Hi. My name is blchocobo. Some of you may know me, and
know that I'm a desert Blumaroo who has a golden Uni named MonoKeras as my older
brother. You may even know his wife (my sister) Kallisari, or our little sister
Heilley. Our owner always maintains that he has four distinct pets, and he's
certainly right. There is no way anyone could confuse any of us with one of
the others. Now whether they might always be able to recognise us as who we
are... that's another story. No, not really. Actually, it's this story.
It all started on the thirtieth day of Collecting.
I was reading a book in the living room. Heilley was sitting in front of the
fireplace playing solitaire with a deck of cards. Kallisari had settled for
her usual spot on the couch with her head tucked into MonoKeras' lap. It was
MonoKeras who decided to break the relative silence.
"Arrr..." he said, stretching his legs and spreading
his wings out before snapping them back into place. "I do believe it's going
to be an interesting night tomorrow night. Are you ready for it, Heilley?"
"Huh?" Heilley looked up and blinked.
"I said, think you can handle tomorrow night?"
Heilley rolled her eyes. "Of course. What, I'm
supposed to be scared of the dark? I'm not that much of a baby, MK."
"Oh, but there's going to be so much more than
that. You've never seen out a month of Collecting before. Things get very...
interesting... on that night."
Heilley's eyes narrowed as MonoKeras' insinuating
tone began to hit home. "Oh yeah? Okay, smarty-pants, what's going to be out there
tomorrow night?"
"Well, let's see. There's always the traditional
threats, of course. Count Von Roo, with his habit of draining the life out of
you. The Ghost Lupe, scaring any unwary pet out of their mind. But there's oh
so many more ghosts, vampires, and other spooks that come out then. It's a special
night where the separation between the normal world and the supernatural world
becomes very weak. All sorts of things can cross from one to the other... never
to be heard from again, sometimes."
"Big deal," Heilley shrugged. I grimaced to
myself because anyone could tell she was seriously bothered by all of the ghost
talk. "You lived through it last year, I notice. I can too."
"Ah, but I had special training and experience
during the Tyrannian war. When you face the horrors of all those monsters and
fight them as I did, then the supernatural horrors unleashed at Collecting's
end aren't all that scary."
Heilley deliberately yawned and put a paw over
her mouth. "Uh-huh. Right. Well if I see any monsters, I'll be sure to tell
them they want you."
MonoKeras nodded. "They might. You can't do
the things I did during the war without leaving restless spirits of your victims
behind. This is the night they get to come back and haunt you for what you did
to them while they were alive. Last year, for instance, there was this scratching
on the glass at my bedroom window. I looked out to see a ghostly green shape.
Just as I thought I was losing it, it moaned something about the lab ray and
disappeared. That's when I realised it was the ghost of one of Sloth's minions
that I defeated in the Lost Desert war."
"Hah! Tall tales!"
"Nope, it's true. Seems it was warning me. Was
about a month too late, though. Now in the Tyrannian war, if they called you
late, it meant you weren't coming back- ever. Why I remember..."
I sighed to myself as MonoKeras told grisly
war stories. I knew he was exaggerating them. It was particularly obvious when
it came to the severed heads. Instead of just "splatting into the mud" like
they always had before, they now "bounded away like bouncy balls." I could practically
see Heilley's hairdo getting even more curls in it. She finally quit her fake
laughter and mumbled a good night before sliding upstairs.
It was almost midnight by that time. MonoKeras
had a good laugh at Heilley's expense after she left, and we all turned in.
I felt rather sorry for her myself. Kallisari had MonoKeras to cling to, and
I really wasn't affected that badly. But Heilley? Ah well. I got to sleep without
much effort, although the moonlight outside made my back twitch with a reflexive
fear of its own.
It must've been a short nap, because I woke
up around two to use the bathroom. I stepped into the hall and saw Heilley tiptoeing
towards our owner's bedroom. I took another step forward and started to say
something, but my foot hit a loose board. Heilley's squeak wasn't quite as loud
as the board's, and she flew into our owner's bedroom so fast that I didn't
have a chance to say anything. I settled for completing my errand and pausing
by the bedroom door on the way back to my own room. I could hear our owner talking
in his low, soothing tones. Heilley's own voice sounded almost plaintive, even
questioning, but I relaxed when I finally heard her giggle. I went back to bed
and didn't think any more about it.
The next morning at the breakfast table, we
had the usual conversation about "what are you going to do today."
"I think I'll take off early from the office
today," MonoKeras remarked. "There are a lot of magical experiments that I can
only do tonight, and I need some time to set them up."
Kallisari's eyes rounded. "Isn't that dangerous?"
"Nah, not when you're an expert like me."
Heilley sniffed disdainfully. "Well you can
have the whole house for all I care. I'm going over to Kootmufin's this evening
and then I'm staying with her all night."
MonoKeras raised an eyebrow. "Oh hoh, okay.
I assume you have permission to run away from home for the night?"
Our owner interrupted before Heilley could reply.
"Yes, she does. She asked me earlier. Kallisari, pass me one of those peaches,
would you? Thanks."
Both Heilley and MonoKeras were true to their
words, and I didn't have quite as many supper dishes to wash that night. Kallisari,
though, decided to take the night off from dishes. She reminded me that MonoKeras'
workshop was immediately above the kitchen. Although she tried to pretend it
was just out of consideration for MonoKeras, I suspected that Heilley wasn't
the only one getting nervous.
It was pitch dark outside, and I couldn't see
a thing through the window in front of me as I scrubbed the plates. My first
clue that something was going on was a few strange sounds. They seemed to be
coming from outside, so I turned off the light to peer out into the night. There
were vague shapes in the tree in the back yard, but...
The next minute or so was pretty confusing,
although exhilarating. It's probably best understood from MonoKeras' viewpoint.
He was working in his lab and had just set up a particularly complicated web
of magic. As he was finally relaxing, he heard an echoing moan from outside,
followed by a shriek.
"Help! MonoKeras! Help!"
MonoKeras snapped upright so fast that his chair
skidded away into an unnoticed corner of the room. "Heilley!"
The only response was a wordless cry that ended
in a choking moan. MonoKeras raced over to the window and flung it open. He
looked outside and into the glazed eyes of Heilley as she hung by her neck from
the tree branch ten feet in front of him. A few last bubbles of saliva formed
on her open lips as the final breath sighed past her swollen tongue.
"NOOOOO! Heilley!" A crash of glass caused MonoKeras
to spin around to look at his worktable again. A large green figure was swelling
up out of it.
"They got me..." Heilley moaned as she drifted
into the air.
MonoKeras gave a wordless shriek of denial and
fear. This is where things got very interesting for me in the kitchen below.
The magic in his workshop responded powerfully to his mental distress, and what
happened next can only be described as a series of explosions. They shook the
whole house, tore out the door to the room, buckled the walls, tore holes in
the roof, and finally let loose in a shattering roar which collapsed the floor.
By this time, I was at the door to the living
room. This was a good thing, since the ceiling collapsed into a huge pile of
rubble. The contents of MonoKeras' workroom were mixed into the wreckage, and
I heard him coughing as the dust billowed into the air. He crawled out and onto
a relatively clear area of the dining room floor.
The light from the living room shone into the
dining area and straight onto MonoKeras' haunted face. I could only stare at
him with my mouth open. "MonoKeras! What happened to you?"
His eyes were wild. "Never mind what happened
to me! Heilley's the one we need to worry about! Something terrible's happened..."
He gulped and suddenly ran for the back door. I didn't even bother trying to
keep up with him as he raced through the door and out into the back yard screaming
for Heilley. I satisfied myself with stepping over the broken pieces of back
door and reaching back inside to flip on the outside light.
MonoKeras was revealed as a shining gold figure,
pacing back and forth while he stared up into the limbs of the tree behind the
house. He reminded me of a Lupe that had treed a Kougra.
"She's up there! She has to be! But..."
I came up to join him. "Who is?"
"Heilley," he groaned. "One of the spirits must
have caught her and they hung her up there. I saw it! It was..." he gulped and
shivered.
I shivered, too. "Heilley? But she's at Kootmufin's
house! She can't be here. I mean, she just can't!"
"I saw her!" he insisted.
I looked for myself. "She's not there now."
"They took the body I guess." MonoKeras' shoulders
slumped in defeat as he walked back to the house.
I followed him inside and we picked our way
through the darkened wreckage and into the living room. I gave into my desire
to needle MonoKeras a bit. "Oh well, if Heilley is gone it really doesn't matter.
After all, that's just one less thing to irritate you."
MonoKeras shot me a bitter look as he dropped
into a chair. The bitterness changed to self-recrimination as he moaned, "it's
my fault! I shouldn't have told her all that stuff, I should've just made sure
she stayed inside instead of wandering around out there."
"But I still can't believe it. Are you positive
you saw her?"
MonoKeras shuddered. "Positive! She's done for,
blchocobo. Might as well admit it. All my fault, too..."
I stared at him in disbelief as I realised that
he was on the verge of actually crying. I searched desperately for something
to say to break the awkward silence, and it was then that I heard the sound
of talking and laughter outside the front door. "Hey, who's that outside?"
MonoKeras looked up dully as the front door
opened to reveal Heilley and Kallisari.
"Hi, MonoKeras!" Heilley chirped as she sauntered
in. "Miss me while I was gone?"
MonoKeras' eyes bulged and his lip trembled.
"B-b-but..."
Kallisari and Heilley snickered, but didn't
say anything. Since they seemed unwilling to put MonoKeras out of his misery,
I stepped in. "Something tells me that you two set a trap to fool MK here."
Heilley put her paws behind her back and gave
me her most innocent look. "Me? Set a trap?" She brought her paws out from behind
her hair, and we all saw the coils of rope that she held. "Oh! That trap. Just
a little something to amuse ourselves with. Amazing what you can do with a rope
harness and some help."
MonoKeras looked sick. "And that green ghost
floating out of my workbench was...?"
Kallisari giggled. "Your image-caster charm
from a long time ago. Remember?"
Momentary puzzlement gave way to that sick look
again and it was obvious that MonoKeras knew exactly which charm they meant.
"So I ruined the house for nothing," he sighed. Suddenly he sat bolt upright.
"Hey! I just thought of something. What is our owner going to say when he finds
out what you've been up to?"
"Considering that he's the one who thought it
up originally, I doubt he'll be surprised," a very familiar voice replied. MonoKeras
and I stared at our owner as he walked in while Heilley and Kallisari broke
into a fresh round of giggles. "I must admit," he continued ruefully, "I didn't
expect you to trash the place quite so thoroughly."
"Yeah, well, never scare a magician. Success
is very messy."
Our owner nodded slightly at MonoKeras' reply,
conceding his point. "So it would seem. I might also add never scare one of
my pets so bad that she winds up spending the night in bed with me. You never
know what mischief we'll cook up in return."
MonoKeras rolled his eyes as everyone laughed.
"Okay, you win. I... hey, what's that?"
We all stopped laughing abruptly as a green
fog drifted in from the darkened kitchen and began forming into a vague shape.
I gulped as I saw the wild outlines of some sort of robotic type of mutant.
One arm--if it could be called that--seemed to be hanging from just a few cables.
"Far out," Heilley breathed. "That's some trick,
MK."
MonoKeras shook his head. "Not me. That's the
ghost of the Lost Desert warrior I told you about last night."
MonoKeras' matter-of-fact tone made instant
believers out of all of us. I was rooted to the spot, but Kallisari and Heilley
both fled through the front door screaming. I winced at the resulting crash.
"Whoooo..." came a moaning sound. I looked back
to see the ghost struggling to say something. "Beeewaarrree... beware ghossstlyy
trickeryyy..."
MonoKeras nodded. "Yeah, thanks, I hear ya."
The tension in the room caused by the ghost's presence vanished in a wave of
relief, and it disappeared like a popped bubble. "A nice warning," MonoKeras
sighed. "But late, as usual."
Our owner was leaning against the broken doorframe,
looking out into the night. "I do wish you'd set a better example for Kallisari,
MonoKeras. She's picked up your habit of crashing through doors without opening
them first."
MonoKeras just groaned in resignation and sank
further into his chair. I exerted every bit of self-control and did all I could
for him--I didn't laugh.
The End |