Sometimes It Is As Much Fun As You Think

Lyndart Park was nearly empty that day. It was the off-season, when the frosted lilacs weren't in bloom and the grass was allowed to grow tall and scratchy. The rain Pasuu had predicted had indeed come to pass, soaking his russet fur as he waited for Jules to complete the teleportation spell. His partner stood with his arm wrapped around Pasuu's small shoulders, glasses held in one hand and long face pointed upward . Every few minutes, thunder grumbled from far-distant lightning strikes.

Jules opened his eyes. "Are you ready?"

"Never been more!" Doctor Voloi replied. "Hit us with it, old friend."

The owl nodded and put forth his feathery hands. As the first feelings of being wrenched out of the world came upon him, Pasuu shut hit eyes tight and subconsciously fell a little closer toward his companion.

They tore through the cosmos, skidding along the interfaces between universes in that space where there was no space to be had, no time to be had. Their bodies were gone, turned into photons, or maybe something even more primitive, some field of energy that only existed back when the universe was still just a child. And so was the trip instantaneous, because there was no time to flow.

When Pasuu opened his eyes, it was dark, and they were falling very slowly. "Hold on tight, friend," Doctor Voloi said, though without necessity from how fiercely Pasuu was clutching at his body, and cast a spell. A large luminescent parachute sprouted behind them to counteract whatever small acceleration this new world put forth.

He let go his grip just a bit. The parachute made their descent very manageable, if not quite pleasant. With preoccupying thoughts now mostly removed, Pasuu could see that the brass construct had been accurate in his oddly poetic description. The floor, so far below, was dotted with what looked to be thousands of red lights, some stable, some twinkling, others flashing on and off periodically. In the distance (just how far was hard to discern; the horizon curved very strangely) were white hazes, most of them disk-shaped and evenly spaced one atop the other, others more lumpy and complex. As his eyes came into focus, Pasuu was able to make out towers, huge, thick, rising toward an unseen ceiling, as well as thin bridges running from tower to tower and connecting the more amorphous splotches of white.

"They must be cities," the coyote stated. Red lights floated by underneath them. He pointed a clawed finger toward one of the more nearby clusters. "You can almost make out the outlines of buildings. Do you see it?"

He squinted, and did. Dark rectangles hidden in the glow, which seemed now to be arising from a multitude of windows, holes punched into a black canvas to generate a haze. "Why are they so high up?" And why was this cavern so big? Surely it wasn't a natural formation.

"We may just have to ask when we get up there."

His heart skipped a beat. Communicate... with the inhabitants of this place? His mind quickly found an excuse. "I cannot image they would speak the same language as us." One of the red lights sailed past on their right, nearly at eye level. It appeared to be the tip of a narrow metallic rod, jutting out from a box still very far below them.

"You have a point. Well, we can figure something out as the need arises. Look there." He pointed again. "A good landing spot."

A large flat surface stood before them, possibly at the right elevation given their current rate of descent. Possibly, but... "I'm not certain how well we can trust our eyes in this place, Doctor."

"Well, we'll just have to find out."

More of the floor was coming into clarity. It appeared as a city itself, constructed of numerous boxes bracketed by rigid pathways. Some of the surfaces were intricately carved, lines and patterns and rows of small lights, a stunning complexity, while others were flat and featureless. And it was only now that they were so much closer as well that Pasuu could hear a low humming noise, seeming to emanate from the entirety of the complex at once. It reminded him a bit of the noise the old power station in his home village used to make, before it was decommissioned out of fear that it was making people ill and was replaced with a newer model. He was one who had been made ill.

The platform they were shooting for rose above their horizon. Voloi frowned. "Well, it appears it's very easy to misjudge the sizes of things on this world." He scanned the floor below for alternatives. "Perhaps it's easiest to simply drop when we get near the ground. Are you up for it?"

"Ah..."

"Ready, set go!"

Pasuu cried out and renewed his death-drip on his companion's body. The slow buildup in speed was almost more terrifying than falling on the other world; it made it much harder to judge just when one reached fatal velocity.

"Hold on tight!"

The world jarred, just for a second. He felt Doctor Voloi pry away his arms and gently set his feet on the ground. It felt cold... bitter cold, and very hard. He opened his eyes to look, and saw that they were now standing atop one metal box amidst a forest of them, red lights dotting their field of view in every direction out to the black horizon, broken only by the half-dozen pillars they could see from this vantage.

Now that he was on solid ground, his legs gave out from under him, and he collapsed.

"Absolutely stunning. Marvelous." Doctor Voloi was standing at the edge of their box, gazing out at the rest of this world with both hands on his hips. His tail was actually wagging. "We'll have to bring that old monkey Singh here one of these days. He would go crazy examining all of this technology."

Pasuu slipped his backback off and set it in his lap. He had to find his water bottle; his mouth had gone completely dry.

Doctor Voloi was practicing walking about now. Each step he took seemed to launch him off of the ground, or at least completely off-balance. "I wonder if we should head to the very bottom, or if it would be easier to jump from structure to structure." His odd dance eventually evolved to a sort of skipping motion, bouncing lightly from one foot to the other. It appeared he was beginning to enjoy himself.

"Can we please walk on the ground?" Pasuu replied after sucking down a few mouthfuls of moisture.

This earned him a small frown. "I suppose. It seems more boring, though, when we have such other options." He continued to hop about in circles. "You should really stand up and try this. It's quite amusing once you get the hang of it."

Pasuu nodded and slipped his backpack back into place, then gingerly pushed himself upright. He moved extremely slowly; it felt like he weighed around ten pounds. Once he was back on his feet, he took one careful step forward, then another. He couldn't imagine how his partner had gotten used to this so quickly. He gazed out toward the nearest platform, and a pit grew in his stomach at the thought of launching himself at it.

"Well, whenever you're ready, I'll be on the walkways below."

Pasuu glanced up just in time to see Doctor Voloi leaping off the side of the structure. He waited to hear a sickening crunch when he hit the ground, but it never came. He took a few more steps, then tried giving himself a little push like he saw the Doctor doing, and found it to be a somewhat natural way to move in such an environment. A minute or so of practice, and he was already good at it. He skipped over to the edge where he saw his mentor jump down, and peered over the side. The coyote was looking up at him and beckoning him onward.

His confidence evaporated, and he closed his eyes and sucked in a few breaths. "I know I won't like this," he whispered to himself. Then he hopped off the ledge.

Doctor Voloi caught him at the bottom and gently set him down. He only re-opened his eyes when he felt solid ground once more, and saw that they were now in a tight corridor, room enough for two to walk side by side, but no more. The humming sound was much louder, now; he wondered if it might be coming from within the boxes themselves. It was giving him a mild headache. Well... perhaps that came from elsewhere.

The coyote adjusted his glasses and began to move in the direction of one of the more nearby of the giant pillars. It really was impossible tell just how near it was, and how big it was. As he hopped forward, he would occasionally rap on one of the boxes on his way by, issuing forth a hollow ringing sound. "While all of this stuff down here is interesting," he remarked, "what I would enjoy most would be to somehow find our way up into one of those bits of civilization. Wouldn't you?"

"Oh... well, I, ah--"

"I would assume since you enjoy biology, you would be as intrigued as I to see what types of strange evolution may have occurred in the intervening years since these people migrated to this new gravity environment. Or, perhaps they didn't migrate at all? Wouldn't that be even more fascinating? A completely alien culture and civilization to get to know." He knocked on another box.

"But... the atmosphere..."

"Hm?" Another knock. Why was he doing that?

Pasuu cleared his throat. "But the atmosphere is the same as ours. We are breathing normally, so presumably, whoever lives here... must have come from our world."

"Ah, yes, I suppose you're right at that." He knocked again.

"Doctor Voloi?"

"Yes?"

"Why do you keep knocking on the boxes?"

He turned around and grinned. Pasuu wondered if the man could ever smile without looking sinister. "I'm trying to see if I can wake anything up."

His ears fell back. "W-what? Wake something up?"

He shrugged. "I don't know what these boxes are for, but they seem to be in fairly good shape, so I presume something is taking good care of them. I would like to know what that might be."

Pasuu was breathing quite hard, he now realized. "I don't suppose we can just... look around a bit first? We know nothing about--"

"Pasuu, friend, the only way to find out about a place is to get to know its denizens. Otherwise you're just sight-seeing, and that's never very much fun. It's like going to a pub just to watch other people drink and have conversations."

He began wringing his hands again. "Well... if you say so." He felt a need to get another drink of water, but stopped himself. He might need it much more later on.

And so they continued hopping through the corridors, Voloi knocking on boxes they passed, Pasuu flinching and glancing backward each time. Much of the way there was little to see besides the boxes, but on occasion they would catch a glimpse of one of the red-tipped needles or a distant pillar. The paths seemed to have little rhyme or reason. While they were all perfectly straight, there were so many dead-ends and ninety-degree turns that Pasuu quickly began to wonder if they weren't just completing circuits around polygons. Though he wasn't certain he could make himself do it, he began to realize that Doctor Voloi's idea of jumping from roof to roof made the most sense as a means to progress toward a destination in this place. Those red lights were everywhere; they saw this during their descent. Could that mean that this entire level of the cavern was just like this? Simply filled with large dark boxes and rod-like towers, out to infinity?

"Well hello, there," his mentor suddenly said.

Pasuu came to an abrupt stop. He was standing before an enormous, circular, open pit right directly in their path. It was deep, very deep. They could see this by way of the row of small orange lights spiraling down into its depths, getting fainter and fainter until finally their dim power was eaten by the abyss. And there was something else... a rumbling, a clanking, quite regular but very faint. Machines hidden down in the deep, powered by an unknown energy source, operating an unknown purpose.

Pasuu felt his partner's eyes on him. It took a minute to register, but then he had a terrible thought. He took two steps back and shook his head, stomach roiling painfully. "No, we can't. There... ah, there doesn't appear to be any way back up."

"Oh, come now, young man. We're wizards. We can make a way back up."

"I just--"

"Hold on. Do you hear that sound?" All he could hear at this stage was his own heartbeat. But at the very least, he could tell that something was distracting his companion from the giant pit he wanted to leap into, and he was pleased about that.

But then he did hear something, atop all of the other ambient sounds in this place. Threshing, pounding, ejecting steam. Axels grinding, wheels rolling on the walkways. The two peered back the way they came, watching for any sign of motion. All felt still but for those sounds.

Then, red lights, flashing on and off one of the far boxes, first faintly, then getting brighter and brighter. The noise intensified with the light, and soon a smell found its way to them, of rust and grease and hot metal.

And then it shot into view, and, with one incredibly sharp turn, it ratcheted around the corner and began heading straight for them at lethal velocity, a mass of whirling metal and smoke and fire. Pasuu couldn't help himself: he began to scream.

This wail continued as he was jerked backward by the nape of his neck. "Looks like I got my way twice!" his companion said, and, carrying Pasuu with him, he leapt into the pit.

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Pasuu blinked his eyes open, and found himself in almost total darkness, lying on his back. His head was throbbing. He wasn't quite sure where he was or how he'd arrived, but wherever it was, the whole of it was pervaded by a constant deep vibration that he could feel in his bones. And it was hot, too. Quite hot. Perhaps he'd fainted as they... leapt....

Ah, yes. He supposed he did.

"Doctor...?" he called out in a whisper, hoping the coyote was nearby. He heard some shuffling, and then two golden eyes appeared above him, disks reflecting back what little light was reaching them. He tried to sit up. "What happened?" he asked.

Voloi sat back and looked around them. "Well, it didn't follow us down the pit, although for a second there I thought it was going to. Did you see it? Wonderful engineering, and no pilot so far as I could see. I think its purpose is to clean detritus out of those pathways, or some other routine maintenance like that." He used a claw to clean between his teeth. "But I wouldn't know, really."

Pasuu shut his eyes tight and rubbed his head. The throbbing was intensifying into a spike, producing little shots of pain on his brow, the beginnings of a migraine. "So we were considered detritus, then?"

The coyote was staring off into the darkness. "Just foreign bodies, I'm sure. I doubt the thing was intelligent enough to know the difference."

"And... where are we now?"

He saw teeth shine. Another one of those awful grins. "I believe I've discovered the purpose of this place. The pit continues on for a very long way, but there were a number of tubes and pipes and hatches along its walls. This place here--" it sounded like he motioned around them-- "appears to be a ventilation shaft of some kind."

So they were down in the pit still. No wonder it was so dark. "Ventilating what?"

"The generators, I presume."

Pasuu stopped rubbing his face, and his ears perked up. "You mean what powers the lights? Is that what's been making that sound?"

"Powers the lights and any number of other things, I'm sure." He must have pointed a claw down the tunnel. "If we head that way you can see it yourself. It's quite extensive."

His head was a bit fuzzy still, but something wasn't quite clicking with this explanation. "It seems strange that a generator would be so far underground."

"Perhaps that can be explained by the fuel source."

His head was beginning to clear, and his vision was returning just a bit. The tunnel was cramped, just wide enough to comfortably crawl through, and barely high enough to sit up and work. It was actually rather cozy. It felt secure, safe; he could see down both directions, and there was no other way for anything else to enter. And sounds echoed marvelously down its metal gorge, so nothing could sneak up on them either. It was strange; he never used to feel it so pleasant to be in a tight space, he didn't think.

No, nothing could sneak up on them. He was already hearing the sound of something trying. "Doctor," he whispered. "How much of this place did you explore while I was asleep?"

"Don't you fret, young man. I didn't go far."

"Then... do you know what's making the new sound?"

Doctor Voloi tilted his head to the side. "Hm. Now that you mention it."

A soft red light began to pulse on the walls. The sound intensified. Threshing, pounding, ejecting steam. Axels grinding, wheels rolling. The same sound as before, in this tunnel, with them.

Pasuu scrambled to his knees and began charging forward. "It's another one, like before. We have to go!"

Voloi was laughing, but followed the mouse's lead. The two scrambled through the tunnel on hands and knees as quickly as they could, eventually finding that it was easiest to make long leaps foward, bounding ahead on all fours. The light was getting brighter and the sound harsher, echoing along and through the walls of the passageway. Pasuu risked a look back and saw the thing rounding a the corner of a vertical shaft he hadn't previously noticed through the dark. It was scaling the walls on spiderlike legs tipped with suction cups, the red light a beacon pulsing on its grotesque metallic face.

"Please try to move faster!" he shouted to his companion. Whether or not he was, it felt as though the coyote was taking too leisurely a pace as he moved.

They soon emerged into a much larger cavity in the tunnels, something like a round silo, with a grated steel walkway following the walls. The place was slightly more well-lit than the ventilation shaft by virtue of one or two caged lightbulbs, similar to the kind the railway workers back on the planet would carry when taking the night shift. Pasuu ratcheted off to the side of the opening and began thinking of a barrier spell to cast. He shut his eyes tightly and focused his mind, then placed both hands on the wall of the silo. A light shone forth briefly, and a luminescent film grew across the opening of the tunnel from which they had just emerged. Pasuu pressed himself as hard as he could against the wall, breathing as quickly as he'd ever breathed.

The clanking and whirring came nearer, nearer still, right to them, and then it was replaced by a thunk. Pasuu didn't dare take a look, but he saw Voloi step out in front of the thing and peer inside. He put a hand on his hip as he leaned forward. "Looks like you stopped it."

He turned on his companion. "I don't understand how you can be so calm about everything! We get here and we fall a hundred miles, we jump off cliffs, machines chase us down twice, probably to kill us, and you stand there... stand there not even breathing hard! You're impossible!" He was shouting, he suddenly realized, and so he quickly shut his mouth and looked away, heat returning to his face.

This earned another foul grin. "I'm truly glad you feel that way."

He turned his back on the coyote. "I want to go. I've seen enough, and experienced enough." Out of the corner of his vision, he could see the generator that the Doctor had told him about previously, a towering column of a stucture rising up from infinite depths below and on toward infinite heights above. Fist-width wires sprouted from it over their heads and fed wherever they could into the walls. On their level were two massive turbines built into its sides, fed from the bottom by enormous bundles of pipes that glowed a dull red with heat. "I've seen enough for a lifetime." His voice was quieter issuing that proclamation.

"Oh, come now. I know at least that last statement isn't true. Look, down there." He got to his knees and pointed a claw down the bottom of the silo. Pasuu risked a brief glance, and saw a dull red glow far, far below them. "You know what that is? It's what powering this generator."

Pasuu crossed his arms over his chest. "You're trying to distract me by appealing to my intellectual curiosity. It won't work."

"It's magma."

His arms fell. "From... from where?"

"The mantle, I think."

"This... this goes all the way down to the primary moon's mantle? And that's... that's what powers the generator?"

A nod. "Generators, I'll bet. Maybe what keeps that big giant cavern so warm, too. Now that's pretty fascinating, isn't it?"

The machine's clanking and lights were starting to fade away now. It seemed to have given up and turned back to wherever it had previously been. Pasuu shook his head. "It isn't going to work. I want to go back. I'll prepare the teleport myself, if I have to."

Voloi stood and let out a sigh. "Well, if you absolutely insist, I obviously can't force you to stay. If you would, though," he nodded off to his left. "It may be unwise to teleport right in front of that fellow."

He blinked several times, then turned and let out a gasp. 'That fellow' was a tall humanoid with thin limbs and very dark eyes, standing just within view from behind the generator, watching them with the most curious expression on its flat face.

The resemblance to the humans on the planet was clear; full head of hair, two rows of flat, white teeth, no tail to speak of, but its skin was almost the color of pearls and somewhat translucent, and it was a remarkable height, standing probably three-quarters again as tall as the average male on the planet. It wore what appeared to be a silken suit, all one piece, slate blue, with varying shades of violet near its midsection, where it wore a toolbelt with a number of pouches of varying size and shape. And those eyes... they were like his eyes, mouse eyes, almost all pupil to allow in as much light as possible in the deep twilight surroundings of this world.

And his presence meant that no, he couldn't leave now. Not now, not anymore.

Pasuu noted all of this before letting out a yelp and falling back toward his friend. The sudden motion must have startled the--creature? Man?--for it fell back as well and took a defensive stance, its hand reaching toward something on its toolbelt. It moved with sheer grace, a petal making its way along currents of air. Doctor Voloi raised both hands, palms out. "It appears you were right, my friend, unless primates evolved separately both on the planet and on the primary moon for some reason."

"I... I...." He could scarcely get a word out between harsh breaths. He considered putting his hands up as the Doctor was doing, but he assumed the way he was cowering and shivering behind the coyote was indication enough that he was also no threat.

It said something. The tone was fierce, but the tongue was a soft one, with few harsh or gutteral sounds. Appropriate, perhaps, for a language developed under soft lighting and low gravity.

"That sounded almost like one of the languages of the deep jungle tribes from the Kualapai region, don't you think?"

Pasuu blinked a few times, and nodded. "Y-yes... I s-suppose it d-did."

The creature was relaxing the more it heard them speak. It looked back and forth, from the Doctor to Pasuu. Yes... its mannerisms were distinctly human, despite its unusual features. Its hesitation most likely came merely from their appearance, their animal-like forms, but the fact that they were speaking, that they too communicated with vocal language, must have begun to set its mind at ease.

Pasuu relaxed a bit, too. "So..." He swallowed back one last bit of dryness from his mouth. "It seems... ah, that we've arrived at a need to communicate, after all."

Voloi nodded, eyes never leaving the humanoid. "I hope you've given it some thought?"

He stared at his companion. "Me?"

Doctor Voloi turned to him and smiled. "You've had other things on your mind?"

His ears fell back again. "Ah... well..."

Voloi laughed, a sound that caused some amount of shock to appear on the lunar man's face. Voloi lowered his hands and grabbed Pasuu by the shoulders, still laughing, and hugged him to his chest. Pasuu, warily watching the other, was surprised to see a smile begin to grow on its face. The smile widened the more Voloi laughed, until suddenly the creature was laughing itself. And this broke the spell, and Pasuu, despite everything, couldn't help but follow suit as well, their three voices now filling the chamber and dissolving away any previous tensions.

"You see?" Voloi said. "It's not hard to communicate after all."