Chapter Eighteen : Screw the Nether (Part One)
The barman looked at the kid. Then he looked at the gold sitting in the palm of his hand. Then back at the kid.
He stowed the nuggets in his pocket without so much as a second thought.
Meanwhile, Pyrien was in the midst of experiencing the mortal joy known as 'intoxication'. He waved a hand in the general direction of the shelf of spirits and said : "That one." And proceeded to down a kegful of something pink and sparkly with the alcoholic punch of a seven hundred pound gorilla on a speeding minecart. Pyrien had never experienced drunkeness before, and was always a bit confused as to why his brother seemed to prefer that particular state of mind over something more sensible, such as sobriety. Then again, it was quite possible Aurorion had never heard of the concept.
The barman looked in the direction of the wave. "Which one, sir?"
It was not the usual way a small boy was treated in a bar. Usually, the small boys who wandered into bars quickly found themselves thrown into the garbage dump situated at the back with a general air of disdain, but whoever had that much gold couldn't possibly be a small boy, could he? Just a rather, ehem, youthful gentleman. Yes, a gentleman.
Gold tended to do wonders to the eyesight.
Pyrien flapped a hand. "All of them."
The barman nodded as if this was completely normal. Then again, the bar had experienced some pretty interesting Saturday nights, so a minor god may not seem that out of the ordinary. "A sample of each, sir? How much would the honoured sir require? Shot glasses, I expect?"
Pyrien paused in the act of reaching for someone else's tankard and looked at the barman like he was the single dullest idiot mankind had the audacity to produce. "All - of - them." He said slowly in a manner one usually applied when speaking to kindergarteners or dogs.
The current owner of the tankard had the grace of mind to pick up his drink while the boy was distracted and inconspicuously move to the other side of the room. He wasn't sure why, as he was one of those people who can be found late at night in a bar opening bottles with his teeth, or with someone else's teeth if it was a really good day. But something about the small boy reached out and casually flipped a rusty, disused lever inside him marked 'Apprehension', which happened to be situated within breathing distance to the clockwork circuit known as 'Primal Terror'.
That gave the barman some pause. Though not for long, as the telltale sparkle of gold once again 'improved' his eyesight.
He began to bring down the dusty bottles one by one.
"Do you know," Pyrien began conversationally as he casually snapped off the top of the first bottle. "That this isn't as easy as it looks? This intoxication, it's very hard to get the hang of. I wonder how Rory does it all the time."
The barman nodded cautiously. Pyrien looked at the bottle in his hand and proceeded to to quaff it, drowning a few rats passing by behind his chair. He dropped the empty bottle and reached for another.
The barman passed it over silently. There was a pop of displaced air and the top of the bottle wasn't there any more.
A pile of broken glass later, Pyrien stood up and sighed. "This is no good. I just can'- Oh."
He swayed a little.
And then, without further warning, the boy transitioned from vertical to horizontal in a sudden clatter of falling chair.
A loud groan rose from the floor and languidly pushed its way up like a geriatric who had mislaid his cane. "Yesh." The voice mumbled after a pause. "I shink I go' it now."
The barman peered cautiously over the edge of the counter. Pyrien blinked up at him blearily. "You know." He began woozily. "I don't. Be like, this. Have, to."
"Of course." The barman soothed as he frantically scrabbled around in a cupboard. An audible sigh of relief was heard as his fingers closed around the thick laminated cover of a book. It was the kind of book librarians took to war. There were scars all over the covers, complimented by the slight colouring caused by liberal amounts of spilt alcohol and a sort of questionable brown substance one sometimes get in a low-budget torture chamber which can't afford its own cleaners. The book had outlived quite a few of its owners, and was likely to outlive quite a few more.
It was titled Barkeeping 1001.
Pyrien rolled around on the floor until he remembered that human beings were supposed to stand upright, which then led to a series of embarrassing attempts to do so. The end result, after an eternity of falling chairs, was a slightly confused boy buried in the middle of a pile of furniture.
"'Sh no' eashy." He mumbled. "Shomeone, me, tell, sky where, is."
The barman flipped through page after page at a speed most athletes would kill to possess, mumbling to himself as he did so. He flashed through chapters on how to deal with armed dwarves so high on elf wine you can bounce radio waves off them and barrelled through surviving rampage of inebriated Giant Zombies, briefly pausing on persuading underage Crafters to put down the damn vodka, and flipping at speed over the chapter of OhshitohshitHerobrine, which consisted of one blank page and a strong aura of hostility.
Clink.
All heads possessing of ears within hearing range turned with a synchronisation that would have reduced an orchestra conductor to a blubbering mess of lacrimal fluid. And as one, they turned there eyes upon the piece of gold that had escaped from the inebriated boy's pocket. Minus the old man in the corner who had the hearing abilities of a bat who's been dead for a fortnight, of course.
Most of them hurriedly lost interest as a group of men who looked like they hadn't been born, but chiselled out of a granite cliff and radiating the same amount of fatality pushed up front and bunched together, possibly with the intent to do what is known as a 'group huddle' but looked more like a quarry of monoliths looking for an excuse to fall and smear some unfortunate passerby into the ground.
They said : He's probably got more in his pockets.
Pyrien said : Whee.
They said : He's a kid. He doesn't need all that money.
Pyrien said : Ooh thash' a pretty flamingo.
They said : It'd be a shame if anything happened to all that money.
(What they meant was : It'd be a shame if anything that wasn't us happened to that money."
Pyrien said nothing. He was preoccupied with attempting to eat the seat of a chair. And having a shocking amount of success, on the account of having the teeth of a hippopotamus and the determination of an extremely inebriated person.
They said : We'll take better care of the money.
The monoliths - ahem, men, having reached a decision, stood up and menaced their way toward the pile of chairs.
Then they did something that was very unwise.
They grabbed Pyrien by the ankles and dragged him out backwards.
Now, in order to survive the obstacle course that was known as the universe, all species had certain instincts built into them to help them do so. For example, when cornered, the bull will charge, the cat will maul, and the politician will bullshit. For your average god, there was nothing more life-threatening than being caught unawares and dragged backwards into the Void by the ankle by some Creational screw-up tossed there by the Primordials when the world was first formed. As such, they have developed a reaction to bodily contact without notification to the other senses.
What they didn't have the time to say was : Oh, bugger.
Half a minute later Pyrien strolled peacefully out of the bar, which was somehow missing one of the walls and most of the roof.
He never did discover the reason behind the pieces of seat leather stuck between his teeth.
I knew I never got seasick. I also knew I never got cartsick. I was very proud of being able to disprove that particular myth (You know, where people say you can be immune to seasickness or immune to carsickness, but never both).
To my ultimate downfall, I never really considered the possibility I could get Ghast-sick.
Apparently it was not good etiquette to vomit on someone who'd just offered you a free ride (Horus kept referring to them as people, gods know why. No one I knew ever turned out to be a giant floating devil-squid), so I had to bear with the nausea and the urge to simply roll off the side and put an end to it all, which was becoming more and more enticing by the minute.
If anyone saw me right now, they would have also noticed the thick fog of misery exuding from my orifices. When they said the Nether was the afterlife's version of an eternal maths class, they weren't kidding around.
And on top of that, the Ghasts insisted on singing with a sound that would shame an entire orchestra composed of nails screeching down blackboards. No, wait, I tell a lie. The blackboards would run off screaming for mercy.
I groaned some more. Horus continued to look bored. It was the only expression he had.
Somewhere along the way, we passed close enough to a ceiling for the glowstone blocks to shatter from the homicidal noise. I ended up with a coating of dust to make a beacon green with envy. I couldn't bring myself to blame the glowstone. As far as noises went, this one didn't just leave the ears sore but contrived to hit them with horseshoes, with horses still attached to them. The damn pieces of glow-glass got off lucky, the devils.
Excellent. I was now jealous of a piece of glowing rock.
The lava below beckoned like a friendly old lady with a plateful of cookies. One that probably had a chainsaw hidden behind her back, if she deserved to be compared to the murderous temporarily-liquid.
I curled up into a pathetic ball of misery.
Sometime later, a finger tapped me on the shoulder.
I refused to respond. Then, I noticed a brief lull in the horrible Ghast-screeches. The noise had suddenly gone from bone-shatteringly high to a surprisingly dulcet melody.
I was too busy drinking up the bliss of the ceasefire to notice the second round of tapping, which, now that I think back to it, contained an edge of irritation.
Without further warning, I was suddenly pulled off the Ghast's back and dumped unceremoniously on some kind of brick floor.
Unsure of what to do, one half of me suggested 'yelp' and the other half surfaced from a puddle of self-pity just long enough to gurgle 'vomit'.
I compromised and did both.
An exasperated sigh issued from somewhere above me. It was a sound that seemed to suggest its maker was currently beginning a journey down the end of his tether and was about to slip off it altogether, but whose pride forbade him to be seen strangling someone in public, which was incidentally the only thing between me and an untimely demise.
"Amusing. I did not know humans were capable of ejecting this much fluid from their bodies and not cease to function. Though mind you - I also did not know they were capable of producing such a smell. It is a most undignified stench. I would be glad to smell the back of it." A voice like that of a rockslide mused conversationally. No, wait. Three rockslides. The voices melted together in the middle of the sentences, like squabbling siblings who'd just noticed their parents walking into the room.
"The feeling is somewhat mutual." A familiar voice said flatly. "Incidentally, it is called Steve, as far as I am able to discern."
Something in the sentence sent alarm bells clanging inside my head. Without fully informing my head of what was going on, my body automatically sprang me to my feet.
My vision cleared. Then I wished it didn't.
I felt the metaphorical heel of the universe descending upon me. At speed.
Horus grabbed me by the collar and hauled me back upright. "As I mentioned before, this human is called Steve."
I was too busy panicking to object to the degrading tone he was using. In front of me floated a grey monstrosity I had only ever seen in books I went out of my way to avoid.
The Wither smiled with all three of its faces. There was a lot of teeth involved.
"Ah. You humans would now claim that it is a pleasure to meet the other, no? I will skip that part, if you can find it in yourself to excuse me. I dislike telling untruths. I think, judging by the expression on your face, you already know me. But since it is the human custom to say this on the first meeting..."
"Hello, Steve. I am the Wither. I do not yet know whether it is a pleasure to meet you."
About what I said at the end of the last chapter:
I obviously lied.
Anyway.
Lo, I am terrible at writing in First Person POV.
Verily, I cannot believeth how long 't tooketh me to realize that .
Ah well. It's too late. I shall have to persevere.
If I get the time, I'll try to rewrite the first few chapters. Just looking at them makes me want to sink peacefully down a Blue Hole.
Anyway, I know it's a short chapter, but it's the best I can do with the time I have at the moment.
-Nano