The beginning was a subtle, creeping hand that was so smooth in its task that no one noticed anything but the fruits of its labor. Including the great simian ninja himself.
Monkey Fist didn't give another spare thought to the fiasco his minions had created that morning save for making them train harder than usual that afternoon. He had expected them to clean everything, including put his book back where they found it and toss that worthless toy in the garbage. It was bad enough that they were becoming layabouts. He wasn't about to let them start hoarding junk as well.
Much to his ever-growing pile of annoyance, his examination of their cleaning attempt discovered that it was below average. There were a few dead bugs laying about in the remaining drifts of flour on the floor and, to his utter amazement, a dead rat lying just inside the pantry, seeming to have either choked to death or died of poisoning on some of the splatterings of cake batter. How cake batter got into the pantry he wasn't about to venture a guess; all he knew was that he was glad he hadn't sampled any of the cake his troupe had created and devoured.
Entering the larger hallway he had converted to a training area for his ninja monkeys, Monty took a quick look around to see if they'd been at least keeping up with their regular chores. He did not mind lesser-used rooms being left to gather dust, but seeing as how this was the room the ninjas were to use it was not allowable to have standards slack. That was why Bubba, what most would consider his second-in-command, was in charge of this room. That combined with the fact that this was the ninja's training area made it doubly galling that there were varying layers of dust on several pieces of equipment.
Did his monkey ninjas ever train between missions? He'd always assumed they did, seeing as how there wasn't too much else to do at the manor and, well, they were monkey ninjas. It wasn't like they could simply go out to town and have a blast at the local nightclub. But now Monkey Fist saw that his assumptions certainly made him look simply meant that the training session was more important than ever: to ensure his troupe was keeping their standards up to his own.
'And' Monty noted with some minor aggression as he rang the dust-caked gong in the corner of the hall to call the monkeys to him 'the importance of cleanliness will be emphasized as well'
The monkey ninjas were very resistant to the extra training he had them do, save for Bubba and, curiously, the free-spirited Kiki. It just reinforced the fact that he needed to crack the whip a bit harder, make sure they knew he wouldn't tolerate any slack. Thus he did just that, making them do an extra set of kata and added a half-hour of sparring with each other. He bore witness to their lackadaisical attitude, the sparring looking more like a poorly organized dance routine than anything else. He snarled to himself; their lollygagging was likely why they kept losing to The Pretender, the redheaded wannabe hero, and the bald pet!
It was disgusting for him to find them all much worse for wear by the end.
"Don't any of you do extra training outside of our usual bouts?" Monty asked incredulously.
"I've been practicing how to drive!" Kiki cried from the back. He waited an extra few seconds, a frown settling on his face.
"That's it? Practicing driving? You're all highly-trained monkey ninjas! What else could you actually be doing besides training?" he snarled, verbalizing his confused ponderings from earlier.
"I look in your books at all the pictures. They're pretty," ooked Missy.
"I bird watch. You never know when you'll see an interesting breed making a nest nearby," Bubba answered quietly, "And you said it was good that I do my carving, Master."
"I try to keep the place clean. But so much junk!" Jumbo shrieked.
Most of the rest shrugged, not really having an excuse or hobby.
"So you all just sit around watching the telly?" A large portion of the monkeys looked at each other and slowly nodded. All but two agreed by the end that they watched television a lot. "Well then." Monkey Fist drew himself up to his full height, asserting his dominance. "I think that we'll have to step things up then considering you have the time to cry about that accursed woman that does the talk show."
"You leave Opera out of this!" Missy screeched. The Englishman leapt over the group, behind the female monkey.
"What was that?" Monty snarled as he bent down, his teeth bared at the impulsive little monkey in warning. She cowered away from his display. Eventually Missy bowed to him, apologizing for the outburst. "Just as I thought." He stood up straight and walked back to the front of the group. "For this reason—the growing rebelliousness, the lack of discipline—I expect all of you to be back in this room at 5am sharp!"
He heard some grumblings of discontent. A quick snort and narrowing of the eyes took care of that. Monty wasn't as harsh as he could be. Not out of fear for his subordinates; Monty could easily take all of them on at once and still have the focus to balance a teapot on his head. It was more because they were much easier to work with when governed by emotions other than terror at what he might do to them and that, for all intents and purposes, they were his compatriots and loyal minions.
"Is that 5am in the Uniform time zone, Master?" Bubba chirped hopefully, his eyes straying to the staircase near the hall where Bubba's prized carvings usually found a home.
"No!" Monkey Fist growled. "We are not running on an American timeline. 5am. This timezone. This castle. This room." The lord was too annoyed with his minions to even dismiss them. He simply sighed as he walked out of the room, heading back to the study to continue his research.
Was it really just a couple of years before that he had been so excited about his newly-trained monkey ninjas? It was hard to believe, really. He hadn't realized how naive he had been. Of course things couldn't have gone the way he had wanted. His main adversary was a bumbling adolescent. The universe was cruel like that.
A series of screeches could be heard behind him, cries of joy and anger…and was that a ding? His minions must have gotten into his lesser collection of historical artifacts; he distinctly remembered having a little bell from the Carpathian mountain range, theorized to have belonged to merchants making their way to India, which had just returned from a trip to a scholar in Russia. While he held no value in it he found it unsettling that even after the speech he just gave them they would still seek to toy with his things.
So caught up in his thoughts on their possible betrayal was he that he didn't even notice when the cries turned to screeches of terror. All he recognized was that they were still making that blasted noise while playing with what was likely one of his artifacts.
He would put a stop to that.
Turning about-face, Monty practically stomped his way back into the training room. The sight that he beheld drove rage through his body and a shudder of anguish into his heart. There, in the center of the room, was Bubba. He was impaled through the mouth by a spear, the weapon bursting out the middle of his back to be embedded in the floor.
He knew that spear. It was one he'd found in the outer reaches of Mongolia, near the Chinese border. Supposedly a weapon wielded by Genghis Khan himself, legend declared it to be imbued with mystical power indirectly related to the Mystical Monkey Power. He had retrieved it early on, when the Mystical Monkey Power was flowing powerfully through his veins.
Oh, it was mystical; he could feel it. But it most certainly had no connection to the Mystical Monkey Power. He had been unable to harness it in the least, a large tell that it was not related to that power; after all, he had - however briefly - been able to command the legendary Lotus Blade, something only masters of the Mystical Monkey Power could do.
Even so, it had still been a weapon, one that was quite beautiful in its simplistic craftsmanship. The haft was an age darkened, and use-smoothed hardwood just over two meters long, and the head was deadly sharp, over a quarter meter long, wrought from the remains of a nickel-iron meteorite. That very head was now sunk deeply into the hardwood floor.
He rushed over, resisting the urge to cry out in case his follower was still alive. Bubba was one of the few monkeys he respected, despite how he lorded over them, and the first of his monkeys to bow to him as their sensei. In his intense loyalty, Bubba would have likely still attempted to bow to him or otherwise show acknowledgement of his master even in the state he was in.
Monkey Fist examined his follower closely, almost feeling relief that his faithful servant was obviously dead. There was no chance the monkey ninja, or nearly any animal for that matter, could have lived long with an injury such as this anyway; anything beyond instant death would have been an unnecessary agony and it took the need for his master to commit a mercy kill away.
Monty spun around, looking for the others with a furious gaze. This horrid result was likely due to their antics! One of them showboating with his prized spear and accidentally skewing poor Bubba nearly end to end. Oh, he would most certainly punish the one responsible...
He spotted one of his disciples, and almost immediately his temper cooled to a simmering bubble from the boiling rage it had been moments before. "Kiki..." Monty grated. "What. Happened?"
Kiki looked over at him, her eyes crinkled in the most piteous grief a monkey could produce. It was all Monty needed to know that the rebellious monkey before him had been...involved, for lack of a better word, with one of his loyalist servants despite the strict orders that the monkey ninjas should avoid such relations. And now she'd seen her paramour, and potential mate, impaled in their training room.
If the situation weren't so serious and confusing, Monty would have likely immediately called an animal psychiatrist. Most were wastes, but the one that loathsome geneticist had recommended was actually worth his time and resources. But that would be for another time.
After working her mouth for a moment, she finally ooked and hooted an answer to him. "We... I mean, Bubba and I were trying to convince the others that your duties and chores would be fun. I know it was punishment, but we had to try since many saw the tasks as unnecessary. Then..." Horror began to leak into her voice as she began recalling events barely a minute old. "I can't be sure of what happened in the beginning. We were all talking, you see, and didn't think much on the little noises. I think there was a small thud from upstairs, then a scraping of wood on wood before a heavier thud. We all saw it, then. It looked almost like it was flying with magic! Then it slid down the banister, hit Bubba's carving and flew up. It...it was going to hit Bobo." Her gaze shifted to the now-dead monkey as she continued. "Bubba pushed him away, and...and..." Monkey Fist motioned for her to stop, for he knew if she were pushed too hard too soon she may simply break.
Even to the end, Bubba was a leader; Bobo was a youngster, relatively new to the troupe, and thus the responsibility of his superiors. But no. Even if it had been himself in the situation, he somehow knew Bubba would have...
"Where were the others?" Monty rasped, doing his best to ignore his emotions. Kiki threw herself on the floor in grief and supplication, hoping to stay a wrath which was not aimed at her. "Playing with 'toys', I suppose? I heard a bell sound. Were they monkeying around with my artifacts, such as the spear? Tossed something which broke the wood and knocked it off its pedestal?" Curiously, he thought for a moment on why he had heard nothing else but quickly found his attention diverted to his servant.
"All were here on the floor until the spear fell, Master!" she begged his belief. "And there was barely a scraping of noise over our arguing. We barely heard the spear hit the banister before it flew and slid to hit...Bubba..."
Monty growled at the logical fallacy - after all, this certainly did not happen on its own! - and stalked over to the banister across the hallway leading to the upper floor. The bottom of the banister was capped with a stone monkey head. A head that, ironically, Bubba had carved, which now had a huge chunk cut out of it.
Along the length of the fluted banister were several gouges where the spear had obviously slid down. He walked up the stairs and beheld the shattered remnants of the case that had held the spear for years. The wall-mounted case lay broken on the floor with only a small section still hanging.
A majority of the box's remains were right next to the wall, but there was a line of broken bits that showed the spear had been flung from the wall and up onto to the banister. Monty thought on it for a minute, slowly nodding his head as he followed the debris. It began to make sense to both the scientist in his mind and the enraged sensei to the deceased Bubba. After all, the wooden haft, despite being almost five centimeters thick, was flexible.
The case was wooden, ornately designed with an interlocking herringbone design. It was also nearly two hundred years old, and it seemed to have had a weakness in some of the glue holding the frame together. It was also very, very heavy, weighing almost one hundred kilograms empty.
One side of the case had broken off in such a way as to drop the base of the haft onto the floor, the weight of the rest of the case bending the spear. The mystically sharp blade had cut through the wooden parts that were left, flinging the spear above the banister, and the flute cut down the center of the banister's top had allowed the shaft so slide down like a train on its rails. Then it had hit the ornately carved monkey head and been launched into the air, arcing into the training area. While it had been about to spear the unsuspecting Bobo through and through, Bubba had taken the spear in Bobo's stead.
"Kiki," Monty called, his voice eerily calm. She stood and bowed to him, and he swallowed more of his rage, sorrow taking its place. "I can see that this was..." he shuddered and swallowed his disbelief in the face of the evidence "An accident. You are certain all of your fellows in the training room, on the ground floor?"
"Yes, Master!" Kiki cried, continuing to address him in a, for her, out of character title, which earned a tired, pained sigh from Monty.
"Very well." He turned from the remains of the case and walked back down to the training room, looking over Bubba's corpse. With a hard, yet careful yank, he pulled the spear from the floor, and carefully removed it from Bubba, attempting to lessen the damage. He schooled his mind and emotions, choosing to carry through the following tasks with as much dignity as his follower deserved. "Kiki, because of your relations with Bubba, you shall help me prepare his body for cremation. Have Chippy, Jumbo and Jojo choose three disciples each. Jumbo is the best at upkeep of of the floors and banisters, he shall choose those he thinks best to help him sand and restain the banisters, as well as fix the floor here. Chippy is best at cleaning stains, and should choose those similarly skilled that Jumbo does not. Jojo will clean up the case and any other help the other two need."
"Yes, Master, I'll tell them at once." Kiki bowed and hurried off. Monty carefully arranged Bubba's body, thankful that he had, somehow, kept his bowels and bladder even in death. 'You were always the bravest of my disciples. To an unfortunate fault, it seems'
Kiki returned directly after he'd finished that thought, the others and their choices in tow. The rest of his horde of disciples was there as well, watching from the periphery. "If they need additional help, you will volunteer, understood?"
They all bowed, apparently as hurt by Bubba's death as Monty. "Go about your duties," Monty said curtly, then carefully picked up Bubba by his shoulders, Kiki grabbing the deceased monkey's legs. "Service for Bubba is in four hours. Be done by then, and after, we will observe mourning for the rest of the night, and through lunch tomorrow."
For once, the monkeys did not celebrate the lack of activities.
Author's Notes
This story's now being co-authored with kgs-wy. We work well together, and he can write the stuff I stink at and vice-versa. Thanks to Mengsk and Pharaoh Rutin Tutin for doing the beta work! Hope y'all enjoy this chapter, where the mood whiplash hurts. The next, whenever it gets done, will not be any brighter.