Caitlyn tried to resist, but it was useless; the man was stronger than him. The old man raised Caitlyn over his head, then gently threw him towards Caitlyn's home.

  "Ah!" cried Caitlyn.

  The old man looked down at Caitlyn as he flew past him. "Shortcuts are bad. Bad things will happen to you if you keep doing this." Then he closed his eyes again and sat back down.

  Caitlyn fell into his own home with a thud onto the ground; he shook his head to clear it of dizziness from flying so far. Even if the old man was gentle with him, throwing him around like that still hurt a bit. Caitlyn got up, picked up his bag and went into his room.

  He threw the bag onto his desk and pulled out the catnip... that shined with golden light. Caitlyn sniffed at it; it smelled good! He could already imagine what his siblings would do once they saw it... They'd all jump on top of him and cw at it, and they'd be rolling around in the catnip like it was a toy; aggressively defending it from one another as if it were the st piece of meat on earth. It'd be great!

  Caitlyn stuffed the catnip back into its bag, and tossed the bag onto his bed. Bed was overstatement, it was actually just a pile of rags that had been given to him by an older neighbor for free when she didn't need them any more. But the rags were comfortable enough for sleeping, and it was good enough for Caitlyn, and jumped on it.

  Caitlyn waited for a while until the urge to go see his siblings had left him, and then he got up and walked out of his home towards the market square...

  ***

  Mara walked through the square; she still felt boring. The sun was starting to set now, and there were few people in sight; most of them had already gone back to their homes for dinner, or whatever it is that humans did for fun. Mara decided to go back home as well; her grand pace (ordinary home) was next to a market where she could get some food...

  Then suddenly, she heard a loud crash!

  "Hey! Who's there?" shouted Mara. She turned around, but nobody was there... except for an empty bottle rolling across the ground, and a gray cat's silhouette on the rooftop behind it.

  The cat walked towards her. Its eyes were glowing white, and it was looking right at her.

  "Who are you?" said Mara, doing nothing. The cat had come closer at her... and sniffed. It sniffed at her feet, and then turned away... but then looked back at her again... and sniffed again... it was looking right at Mara now!

  "Meow!" said the cat. Oh no. He smelled... her lunch. That's what it smelled like. Mara's stomach growled in response...

  She ran to her home, but the cat had followed her... he had run after her as fast as he can... he was closing in on her...

  Mara reached her grand pace and tried to open the door to enter inside. It opened, and smell of burnt food assaulted her nostrils; she closed it immediately.

  She rushed to her kitchen and opened the stove. She opened her mouth.

  "Oye gads, my roast is ruined! How did that happen?!" Mara shouted in anger, but her stomach made its displeasure known as well, making its presence known to her ears... "Ooooh! That's right! I'm hungry! I will eat!"

  Cat's meow? Meow!

  The cat came into her kitchen, and saw the roast on the table... and started licking at it. "Hey! Hey! Get away from my food!"

  Meow meow!

  She lifted him up by his tail and threw him out of the house.