Deer Avengers: the Mongoose Hero Must...be Born
These are woods just outside of Colombo. They're far from much activity, political or economic. It's often hard to imagine what the British or the Dutch once saw in this place, when they colonized it, back when a man named George still sat on the British throne... Either way, a certain someone is glad they did. Otherwise, he'd be less likely to be anywhere near here...away from companies who'd hound him into turning some of his ideas into what he wouldn't stand for...or supplant the state for.
These woods are home to all four of the Big Four; the snakes that kill the most people all across the Subcontinent. These'd be the saw-scaled viper, the cobra, the common krait, and the Russell's viper. If they all had shotguns, the barrels would be infinitely long; each species would have to carve that many notches into the barrel to keep up with all the humans they've killed.
This is a shack. Here, a settler lives the good life. By many, he's been described as a chupa-cu. He, by contrast, prefers to think of himself as simple... A defeated rebel, even... He's not a Naxalite...although he sometimes considers joining that rebellion. Alas, he'd have to move to Hindi country just to get started... He might as well go to Mumbai and turn a lot of his ideas into carrion for Bollywood's griffons... (Griffon vultures; not the other thing.)
Inside, there's a firearm rack. From it, a high-caliber rifle hangs. It's a tiger-killer; this is plain to see. It might, though, merely be a retired tiger-killer...
Just outside the shack, there's an open space. Across it, snake attacks have happened. Tigers, too, have been known to make prolonged visits...
Through the front door, the host lets himself out. He's white, blond, and blue-eyed. His ancestors were English...and political philosophers. A few, potentially, were simple suburban types from Ohio...
In his hands, he holds his protegee; a brown mongoose pup. He doesn't look like much... Either way, he's a natural snake repellant. Today, he's about to be deployed...
Thomas finds a place to set his protegee down. He does so. He rubs the pup's small head one last time and gives him a berth. He wouldn't expect the snakes to...once they come.
Now, John is all alone. He's surrounded by bunches of grass which, to him, are as big as trees... Some of it is tiger grass. Some of it is tiger nut sedge. Either way, it blocks his view...and potentially harbors many hazards. Four of them, he knows, would be venomous. And it'd be all up to him and his kin to keep their populations down. Alas, the very fact that they're called the Big Four now potentially means, sadly, that there are more snakes than mongooses. Better thing, then, that Good Ole Thomas is training a mongoose protegee to succeed him after he retires. Alas, if only more Sinhalese men did what he's doing...
He circles the grass bunches, and sniffs the air... It's a lovely day. It'd be even lovelier if John wasn't expecting to get attacked by snakes...or worse, sea eagles... But then, he's a mongoose; it's his destiny to kill snakes. He needs not hear the speech; Henri Hawk once heeded a similar speech from his aging, crippled sire. (Or rather, if he was aged and crippled, that'd better explain why he never tried to help Henri kill Foghorn Leghorn...)
Before long, a common krait presents itself. It bares its fangs and strikes.
With speed, John dodges the strike. Now, the duel is on...
Against a nearby rock, shadows are cast. The shadows of snake and mongoose pup seem to tango with one another... Pearl Bailey would be proud...if only the owners of those shadows were as black as she once was...
As the duel endures, the Deer Avengers arrive. The fight catches their eye. Slowly, they all encircle the fight...and approach it, as it's about to end...
By now, John's got the snake's throat in his jaws. With revenge in his eyes, he's not letting go. One way or another, this krait will breathe its last breath. And he'll be the medic who pronounces this silver-tongued bastard dead...
As the fight concludes, the muntjacs trade looks. They're all inspired... On a better day, they'd surely consider recruiting the mongoose pup into their ranks... Alas, too bad these are the Deer Avengers...
At long last, the krait breathes its last breath. The victorious pup releases the beast from his mouth. He seems exhausted. Gradually, he acknowledges the sapient, bipedal deer who surround him... Many confused stares ensue...
In the shack, Assamese tea is brewed. It smells great; it almost smells of Sinhalese Buddhism... Not that the host would know; he's a social democrat.
On the mahogany coffee table, the Deer Avengers are presented with a big pot of sassafras. They gather around the pot, and start lapping it up with their tongues...
In a corner, tents of sheets have been pitched. Some of them are white and have the Red Dharma on them. Others are saffron, yellow, or orange...and were, perhaps, once the robes of bhikkhus or bhikkhunis...
Inside these tents, Ms. Nirvana, a kind Sinhalese maiden, attends to John's fight wounds. He'll survive. As one might expect, she often fears for John's welfare... Alas, Thomas knows very well that if a man doesn't learn to stand in life, he'll spend all of it getting struck down...and not just by the Big Four, either...
From a wall, a framed sketched picture hangs. It's of Thomas Hobbes, a political philosopher whose time was mostly in the 17th century...although he was born in the 16th; hence, while his generation might not have been of millennials, they might, in fact, have been centenarians...or some word that begins with the same prefix... The host of this home is his descendant.
"A tiger, eh?" Thomas sips his tea. "That sounds like a tall order."
"Technically," Ant-Buck, a pastiche of Scott Lang, speaks, "it's a killer robot posing as a tiger...and hence, potentially far more dangerous than your average Sumatran tiger."
"Yes... I picked up on that, too." He half-giggles. "Normal tigers, I've experience in field-dressing... But...killer robots posing as the same?!"
"That punching bag of stripes killed our ninmenju," Tenpin Agent, a pastiche of Rick Jones/Sleeper Agent, says. "He's gonna pay."
Thomas holds up a finger. "But you're also telling me that..." He sets his teacup down. "You're telling me that he didn't start ripping the ninmenju to shreds until after..." He hesitates again. "Until after a moonrat ran up into it?!"
Ms. Gerenuk, a pastiche of Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, shrugs. "He was chasing him. The poor gymnure was trying to get away."
"Yes, yes... That's what I thought you said..." Thomas hiccups, and sighs. "Unfortunately, I can't help you. I don't kill tigers."
The Deer Avengers gawk...and all, nearly simultaneously, glance at a tigerskin rug lying on a nearby floor; bared-fanged head and all...
Thomas half-smiles. "Anymore," he finishes his previous sentence. He blinks, though, and raises his finger. "But that's not to say you've come to the wrong place. As a matter of fact, you're timing couldn't be more ideal." He hesitates. "Well... It kind of could, but... We'll get to that later."
"Please just try to keep this concise," Iron Buck beckons. "Can you help us, or not?"
"Well... I certainly have more confidence...now...that I can help you...than I would've..." He hesitates...and holds up a finger. "Let me show you." He stands, and moves towards the tents that're pitched in the corner...
Inside, John now bathes, while half-asleep, in a pot of bubbling herbal water. In a low-cut, his beautiful Sinhalese attendant prepares other treatments. She hums calmly and serenely, while doing so...
Deviously, an aquarium net dips itself into the bubbling herbal water. It scoops up the poor mongoose pup, and temporarily relieves him of his post-snakefight treatments...
Thomas cups his hands and holds the drenched mongoose pup in them. Maintaining the cupping of his hands, he wanders over to the Deer Avengers, and shows them his career's work...
"This," Thomas speaks, "believe it or not, is my protegee. I'm training him to succeed me as a tiger hunter...when and if I die."
Starfawn, a pastiche of Eros/Starfox, scoffs. "If?!' Sounds like you need to have your head recalibrated..."
Tenpin Agent looks back and forth, between the mongoose pup and the host. He points one of his hooves at the pup. "This guy is tiny. How the hell is he going to slay a tiger-bot?!"
Thomas scoffs. "You saw him slay a common krait just now, didn't you?" He hesitates. "Or rather, me and my head-shrink did; you guys were just coming in, and probably didn't see most of the fight..."
"We don't mean to insult your protegee," Iron Buck speaks, "but seriously, he's tiny. And we're not even needing him to slay a real tiger; this is a killer robot. I know you're just trying to do what's right here, but..." Iron Buck sighs. "This little guy is not John Connor!"
Thomas scoffs. "So you don't like him because he's small, do you? Well... I don't know if you realize this, but... You're muntjacs! You're smaller than most deer... Hell, you're smaller than sambars... I'm even willing to wager that some of you are smaller than some musk deer or chevrotains!" He shrugs. "And yet, you make a living out of killing human deer hunters and tigers in the name of slain deer! Don't you think that if there's hope for any of you, then there's hope for my John, here? Seriously; I've been training him to fight all four of the Big Four!" He nods. "He just killed one of them, less than an hour ago! I saw it with my own eyes; you did, too, even if you were only semi-aware of what was going on!"
Merged Hulk raises his clawed hand; he's a sapient werebeast. "Has he ever actually killed a real tiger?" He shrugs. "A tigress? A cub? Anything?"
"He's killed a leopard cat."
Tenpin Agent scoffs. "That's inspiring!"
"Look, he's all I've got. You can look elsewhere for help if you'd like, but I'm sure they'd charge more."
Iron Buck sighs. "Very well; consider our hoof shaken." He studies Thomas. "When can he be ready?"
"He'll need a few hours to recover from his last fight. As soon as he's well, though, I'll have him off...along with you."
Iron Buck nods. "We'll be back in a few hours. He'd better be in his best and brightest when we return."
"He will be. Thank you for coming by. And I promise you, that when he takes down your vicious tiger-bot, the fight will be so legendary, it'll blow your drawers off."
Iron Buck scoffs. "Sadly, it's not our drawers that we're trying to blow off..."
At this idea, some of the Deer Avengers place their hooves on their bellies and go through "gag reflex" motions... They seem to be imagining one of the Terminator robots...from the Terminator movies...peeling off their human disguise...
This is a mountain. It was once a volcano...if it's still not. A rainforest surrounds it. No one ever comes out here...and with good reason.
This is a cavalry fort. Shock troops are garrisoned here...sort of. They're all killer robots; and hence, have no human (or tiger, in fact) error to boast. They're more efficient and more deadly. And with luck, they'll never get a chance to deploy their full power... It all depends on whether or not a certain brotherhood of sapient muntjac avengers arrive to relieve them of their excesses...and not to mention their command element...
In the motor pool, there are Tiger tanks. They look a lot like the ones from WWII...if not bigger. John would be half-surprised they're not super-heavy tanks from military SF video games... And yet, at the same time, he'd be thankful if it turned out they were all light tanks...or simple cavalry vehicles, even...
In the hangars, there are Tigre attack hovercraft. They might or might not be Eurocopter-made. John doubts, though, that Xenia Onatopp would be one of the pilots... Then again, if this fort is staffed by killer robots, then John just might get to see how Ms. Onatopp would look as a Terminator duplicate... Unlikely though this seems, considering that if the Terminators were biased against humans, then the Tigernator probably has the same opinion not only of humans, but of real tigers, too.
In other hangars, there are rip-offs of the P-40 Warhawk; this was the kind of warplane that the famed Flying Tigers of pre-WWII once flew. They've had paint jobs, too, to mimic said Flying Tigers. Unlike the Flying Tigres, though, these Warhawks are surely UAVs. The Terminator robots, in the Terminator movies, never invest in humans; hence, the Deer Avengers wouldn't expect these tiger-emulating killer robots to do any better...
Atop flat-topped battlements, tiger-robot sentries stand watch. They stand very still; not like circus tigers, and certainly not like wild tigers. There aren't very many rings of fire in sight... But then, the killer robots probably see the ring-of-fire as a sign of weakness...and also possibly profligate. SkyNet surely would, after all...
From certain facilities within this fort, chimneys smoke. Other tiger-bots, it seems, are being proliferated... Either that, or a Tiger super-tank is being built...
Outside the fences, the rainforest is expansive...all the way to the island's coasts. Beyond that, there are coral reefs. Within the rainforest, many tiger orchids grow. Many, in fact, are the biggest there are...everywhere. Beneath trees, Thysanolaena grass grows; this kind of grass, in English, is known as tiger grass... Among the bunches of this grass, smaller-yet-more-invasive bunches of tiger nut, a kind of sedge, grow and expand...like little Tamil fascists/imperialists...
As they often have been, trails have been blazed through this forest. Unclear, as to where the motivation to do so comes from... But then, of course, Tamil women aren't going to stop having babies anytime soon...at all... Good thing their babies don't try to kill their sitters... Or extort their sitters, by threatening to flush their study-notes down a toilet if their demands aren't met...
Along a trail, the Deer Avengers jog. They're equipped and armed. They're jogging as if they were training...or running the obstacle course.
Behind them, their latest teammate straggles. He's equipped and armed, too...to a more minimalist extent. But then, he is smaller.
Not only is poor John straggling, but he hasn't stopped falling behind. He can't even stop to tie his sabatons, while running with this herd... Better thing, then, that he's a brown mongoose, and hence, wears no sabatons...or combat boots, even...
He's falling farther and farther behind. This is getting hopeless... He probably should've taken a PFT before joining the Deer Avengers on this revenge quest... Then again, there might be a reason why the PFT was never offered... John certainly doesn't mean to criticize the physical prowess of the Deer Avengers, though; not only do they have perfect bodies for muntjacs...which are made even more perfect due to their humanoid habit...but they're cute to anyone who isn't used to them like the Javanese and the Lampungese are...
Something stirs in the forest's grasses. John stops, perks his ears, and listens...
Moments pass. Nothing else happens. John finally shrugs, continues jogging, and...
Alas, the file has finally fallen out-of-sight. It seems he's been left behind. Great; John's got no idea how he's getting back to Sinhala...
It's just as well. John's pretty sure that he could stand to get in some more training, before the Tigernator finds him. Hence, he ventures off into the tiger grass and the tiger nut sedge, and gets started...
Night falls. Far away, thunder rolls. Funny; it's not even humid...nor are there too many clouds in the sky...
Within the forest shade, John does nocturnal combat with a Russell's viper; another one of the Big Four. The viper has a bite of wrath... His venom, too, is no laughing matter... Alas, John is a mongoose...and thus has a will of solar energy.
Before too long, it's over. The viper's carcass lies dead, across much jungle soil. Tiger orchids will soon surely start infesting the ground over which he will soon become a part of... Hopefully nothing big, though; he's been a very unfair fighter... He's also surely killed a lot of local farm children, too... He is a Big Fourer, after all...
Atop a rock, John soon sits and rests. As he does, he un-holsters all four of his "Big Four" pistols. Onto the barrel of the "Russell's viper" pistol, John carves, into its top, another notch. He's not quite at the twenty-first notch yet...but he's getting there. His three other pistol barrels, too, are a lot more seasoned than before; he's already slain seven more common kraits, besides the one he killed while meeting the Deer Avengers...
He still can't believe they left him out here. It's just as likely that they're trying to maroon him as it is that they're testing him... It's still too early, though, for John to know whether he's passing or failing said test...if he is being tested, that is...
John finally holsters his pistols, sighs, and continues resting... He could go for some peyote, about now... Too bad, alas, that San Diego is literally the world's largest ocean away from here...and then some...
From above, the rays of white lights gradually approach...and soon seem to have the clearing spotlighted. John raises his head, bats his little mongoose eyes, and looks up and around... Strange; he senses the light's presence, but can't seem to acknowledge its source... It's a light, it seems, with an invisible source...
Now paranoid, John stands, draws a pair of spadroons, and leaps off the rock. He gradually turns backwards and in circles, expecting the mystical light's making demon to present himself... Moments pass. Nothing stirs...although the lights do get brighter...
"This is less funny than before," John speaks, via psi power. "Get to your punchline, demon...and either be gone, or be slain..."
"You speak of humor," an echoing feminine voice says softly. "And yet, you live and fight as someone who's never known it."
He scoffs. "I know more jokes than you do, lady. You can bet your estrogen supplements on it!"
"Very well; allow me to lend a cricket ball. How, I ask thee, is a sheepdog pup like a honeydew melon?"
He chuckles. "You call that a joke?! It's one of the lousiest unresolved cliffhangers I've ever heard of! Show yourself, demoness! Let me have your lady parts, so that I can boil, cook, and damn them from whence they jiggle...or could otherwise use more lubrication fluid!"
"O Dear John... That is such an amateurish way to look death in the eye..." She levitates into his sight...revealing herself to be a radiant, mostly-white cobra...with a hood large, and with sacred runes all up and down her body length. Every now and then, she bats her eyes. "Especially considering," she finishes her thought, "that you've had nightmares of my likeness ever since before your birth!"
As one might expect, John shouts, charges her, and starts trying to kill her. She reacts by turning into a rubber hose and falling onto the ground nearby. As she does, her lights go out. Even so, John stabs and slashes at the rubber hose for about five minutes...before realizing that what he's doing isn't working.
He looks around. "Why...? Why can't I kill you?!"
She spontaneously turns back into what she was, re-lights her lights, and dumps him back on the ground, sweeping him off his feet. "You cannot kill me," she levitates nose-to-belly with him, "because unlike the cobras and kraits you've nightmares of...I am not here for you to kill. I am here to remind you that warrior does not live on bullets alone. No matter how ambitious he may be...he needs bandages, too."
"I'm not sick!"
She raises her brows. "Aren't you?! Well, then... How is a sheepdog pup like a honeydew melon?"
"I'm supposed to be hunting for a killer robot!"
"You are supposed to be resting, little tot." She gathers her coils around him, arranging them in the shape of a heart. Like a sink faucet over it all, she towers over him. "Warriors does not live," she repeats, "on bullets alone. He demands bandages, too. And if he himself does not demand those bandages, others are destined to do it for him...insufficient though some of them would look in battledress."
He looks around. "Okay. But how do I know I can trust you?"
"You don't. One slight hint, though." She shrugs. "Do I look like Iblis to you?"
He sighs. "Very well; good point. Even so, if I'm going to bask within your...unusually and almost unnaturally inviting coils...I demand to know your name, rank, and serial number."
She giggles. "Sadly, I only have some of that. Race-wise, though, this, I will disclose: I am a nāga."
He seems confused. "I've never heard of your type."
"O, but of course you wouldn't. You'd spend your entire prime slaying the living and mortal of my kind, that you'd never stop and wonder if some of us are benevolent...like the Hindi that slaughtered a billion Urdus, right before meeting one that looked great in a bikini and even better with an M2 machine gun at her grasp..."
He studies her.
"And as far as names go," she adds, "you may call me Maṉaccōrva." She bats her eyes. "One day, you just might decipher what that means. Until then...sleep you must."
"I'll try." He looks around. "These aren't exactly lofty sleeping quarters, though."
"Very well; I promise you that if you sleep in my coils, you will wake with two nostrils that draw breath, a gut that hungers, a pooper that still poops, and otherwise an integrity that is still, very much, worthy of your serpent-slaying will." She shrugs. "Do we have an accord?"
John looks around. "A piece of cord, perhaps... Still, though, in defense of having to sleep within harm's way...it serves better than a snake run." He studies her. "A snake, though it seems I am trusting to ward off the snakes of my nightmares."
"Yes; the bandage can often emulate the bullet... And, if it did more often, sadly, fewer wars would be lost."
With that, John curls up. He's finally too exhausted for dialectic or argument; took him long enough. Maṉaccōrva stays close...too close, even, sometimes...and stands watch. She, it seems, is the perfect fire guard; she can sleep and watch a grate at the same time. She's never had to, of course; she's hardly one of Father Hindi's warriors. Either way, she's nursed more than a few back to health...and yes, has just as often acted as their psychopomp, in sitches where they couldn't make it.
Tonight, the tigers may come, and Éponine's boobs may enlarge in fear...whether that be because of any impending counter-insurgency, or because of actual tigers...but tonight, the sheepdog will not dare lower her guard, as this little hero-of-tomorrow sleeps... And all while posing as the sheepdog...she might, in fact, be honeydew melon to the eyes... Her divine light does not blind, after all...
All around, the night settles. Dawn approaches... It's still dark, though. Soon, the tragopans will be crowing...as will the jungle fowl and the peacock-pheasants... The Koozebanians would never do this place justice...funny though they sound while mating...
Far away, the thunder, it seems, has stopped...if it was ever actual thunder at all. It certainly smells like smoke, though...and cordite... Parts of it smell like smokeless powder, too... They'd more likely be cannons, though, than firearms...
Now all alone, John still sleeps. The nāga, it seems, has abandoned him... Either that, or she's still around, and she's made herself invisible... But then, of course, as powerful as she is, John wouldn't be wise to assume that he's her only client...especially considering that a day ago, he would've been biased against her for looking like a cobra.
Nearby, a ninmenju grows. Many flowers, he hosts. Most of them are yellow...although many of the other flowers are of other colors as well. Either way, he doesn't look too different from the ninmenjus back in Lampung...
The ninmenju senses John's presence. They've got a flower that's about to burst...with seeds. They seen John as an opportunity...
Via psi power, the ninmenju's many other blossoms move the seeds of the seppuku-reproducing one. As John sleeps, the seeds are deposited within the fur that covers his rump. Mongooses, it seems, are a highly ideal seed-carrier...for some reason.
The sun has risen. John wakes. He looks around. He's just as convinced that Maṉaccōrva was just a dream as he is that she was really here, and that she really did for him what she said she'd do... She must have; she's helped him naked...um, make it...through the night.
Back to work, though, John must go. He's got a tiger-bot to destroy. And beyond that, he's got Deer Avengers to catch up with. They're both very big jobs...and he has no idea how he's going to do either one.
This is a fallen log. Oyster mushrooms grow all over its side. These oyster mushrooms are very large. Too large, in fact... It's also hard to believe that nothing other than themselves benefit from their own presence...
Lost in thought, John wanders right past the log. Moments pass... He returns and looks around. The oyster mushroom-covered log is right there, near him...and yet, he never sees it... Confused, he shrugs, and wanders off...
The rainforest, it seems, has become Technicolor... It's very amazing... It's almost like it was when Dorothy first landed in Oz... If not better...
The rainforest is also now a soapberry one. Little more than soapberry shrubs and trees grow here. Bars of soap hang from their limbs; they're colorful, and they smell better than real flowers or berries. From their wood and soap bars, soapberry bugs suckle. Somehow, the herbs can replace themselves as fast as the bugs can eat from them...
Small jellyfish drift through the air. They're mostly transparent, and have golden, glowing centers... Plant seeds levitate around them, as they levitate around everything else...
Butterflies, too, pollute the air... They sport rainbow colors. Many are iridescent. A few glow... They're all in Technicolor, of course...
Within the forked trunk of a tree, a phonograph plays. It plays Skeeter Davis's rendition of "End of the World..." In a way, this seems like overkill... In another...it's not bad, either...
Nearby, a tragopan hen lays her eggs. She wanders off. In her absence, half of her eggs hatch into golden-center levitating jellyfishes...and levitate off, into the air, to help their kin embellish the local interior decor...assuming that that's what their purpose is...
Atop a branch, a male tragopan sits. He's brilliantly, boho-colored. His eyes are big. Every now and then, he spontaneously cat-calls the females. As he does, his head and neck temporarily shapeshift into a horn. His chest, too, inflates like a bullfrog's gular skin...
As the brave tragopan cat-calls for hens, actual cats come instead. Leopard cats ascend onto the branch he's on. They're female. They lie in circles all around him. The circles eventually become a dogpile, and more of them come. The brave rooster somehow manages to stay atop the cat-pile, no matter how tall it gets. The branch, too, stays intact, no matter how many leopard cats lie atop it. (To be clear, a leopard cat is a smaller cat that's named after a leopard, and not an actual leopard.)
Within a nest all to himself, a lone cuckoo chick bares his beak. Random birds come along...mostly corvoids, muscicapoids, zebra finches, or cockatoos...and feed him. At least he's got multiple mothers to feed him. And at least they don't have to feed him at their actual chicks' expense... It's not a cloudcuckooland without a cuckoo, right?
Across a branch, a clouded leopard lies. Every now and then, he spontaneously becomes a white-and-black cloud. Like a gaseous termite nest, the cloud hugs the branch for a moment...before spontaneously morphing back into the clouded leopard again. Every half-minute or so, the morphs happen... It almost seems as if the clouded leopard is the "cloud" in this cloudcuckooland...
There's a lyrebird. He stands very still. His very large fan-formed tail lies over him, like half an artesian well over its source. As he poses, the lyre strings within his huge tail pluck themselves, and pluck music. Depending on which record plays on that tocadiscos within the forked tree, the lyrebird's lyre plays accompaniment.
On a tree branch, a galago and a honey possum sit. A chameleon sits perched near them, his tail girdling a nearby branch stub, mentoring them concerning the many hidden gems of zoology... They both seem very gawking... But then, for the galago, that's automatic; his eyes are always big.
There's a small pond. It's full of petrol. A ring of flame burns around it, bordering it. In the midst of the pond, a flamingo stands on one leg...as they often do. Every half-minute or so, the flamingo sneezes...with a lot of force. Each time this happens, he causes a small, fiery, smoky explosion. In the aftermath, the pool is empty, and the flamingo is blackened. In about a half-minute, though, the pool is once again full of petrol...and the flamingo's plumage regrows, pink as ever, and as if the explosion never happened. A half-minute later, the flamingo sneezes again...and they cycle repeats itself...like Groundhog Day in high-octane...
In many places atop tree branches, birds-of-paradise perch, brilliant plumage on display and never faltering. It seems, to John, that they're trying to mimic bromeliads...or prominent jungle flora in general... One greater bird-of-paradise, it seems, is even trying to mimic a big and brilliant tiger orchid; the biggest orchid in existence... His tiger print makeover, alas, could use some work...if he's ever even applied for one...
Across the ground among trees, a beached finless porpoise lies. Her udder is very prominent. It's been divided up into two sections; one white, and one gold. The white half has a big word printed across its midst...which, in English, means "milk." The golden half has a similar word across its midst, in similar lettering; its English translation is "honey."
Mindlessly, John wanders up to the udder. He suckles from certain teats; both with the "milk" zone and the "honey" zone. He'd suppose that this specimen was imported from Canaan...until he'd remember that finless porpoises are not native to Canaan.
Atop a branch, an archaeopteryx sits perched. His plumage is brilliant; like the birds'-of-paradise... It seems like he would've died sometime in the late Jurassic, along with all of the other specimens of his species... As a matter of fact...there's a lot in this soapberry forest that shouldn't be here...let alone exist...
Along a forest path, a few feathered theropod dinosaurs skulk. One is a utahraptor. Another is a troodon; the troodon is a denizen of the Maastrichtian period; the very last part of the Cretaceous. Another is a gallimimus; the gallimimus, too, is denizen to the Maastrichtian... Like cassowaries, they skulk about. Like birds-of-paradise and tragopans, their plumage is very brilliant; it's hard to imagine how any of them get any hunting done if they stand out wherever they go...even if this is a Technicolor cloudcuckooland, where literally everything stands out...and looks even better with 1930s music playing in the background...
Between two shrubs, a hammock has been strung. Unclear, as to how it got there, or whether it belongs to anyone... Whoever they are, though, they don't seem anywhere near... John would hate to think that it's the archaeopteryx's...
Not sure if he can take this all in, John lumbers to the hammock. He crawls inside and virtually vanishes within its folds. Within them, he rests...and hopes for a Technicolor cuckooland that isn't so overwhelming... Or better yet, a ticket back to the real world, where things are tolerably monotonous...if not good all the time...
Time passes... It's a beautiful sleep, for John... If it's still a beautiful world, though, John wouldn't know; as things are, he's too asleep to tell... Or rather, if he's not asleep, he's dreaming that he is... And hence, might very well be having a dream-within-a-dream...
Up from the treetops, a tiger shrike flutters. Repeatedly, he dives and pecks the sleeping mongoose on the rear. This happens several times. Each time, John gawks painfully...
At long last, John abandons the hammock. As he does, he stumbles into a strange...yet sadly more expected...sight...
The Technicolor cloud rolls back. The trees, in this part of the rainforest, are deadwood. Here and there, mushrooms grow...both in singles and in clusters... They...might or might not be the reason why the Technicolor world was around at all...if the Technicolor world was even there to begin with...
In the midst of it all, there's a very big, very tall deadwood tree. Many of its branches are still intact. What's even scarier, it seems the branches are just as strong...if not stronger than...they were before the tree died...if the tree was even living to begin with...
A dark, scary feeling overcomes John. He'd rather not acknowledge it... Gradually, though, he looks up into the top of the tall, central deadwood tree... He'd call it the Tree of Life...alas, life, it seems, would be the exact opposite of what it would bring...
Standing within the strongest of the high-up branches, the Tigernator, with robotic eyes aglow, looks down upon the ground. He looks right in John's direction. Unclear, as to how it can see John; John is very small, after all... But then, the Tigernator has telescopic vision...
At long last, John's moment has come. And, just as he feared, the Deer Avengers are nowhere near to be his insurance, in case this goes awry...
The Tigernator roars, and leaps. His paws make heavy steel sounds, as his weight makes contact with the ground. He bares his fangs, and keeps his head low to the ground, while taunting the poor mongoose gladiator... Every now and then, he growls.
At one point, the Tigernator leaps...and lands right on top of a huge oyster mushroom. It breaks in two...and scatters a lot of sporous powder while doing so. Gnats fly all around the messy scene...
Still, alas, the Tigernator bares his fangs, as always. As a robot, the essences of shrooms have no effect on him. He can kill all day, it seems, without needing to take a peyote break. He'll always be a stranger to Technicolor cuckoolands... Hmm; John kind of feels bad for him, actually...
Within the side of a nearby stump, a spadroon conjures itself. Mindlessly, John grabs the hilt of it, shrieks, and starts doing knifework on the killer robot's nose. Much of the robot's tiger disguise comes off of it; none of it hurts.
John now becomes aware that he demands a new strategy. Hence, he shrieks again, leaps, and goes for one of the killer robot's eyes...
Alas, the Tigernator roars again. Spooked, John alters his course in midair and runs. Like a cat chasing a mouse...and leaving a huge furrow of damage along the way, the Tigernator follows the poor mongoose.
This is a cliff ledge. This might very well be where it'll soon all end...
Across the ledge, the Tigernator and John do their dangerous little dance. The Tigernator has an obviously unfair advantage. And poor John isn't sure he'll be able to get new weapons whenever he needs them... He still isn't sure if the Deer Avengers will return for him...let alone kill this robot before it kills him...
Against a nearby cliff, shadows from the fight are cast. First, the Tigernator shadow turns his tail into a flail. With it, he attempts to strike the poor mongoose several times...and fails each time. Thomas, it seems, has taught the rascal well, where this is... Either that, or the rascal was born with it...
Via special gauntlets, John's shadow shoots hand blasts at the Tigernator shadow. The Tigernator shadow roars in agony, a few times, as some of the blasts hit him. One hits him in the eye; he broods, a bit...despite being a robot.
Beneath where the shadows dance, a long row of bottles has been lined up. Some of John's energy blasts rebound. As they do, they shatter each bottle, from right to left, one at a time... If only the Coke-bottling plants in the Mexican States could see their legacy now...
From the Tigernator shadow's back, he produces a revolving turret. It's shaped like a capstan. Each "bar socket" of the "capstan" hosts the bore of a gun barrel. The Tigernator shadow turns itself into an ottoman, and becomes a spray head sprinkler of live ammo, as he showers everything in the vicinity with gun ammo... This'd include part of the cliff against which the fighting shadows dance; during this time, the shadows become translucent, to an extent...
Next, John's shadow produces a yo-yo. With it, he does tricks and distracts the Tigernator. With it, he strikes the Tigernator in the eye several times. At times, the Tigernator yells out in pain...despite being a robot.
Away from the shadows, for a time, John is dressed like a matador...and hence, for this role, might or might not prefer to call himself Juan. The killer robot now, somehow, has bull horns atop his head. With a face as fierce as ever, he keeps charging the poor mongoose. Juan keeps producing a red cowl...with which he uses both to deflect the blows, and to dupe the Tigernator into inflicting further harm onto himself... And yes, matador music plays in the background, as this happens... Heartless though the killer robot is, even he, it seems, appreciates a little bullfighting music...
By and by, back to the shadows... The Tigernator shadow now stands on his hind legs. He loosens his forearms...and detaches them, completely, from himself. The Tigernator, it seems, is anatomically-liberating... Alas, again, those massive panther arms and great paws are hardly the most of John's worries...
The Tigernator's arms' shadows produce their long, sharp, steel claws. Levitating and slashing, they go to war with John. Once more, though, John uses his mongoose speed to dodge their strikes...as if they were both a pair of king cobras. They certainly leave a lot more damage in their wake than king cobras would...never mind the fact that king cobras are just as bad at spitting as they are at biting...
As John does his speed-tricks, he deviously lashes grenades to both arms. Before the Tigernator can react, it's too late; the grenades explode, and literally disarm the killer robot...or rather, the Tigernator is now disarmed of his literal arms...
Now a Black Knight of sorts, the Tigernator now must resort to extreme measures. Hence, he growls, chambers, and leaps super-high. He leaps so high, that John will have more than a moment before he comes back down atop the ledge...
Hence, John loses no time. First, he inflates a portable pool. Then, he opens a portal within the pool and fills it with no shortage of petroleum. Then he strikes a match and tosses it across the pool surface. As the pool surface burns, John waits nearby, atop a rock, and waits for the inevitable to present itself...
From high above, the inevitable plummets back down to Earth. He's in a nosedive. While in the middle of it, he opens his robotic eyes, looks down...and gawks.
For the Tigernator, it's too late; he splashes right down into that oil and vanishes beneath the flaming surface. The pool temporarily overflows, causing liquid flame to spill out onto the ground all over the ledge...
As the excess liquid flame flows across the ground, John seizes the opportunity. He gets a chain-sickle. He lights both the ball of the ball-and-chain and the sickle blade with flame. He rushes to the very edge of the bluff, swings the sickle around, and waits for the killer robot to, once again, emerge...
When he does, he's ablaze. He looks around. Via his melting robotic gaze, he sees John. His pupils narrow.
John's pupils, too, narrow. He keeps the sickle-blade swinging and awaits the inevitable..
Moping from being wet, and on fire, the Tigernator slips out of the burning stock tank of oil. Like the tank behind him, he's ablaze. The tank now sends a smoke signal, of sorts, that can be seen for a long way in many a faraway part of the rainforest...
Even so, the Tigernator stands still. To an nth, he back. Then, he charges. He roars, while doing so...
John stays calm, and continues to swing the chain-sickle... This is his moment... He's not sure how it's going to go down...but he certainly hopes the killer robot doesn't last long enough to recount anything to anyone...if anyone would even check his memory drives every once in a while...
As the Tigernator runs, he whips his tail...which smokes. It leaves a trail of smoke in his wake. In a way, the Tigernator's tail is like the tail of a comet...if a comet were ground-borne, and left a tail of smoke in lieu of glowing stellar matter...
The Tigernator is now very close. It's soon time for John to make his move.
He does so...by throwing the flail away. As it does, it spins through the air. Its ball and sickle blade are still ablaze; they, too, trail smoke, as they fly...
The Tigernator, via heat sensors in its robotic eyes, sees this...and is hence distracted... So distracted, in fact, that he forgets...if he's actually acknowledged this to begin with...that he's about to fly right off a cliff. Hence, he does.
Now helpless, the Tigernator flies across the chasm...and right into the taller cliff across it. Here, he shatters to pieces and loses what remains of his integrity. Only a huge black spot remains in his wake, across the cliff surface. Funny; this was the same cliff against the "fighting shadows" would've been cast, only moments earlier...
Underneath the ledge the Tigernator's just leapt off of, a chain net has been set up. From it, John now victoriously hangs, via his forearms and his jaw. He's done it; he's defeated the Tigernator. And he doesn't have the Deer Avengers, at all, to thank for it...
Either way, the job's been done. John's still super-eager to get back to Sinhala. Hence, he attempts to start climbing the chain net. This, alas, isn't as easy as he thought it'd be...
Alas, from below, something leaps, ensnares him, and starts attempting to pull him downward. John gawks; it feels like whatever's got a hold of him is ablaze...like a fiery whip...or hell, like the Ghost Rider's hellfire chain whip...
It's the Tigernator's tail; it's liberated itself from its master's now-shattered chassis. Now, like a serpent, it ensnares itself around the serpent-slayer, and attempts to finish him off, and hence finish doing the Tigernator's will... This is hairy... Plus, John's growing surer and surer that he'll need Vaseline all over himself, if he survives this... Lucky for him, Ms. Nirvana has treated deeper-cutting wounds...
From five sides, though, John is soon saved...by five different fire extinguishers. From five different nearby cliffs, five of the Deer Avengers have finally come to their teammate's rescue...embarrassing though it is that John, a legendary serpent-slayer, needs help slaying a serpent-like creature...
Into the chasm, the tail soon plummets. Alas, for it, this'd be no big deal; for the tail was just as far down, after all, when it rose back up to finish poor John off, only moments earlier...
Before the tiger tail even hits the ground, though, the Deer Avengers are all over it...like a fumbled football. With blunderbusses, harquebuses, and deer-hunting carbines, they take reckless shots at the awful wretch, attempting to finish it off. The Three Stooges, it seems, had for fun finishing off the core of that switchboard, in the exciting climax of "Men in Black..."
At long last, though, the muntjacs have finally finished off the robotic tiger tail. It now lies on the ground, lifeless. No one will ever weep for it, honor it, or sing for it; it was just a robotic cybernetic, after all. SkyNet can always build a new one...and probably will.
Until then, though, the Deer Avengers put a record on a phonograph and light a Walpurgis Nacht bonfire. They dance naked around the fire while wearing berserker headdresses and feathered headdresses, and dance to the phonograph playing Buck Owens's "Tiger by the Tail..."
Aloft, John still hangs from the chain netting. It...seems that the fire extinguishers have frozen him into place... He now looks a bit like that toy dog, in that one America's Funnies Home Videos video, in which a family's patriline washes their toy dog in a tub...and then hang him out to dry, via his stiff hook-shaped front paws, on a clothesline. And for a very long time after that, the toy dog hangs motionless, while hanging from his stiff hook-shaped front paws, as if he was petrified...
And so, the ninmenju has been avenged...at a great cost. Also, while a great 101 fight was happening here between the mongoose and the Tigernator, another great fight happened at the Tigernator's compound. The Deer Avengers, it turns out, out-ran John not to deliberately be mean and leave him behind...but to destroy the Tigernator's compound. (This'd be the source of that "smoke-smelling thunder" from the previous night.) Via this, the Deer Avengers now have many more trophies to find shelf space for in their "Hall of Spotlighters," which, as one might expect, takes up more than a small wing at Deer Avengers HQ.
And now that the ninmenju has been avenged, the two graves have been dug...and filled. Seed plots, too, might have yet to be dug... Hence, as the twig is bent, so grows the tree...or in this case, the treefellow...