Visiting the Stratometaship
There, the welcoming needle. There, the beckoning spire. There, the void-nailed hall. There, the much-adopted house. There, the ship of timelost fools.
Greetings again readers! Have you seen? I have renamed the Xenon Elasmotherium to WizardThiefFighter … Why? Oh, why? I am simplifying and unifying my interweb footprint. With the little humans, nothing else will do. I will also change precisely what I post here … it will probably begin to overlap more with what I post on blog and stratometaship patreon. I cannot sustain coherent divided media strategies. But fear not … this does also mean focus on just three things: original art, stories, and games.
I hope you will find that acceptable.
Now the tall tale.
Falling Shipwards
Sparu Kachi, the tetrachromatic thief, fell from the fiery heavens. Fell past the tumbling shells of abandoned bauble-dwellings. Fell through the sun-dried corpse clouds. Fell through fog banks of forgotten memories.
There, so beautiful, so touching.
...soon, pretty, taken ... wait, wait, why...
Hail! Hail to the crown of the Standard Angel!
...fingers in my mind, crawling, trawling, ping-pong, ping-pong, stop, let me go, let me go, I don’t want to see, see, sea...
Kneel, pray, ablute...
Sparu Kachi blanked its mind as the old man in the corn field had taught it many stars ago. The memories faded, forgotten again.
“Still falling, though,” it muttered, “Should do something about that.”
wings
“Oh, right, unfurl.”
With a crackling of folded dimensions Sparu Kachi’s wings unfolded in a rain of blue-grey greasy sparks of buckling reality. Its fall slowed through a glide.
“I wonder why I was falling. Feels like there’s a hole somewhere.”
recoil
“Bad hole. Better avoid going there.”
soulfire, crackling, hissing, sacrifice rides the ley
“Ah, it does smell good. Let’s have a bite. So hungry. Why am I hungry?”
“IDENTIFY YOURSELF, UNIDENTIFIED FALLING ANGEL!” screams a Voice cutting through the void like an End Times seed erupting into false creation.
“Gack! Not so loud, my head, my ears!” squawks Sparu Kachi.
“Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean ... wait. IDENTIFY YOURSELF!”
Sparu Kachi pondered. Who was it? What was its identity?
eagle-feeder, liver-giver
No, that wasn’t it. Hardly Prometheus. It checked its pockets. Maybe there was something precious, something true ... no, it didn’t have any pockets. Well, that was a ...
“IDENTIFY YOURSELF OR WE-UNITY WILL FIRE!”
In for a sacred peacock, in for a cosmic devourer.
“Sparu Kachi, Sparu Kachi, Sparu Kachi.”
“Oh. You again. Fine. Land on the second port dock. The first one’s been invaded by pineapples.”
“Wait!”
“What do you want?”
“I’ve been here before?”
“Clearly, now stop screaming in the void. We’ll have to move to avoid the Eaters as it is.”
An overgrown platform overgrown with voidweed the color of sick spread beneath it. Sparu Kachi angled towards the right side, making for an inviting-seeming grove.
“That’s starboard.”
“What?”
“That’s the wrong side. Port is the other side.”
“Oh, right, I ... I didn’t know that.”
“Clearly.”
Places Visited
Sparu Kachi glaived down, past the astral turf of the welcoming needle’s topside, past its reality tether core, towards the beton-mechanical engineering section of the ship. Its wings sparked and whined as they traced the ley winds of the voids, then caught hard on the thin-but-solid stuff in the vessel’s existential envelope.
There, a navicul in the yellowing starsilk of the stratometaship’s first cargo clans. Sparu Kachi caught its attention with a luminous greeting and the flat-headed human ran to unspool the catch-pier.
Sparu Kachi slowed to let the catch-pier’s slimmer tendrils taste him first, avoiding the need for painful ship-grips.
Satisfied, the catch-pier stretched taut, creating a walkway for the tetrachromatic thief.
“Sparu Kachi! Really, it is you. We-Unity does not lie!” cried the dome-headed warden golem standing on the skiff dock.
“Really, it is me. Though quite how, I don’t know.”
“But Scuta, you remember Scuta!”
“Ah … well … maybe?”
Sparu Kachi peered at the scuffed anodized metal shell of the dome-headed golem calling itself Scuta. Some semblance of recognition flickered in its lower memories.
“Ho-ho, the void spiders did a number on your mind! Well, we have your backup from your last visit.”
“Oh, another … ah, an older me?”
“No, younger! But still eligible for your debts, ho-ho!”
“I have something for … uh …” Sparu Kachi paused, riffling through its memories, puzzling through the locked ones it had forgotten to hide them from mind-stealers.
“For whom?”
“Uh … wait … for the Maiden in the Ice?”
“Oh, ho-ho, she won’t see you. Pepi, Pepi will have you first!”
“The old rogue is still around?”
“Still around and cooking.”
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