Here's my latest chapter for now, where the tension factor really gets bumped up.
I must apologize for inserting canon material from the movie here. You can describe it as eloquently and beautifully as you want, but in the end, a Kleenx box is just a boring Kleenx box we've all seen before, right? I've tried to keep this repition to the bare minimum, only writing parts where the words of a character were altered in response to the presence of our human heroes, or material that was needed to frame that altered dialouge.
Now enter the bad guy. As a general rule, it is pretty rare for most wild carnivores to kill just for the sheer sport of it, and just as rare for them to deliberately torture prey. Nduli, (murderer, assassin) in Swahili, is not most carnivores. I had a real American Psycho vibe oozing from this chilling beast of an OC while coming up with him, and I hope that shines through, weird as it is to say! Ah, the joys of writing a soulless monster-type character!
Ingonyama nengw' enamabala. Translation from Xhosa: A lion and a leopard come to this open place. From The Circle of Life.
"Fossil evidence shows that leopards have killed hominids since Australopithecines hunted and gathered in Africa. Their night-stalking habits undoubtedly helped influence our primordial fear of darkness and our need to gather close around a blazing fire. Homo sapiens, it would seem, has always been a normal part of the leopard's diet..." Barbara Sleeper, Wild Cats of the World, 1995.
Hyenas get great enjoyment out of laughing at the misfortunes of other animals. Even their fellow clan members aren't immune. Tonight, Ed was having a good series of cackles at the expense of Banzai, his friend's hindquarters bearing the painful results of a red raking by the lion king's claws.
The skin of a spotted hyena is very, very tough, and difficult to penetrate. Nevertheless, no matter what hide it wears, the animal that has had the bad luck to be slapped around by a male lion is certainly going to remember it in the morning, to say the very least. Putting that raw, torn sensation into words, Banzai bitterly cursed, "Man that lousy Mufasa! I won't be able to sit for a week."
Instead of offering any type of sympathy, Ed continued to produce manic giggles.
In a deadpan voice, heavy with warning, Banzai said, "It's not funny, Ed. And I don't know why the heck you're sitting there laughing after some hairless overgrown monkey smashed out one of your teeth."
Realizing that his friend had a point, Ed stopped and thoughtfully cocked his head, rubbing his throbbing stump of a tooth with his paw for half a second. But the urge to laugh at Banzai proved far stronger in the haywire hyena's brain. He tried to throttle it, but burst out laughing even harder in great, gasping, wheezing BWA-HAAAS!
"Hey, shut up!" an incensed Banzai whined.
Ed didn't and couldn't do that though. Pinning back his ears, Banzai growled in mounting annoyance before tackling Ed, who didn't even have time to go into a defensive crouch before both males were wrestling and snapping together in the dust.
"Will you knock it off!" an exasperated Shenzi yelled from her perch above some broken rock, tinted an eerie green-yellow in the geothermal light of the steam vents and fumaroles. Banzai obeyed, breaking away from the squabble even as Ed continued to manically chomp down on his own leg like some crazed squirrel.
"Well, he started it!" Banzai exclaimed, pointing a blaming finger at Ed before drawing back with a repelled grimace.
Shenzi just gave a snort of derision before padding down. "Look at you guys. No wonder we're dangling at the bottom of the food chain," she said.
Carrion-scented drool ironically hanging from his mouth, Banzai sourly declared, "Man, I hate dangling."
"Shyeah?" Shenzi said for emphasis as she reached the two males. "If it weren't for those lions, we'd be running the joint," she enviously pronounced, pointedly bobbing her tousled bearlike head at Banzai.
"Yeah," he agreed. "Man, I hate lions. And I've decided after today that I hate humans too," he added.
"They have an irritating amount in common," Shenzi said with a nod. "So pushy."
"And hairy."
"And stinky."
"And man are they both…"
"Uuugg-LEE!" Shenzi and Banzai heartily proclaimed in unison, back to back as they gave vent to wild giggling, Ed joining in.
"Oh, surely we lions at least are not all that bad," a male lion's voice coolly interjected from above them.
Hearing the voice of the only creature in the world that they truly feared, all three hyenas flashed around in startled fright. Then the identity of the speaker registered, their lord's lanky form illuminated by the pea-green lights from below.
"Oh Scar, it's just you," Banzai sighed amiably in relief.
"We were afraid it was somebody important," Shenzi thoughtlessly explained.
"I'm surrounded by idiots," Scar sighed in dry weariness, rubbing his temple in exasperation as he regarded his three main followers.
"Not you Scar, I mean, you're one of us. You're our pal," Banzai responded in a tone of grateful amiability.
The honor was rather dubious as far as the lion was concerned, and he sarcastically drawled "Charmed," while rolling his eyes in disdain. They were really more a necessary evil and hired help than pals.
Impressed by her lord's debonair manner, Shenzi said "Ohh, I like that. He's not king, but he's still so proper."
"Yeah," Banzai agreed. Eyes lighting up all of a sudden, he shamelessly wheedled, "Hey hey hey. Did ya bring us anything to eat, Scar, old buddy, old pal? Huh? Did-ya-did-ya-did-ya?" he asked, begging like a spoiled child visiting his grandmother.
With a faint sneer that bespoke his disgust and disdain at both their greed and failure, Scar reached behind him and grabbed the zebra haunch he'd taken from his prides' kill earlier. And after seeing firsthand what weak and fragile beings Jack and Ann were, the fact that his agents had been unable to deal with the human meddlers was especially pathetic.
"I don't think you really deserve this," Scar dryly said, holding out the black-and-white ham as the hyenas snapped to attention, rearing up on their stocky hind legs and spraying drool in expectation like a trio of misshapen, scruffy crosses between black bears and Newfoundland dogs. "I practically gift wrapped those cubs for you, and you couldn't even dispose of them," he drawled, a cool mixture of accusation and admonishment tinting his voice as he simultaneously let the haunch drop and scornfully turned his head aside while the famished hyenas tore into it.
Even as she chewed a large bite, Shenzi raised her head to plead her case, pointing out, "Well, ya know, it wasn't exactly like they was alone, Scar."
As she returned to feeding, Banzai's head came up, stating reasonably, "Yeah. How were we supposed to know that some gung-ho hominids would come out of nowhere wielding rocks and bone clubs?"
"That's no excuse," Scar crisply shot back, lightly lashing his tail in irritation. "You all could've soundly trounced them if you'd wanted to."
After bolting yet more zebra, the stung Banzai sheepishly admitted, "Yeah, I guess so. But what about when Daddy came?" he demanded. "What were we supposed to do then? Kill Mufasa?"
Sliding his head over his paw, Scar gave them a puff adder's gleeful leer as he responded, "Precisely."
The hyenas all looked up together, faces a study in puzzlement.
With a resounding crash, a shocked Ed went flying backwards into an assemblage of dry herbivore bones. His companions surfaced alongside him, their heads all crowned by horned skulls like wanna-be Celtic warriors, Ed wearing a Thompson gazelle's pate, Shenzi an impala doe's, and Banzai a Cape buffalo's skull.
"Yeah, be prepared," he enthusiastically yelled in agreement. "Yeah-heh. We'll be prepared, heh… For what?" he asked, suddenly at a loss.
"For the death of the king," Scar pronounced from above.
"Why? Is he sick?"
Exasperated to the point of fury by the hyena's dullness, Scar grabbed him by the throat, flatly droning, "No fool, we're going to kill him. And Simba too," he added before roughly dropping Banzai in a heap on the granite.
"Great idea! Who needs a king?" Shenzi zealously screeched. Unable to control their sheer delirious glee, she and Ed danced around Banzai's seated hunched form, his voice accompanying hers in a ludicrous chorus of "No king! No king! La-la-la-la-la-laaaa!"
"IDIOTS!" Scar bellowed. "There will be a king!"
Taken aback by the contradiction, Banzai babbled, "Hey, but you said, uh…"
"I WILL BE KING! Stick with me, and you'll never go hungry again!"Scar grandiosely proclaimed from a great podium of granite as volcanic lights suddenly came awake to cast a preternatural orange-yellow light over the graveyard.
"Yaay! All right! Long live the king!" the three hyenas passionately cheered, utterly seized by zeal.
The slogan was taken up by dozens upon dozens upon dozens of other, equally fervent hyenas, revealed by the fiery lights from the earth's mantle. "Long live the king! Long live the king!" they barked out. One of the voices was more restrained, and much closer to Scar's in its tone.
That particular speaker stood on velvet paws and coolly remained in the same position while his hyena companions formed a militarily rigid rhombus of scavengers and goose-stepped across the vale's floor, all eyes on Scar as they crisply chanted, "It's great that we'll soon be connected, with a king who'll be all-time adored."
With a grim coolness that deeply spoke to the "smaller" cat, Scar reminded them, "Of course, quid pro quo, you're expected, to take certain duties on board," giving a meaningful slice across the air in front of his maned neck. Right after he did, Scar looked up for just two seconds, his green eyes meeting those of his feline cousin, one orb colored the normal khaki of his kind, the other walleyed, everything but the pupil a viscous, egg-yolk yellow.
The spotted cat gave a quick, lazy nod and flick of his tail in acknowledgement even as Scar extravagantly decreed, "The future is littered with prizes, and though I'm the main addressee, the point that I must emphasize is…"
The observing feline knew what was coming, and wasn't all that surprised to see the lion unpredictably vault off his rock balcony to lunge at one randomly chosen male hyena as the stone began to rather disconcertingly and abruptly spilt open. "You won't get a sniff without me!" Scar roared.
The smaller cat's features twisted into a pleased smirk as, like he'd seen terrified baboons do so many times just before he slew them for sustenance or sport, the hyena scrabbled backwards for a few panicked moments before falling with a yell into the hellish crevice opening below him. Even if they were your "allies", it was still so much fun to watch things die painfully.
Then everything slipped into an ever-intensifying, barely controlled paroxysm of entropy. Geologic, mental, and psychological instability was running rampant all at once. Great columns and mesas of heated stone were bursting out of the rumbling earth, bearing exuberant hyenas atop them. At the apex of the tallest, fastest-growing one was Scar, announcing to his minions, and then crowing in a near-unhinged state, "So prepare for the coup of the century! Be prepared, for the murkiest scam! Meticulous planning, tenacity spanning. Decades of denial, is simply why I'll, be king undisputed, respected, saluted, and seen for the wonder I am!" as carmine steam gushed out around his wild, tense form, stark against the brooding denim blue night sky.
Swept away by their lunatic urges, the capering hyenas leapt along the pillars, one playing a marimba of huge bones as two others shook the skeletons of Grant's gazelles to pieces, the spectacle casting frightfully hallucinatory shadows in the infernal light as they did so.
"Yes, my teeth and ambitions are bared," Scar eagerly decreed. "Be prepared!"
His words were echoed back by the fanatical hyenas, snapping out, "Yes, our teeth and ambitions are bared…"
"And claws too," the leopard tom amended with a vulpine grin before flashing around to give a shocked young male hyena's face and neck a clawing merely for the sake of it.
The hyena's sandpapery screams of fear and pain as he ran off were swallowed up by the concluding, "Be prepared!" of the others. And the leopard's grunting laughter rose to mingle with that of the hyenas and the male lion seated on his impressive pedestal.
Scar drew deep breaths for a few moments, looking around at all the hyenas gathered around him. "All right everybody, it's time to go beddy-bye now," he said with mock sweetness. "We have such a very big day tomorrow after all, and it's best to be well rested."
"You heard him, let's all go hit the hay," Shenzi snapped out at her clan. Faces flushed with anticipation and exertion, the hyenas all leapt or skipped down from their perches and ambled off to choose a site to slumber away the rest of the night, fly-whisk tails dangling limply behind them.
Scar waited until the majority of the hyenas were gone, then descended his own elevated pillar in a series of easy bounds. The walleyed leopard tom trotted forward over the stones and bones to greet him, rolling onto his muscular back in a gesture of cool respect before getting back to his paws.
Scar gave a small smile and nod to his part-time servant in reciprocation before saying in delight, "Ahhh, my good friend Nduli. Truly so good of you to come on such short notice."
Like the majority of felids, leopards are solitary, and as such prefer their conversations to be quick and to the point whenever possible. "It's no problem my lord," Nduli remarked with a dismissive slash of an amber forepaw. "I understand you want me to carry out an…assignment for you lord?" he casually stated, eyes shining even as he prodded at a broken piece of bone in seeming disinterest.
"Yes." Scar confirmed. "Very much so, and it has come to my attention that you have past experience in dealing with these creatures."
The leopard tom gave an amused snort before saying, "You'll have to be way more specific than that Scar. I've gleefully cut down many kinds of animals for both food and merriment in my nine years, after all. 'If it's made of meat, the leopard will eat,' as they say."
"It's a primate. A primate that walks on two legs," Scar said in a clipped tone.
Nduli knew very well what type of creature the lion was talking about, and the prospect got his senses tingling. He'd killed several during his time as a landless tom in the time after he'd left his mother and before his unusually epic wanderings had brought him to a territory he could claim as his own.
Their flesh was right on the same esteemed level as monkey and warthog in his book, the sheer recollection causing the walleyed tom to salivate. And they were so, so, painfully easy to slaughter.
Nduli knew however that Scar wouldn't go to the trouble of seeking his aid to put down a human just for the sake of it. He'd been in the lion's employ long enough to grasp that whenever Scar requested him for the thrilling task of a hit, it was because that particular animal had done something to acutely piss him off. Whatever the reason, it always would be a fitting punishment, because while the hyenas liked to merely taunt and terrorize, Nduli loved to taunt, terrorize-and torture.
"I certainly have, my soon-to-be-king," Nduli responded, a slow, cunning smile spreading across his stocky face. "How many, where are they, and what did they do to enrage you?" he asked in dry snaps, knowing the drill down pat.
With his lips squeezed into a bitter slash, Scar told Nduli all the information he needed and about how his attempt to have the King's heir slaughtered had been thwarted, the warm air seeming to get slightly hotter whenever the black-maned lion spoke the male's name. "And that's plainly an abundant reason to call for you as my instrument of revenge," Scar smoothly, elegantly told his spotted assassin. "For we both know," he added with a nasty smile, "how you like to kill your victims."
"Slow, bloody, and in every type of agony," Nduli replied with a twisted grin, made all the more terrible by that mad yellow left eye. "Should I go do the deed first thing tomorrow morning?" he expectantly asked.
"No. Not yet," Scar said, shaking his head. "Instead, I've come up with an even better time and place…"
He told Nduli what he had in mind, and the leopard's face lit up with admiration at his master's cleverness. "Ha ha! You are freaking brilliant Scar!" he exulted with a clap of his paws.
"Always the strategist," the lion smoothly grinned. "And prepared for anything," he added, causing Nduli to chuckle appreciatively at the words.
"And now it's going to pay off handsomely at last," Nduli commented with thoughtful pride on Scar's behalf. "Just don't leave your spotted servant on the outside looking in though," he tellingly hinted.
"There'll be meat aplenty for all my loyal followers, believe me," Scar assured him. "And your own kills will forever be off limits from any-kleptoparasitic parties-as well."
It was a very welcome boon, and a delighted Nduli could only say, "Thank you my king."
Scar replied, "I think my deputy deserves at least that much," as he turned and began to walk away. "But now it's time for us too to sleep."
On an impulse, Nduli called out, "Wait! Scar, I want to show you something."
Looking back, Scar wearily sighed before asking, "Can it wait until later?"
"It'll just be a few moments," Nduli insisted, even as he began to draw a crude shape in the dirt with an unsheathed claw. "The humans," he blandly commented, "like to play games with these objects, almost like pieces of bark, that they call cards."
Rolling his eyes, and not really able to discern any sense to the leopard tom's actions or words, Scar dryly inquired, "My good Nduli, does the faint possibility exist that there may be a point, or is this a silly waste of time?"
"There's definitely a point," Nduli assured him as the spotted cat began to carefully make more marks inside the rectangle. "First of all," he stated, "these cards have a value system, a dominance hierarchy if you like."
"Yes, yes, now just summarize," Scar said impatiently.
Continuing at his rushed work of making more nonsensical shapes, Nduil calmly went on, "The first and highest ranking one is called the king. The second one is known as the queen. The third-ranking one is the one I've just very crudely copied," he informed the lean lion, stepping back from his work as he did so. "Now, do you know what this third one is called Scar?" he asked, his expression the picture of shrewdness.
"You know I loathe these types of games," was Scar's surly response.
In the space of a half second, Nduli's demeanor radically changed. Plastering his ears against his deep skull, he gave a cavernous growl and threw his muscled forelegs forward, savagely scuffling in the dirt with razor claws bared. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, he coolly stepped back, sat back on his haunches, and gave Scar a smile worthy of Lucifer. Hypnotic yellow eye gleaming, he rasped out, "It's called…a Jack."
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After all this hyper-feverish writing I've been doing, I want to tell everyone here that I need to rest for a while before you'll be seeing more. I also need to step back for two other major reasons: One, I'm becoming concerned that our hero and heroine are starting to act somewhat unlike themselves, and the best way to cure that is with a fresh start. Two, I have no idea for what Jack and Ann are going to do 'tommorrow' in this fic, and need to plan the day's activities! I also want to look back and assure myself that this story's plot isn't floundering. But I assure you all, there will be more to come!