Here's another, a completely different opening chapter to another story as yet untold or unfinished. As before, it's open to anyone who might want to try and complete. Just PM me first.
The pigeon launched itself off the balustrade of the Opera House, after having first ensured no gargoyles were within snapping distance. City pigeons had learnt the hard way about threats and predators, and the feral population was largely composed now of the savvier birds who were descended from parents who knew all about gargoyles and the occasional banshee.
This bird, however, was just about to discover how steep a learning curve could be. In fact, it would slide off the edge and into oblivion as it rose into the sky above the city. It barely had time to register something in the sky that moved very fast, faster than its experience knew, before darkness and crushing pain descended.
{{pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop?}}
POP.
Fleas communicate in an ultrafast series of popping noises, too fast and slight and high-pitched for humans to register. The cargo of fleas the pigeon had been carrying had also met their end, and were gathered, in as near a state as a siphonapteran can muster to shocked awe, in front of what looked like an empty carapaceous exoskeleton with a strange pattern on its shell.(1)
POP. The Death of Fleas confirmed again. {{When your host was ingested and died, you did too.}}
{{pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop?}} ("Will we go to a land flowing with warm blood and, er, er… more blood?")
POP. {{Don't ask me. I'm only here to see you cross at the appointed time.}}
{{pop-pop-pop-pop-pop?}}
The Death of Fleas obliged and told them what had killed them. The souls of the ex-fleas lost interest when they realised it had no skin they could easily pierce. Fleas are generally creatures with one-track minds.
As the souls of the dead insects faded, the Death of Fleas sank back into the psychic ether, feeling vaguely glad He didn't have to attend billions of siphonapteran mortalities personally. He normally partnered the Death of Rats, as whenever a rat dies, a cargo of fleas generally passed over too if they couldn't get to a new host quickly. But just now and again, he had to minister to fleas who had passed over in rat-free circumstances, ie in a choking cloud of flea-powder applied to the family cat, or halfway down a chimpanzee's digestive tract as the result of a mutual grooming session. This way of going, however, was a new one on him. Insofar as a flea can wonder, he wondered if he'd see more of it.
Doctor Davinia Bellamy straightened her back and frowned.
"What do you make of it, Professor Pennysmart?" she asked.
Unseen University's Professor of Extreme Horticulture looked down at the patch of growing weed and regarded the way it was spreading, in the lee of a suspiciously new-looking wooden fence.
"I'm almost sure of it, Doctor Bellamy. Just one more test…"
He beckoned the reluctant second wizard forward, the one whose escape route was blocked by two sturdy Bledlows. Davinia smiled up at him as kindly as she could manage. As the Assassins' Guild School's principal teacher of botany, she had been called out to identify a new and unknown plant species that was springing up around the City, and to assess any danger or threat it posed. She had taken one look and called for University assistance.
"Professor Rincewind," she said, "I asked for you to come with us today as I suspect you've seen this before. It might spare a lot of investigation if you can confirm the identification."
Rincewind swallowed. It was reminding him of recent things which he would have preferred to forget about. Mind you, this defined most of his life to date. And when Assassins take an interest in you, then that's bad news. Even when they were as superficially harmless-looking as Davinia Bellamy, who was blonde, plump, bespectacled and generally mumsy and who, rumour attested, alternated cold-bloodedly poisoning clients with being a devoted wife and mother to a husband and three sons. She didn't wear a sword or a stiletto. She didn't need to, although a wicked-looking pair of secateurs hung from her Assassin toolbelt. Again, rumour had it that she'd used them on an unlicenced Thief who'd sensed an easy mark, and who was now a former mugger and pickpocket learning a new trade that required far fewer fingers.
"I saw it on the Moon, miss" Rincewind said, reluctantly. "It's lunar weed, vegetation. We must have brought it back with us."
Davinia nodded. She turned to the householder, who was looking shifty and worried in the presence of Authority.
"At about the time the spacecraft returned to Disc, it was, shall we say, informally scrapped by people wanting souvenirs of the flight. No, don't panic, I'm not with the Watch and that aspect doesn't concern me. Did you collect enough souvenirs to build your garden fence with? Yes, I thought you did. Mind if we take samples?"
While Davinia wore an Assassin belt with the usual multitude of pouches and pockets, only part of the contents were conventional for her trade. Many of the pouches had been turned over to seed packets, pollen samples, and basic gardening tools. While Davinia had achieved a basic pass grade in Swords, after long patient training, she had realised that if it came to a stand-up fight, there were tools she had used all her life that in her hands were potentially far more lethal. She carried a garden trowel where a cutting edge had been ground to razor-sharpness, and a seemingly inoffensive dibbler(2) had a point on it that rivalled any stiletto for punch. And of course, what she could do with a hoe or a garden rake in a fight had won her plaudits for inventiveness and style. She smiled. Joining the Guild had really rounded her out.
Taking out a razor-edged blade and a microscope slide, she began to meticulously scrape the wood of the fence, taking samples for examination later. If this was wood from the Kite, and it carried spores, the diagnosis, method of transmission, and identification, were absolutely proven. Then there was the problem of what to do about it… a non-native plant species with no known predator could take over and really wreck the ecology. This had serious implications, and Vetinari was not going to be a happy Patrician when she and Pennysmart reported back.
But maybe we at the Guild can devise a species-specific pesticide. We're Disc leaders in poisons, after all.
Lady Sybil Ramkin looked down at the new hatchlings with a mingled sense of joy and regret. The joy was because this was the closest she'd got to breeding back into the Errol line. Those long sleek bodies and flared nostrils….
The regret was because of all the good dragons that had been lost in the recent Moon expedition. She'd given Havelock hell about that…he'd promised they'd be looked after and returned intact.
She looked down on the hatchlings again. They were the progeny of two of the very few dragons who had returned from the Kite, having house-hopped across the City from the crash-landing site, following a homing instinct to Ramkin Manor, coal and safety. She hoped others, who had made Discfall further away, would follow them. the pens were too bloody empty these days. Her rage had been mollified by Carrot and that da Quirm fellow briefing her on the existence of Moon Dragons, with that jolly clever bald chap Leonard presenting her with a portfolio of sketches and paintings of the Lunar Dragon, together with his observational notes, as part-compensation for her loss. Havelock had smoothly said that she was the ideal person to collate and work up Leonard's notes for publication, and some of the wind had gone out of her sails then. No doubt as Havelock had intended…
She wondered if the lunar trip had somehow affected her dragons. Had cross-mating happened up there, or had the lunar atmosphere provoked metamorphic change in a notably malleable species that was continually reinventing itself? There was a facet here that she hadn't yet considered, she knew that. Her mind worked furiously. According to Carrot, some of the lunar dragons had returned to Disc with them, although none had as yet made their way into her possession. Damn pity they didn't capture a couple of mating pairs for me, she thought, full of the passion for dragons. But would it be cruel to bring them back to Disc, away from their natural habitat, to a place where from what Carrot tells me, gravity is heavier and makes things weigh more? And what do they eat up there?
"OUCH!"
Her train of thought derailed, she looked up to see Sam had picked up a hatchling and had attempted to use it to light his cigar.
Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
"It flamed from the wrong end!" Sam complained, flapping his hand. "Burnt my fingers!"
"You know I disapprove of that sort of thing, Sam" Sybil said, sternly. "I told you you'd come a cropper one day!"
Then they looked at each other.
"Flaming from the wrong end…" she repeated.
"They're bloody Errols!" Sam exclaimed. "Sybil, you've got Errols!"
Sam and Sybil hugged, excitedly.
(1) A very tiny scythe and an hourglass.
(2) Not the entrepreneur. A dibbler isa pointed gardening implement used to make holes in soil, especially for planting bulbs or seedlings. In the French translations, Dibbler is M. Planteur, using the French word for the same tool. Mind you, it's also an endangered species of small rat-like marsupial in Western Australia. Bet you didn't know that.