You can never visit the same world twice. The world you go to will always be random.
And you will never again be able to return home.”
Kari gasped. Never being able to see her parents or home again was a great price indeed. Knowing that her life would be rather meaningless if she stayed home whilst the twins left, she still hesitated. It was a hard decision, but she knew what she had to choose. She couldn’t spend the rest of her days digging wells, milking cows, and a thousand other chores. Now that the idea of traveling from world to world and seeking adventure had been planted in her mind, she really wanted to do it.
Stepping forward, Kari reached for one of the necklaces, hesitating for only a second before snatching one and placing it around her neck. The purple crystal seemed to glow from within when she touched it.
“I’m going,” she said. “But I’ll break that rule. Someday I’ll find my way back here. Just you see.”
Turning to her brothers, who stood grim-faced behind her, Kari raised an
eyebrow. They scampered forward to take their necklaces as well.
“Never forget how much your mother and I love you,” the Sage said. “We hate to see our children leave, but we know you cannot stay here forever. Playing jailer to Cain is my responsibility, not yours. Remember to say goodbye to your mother or I will send her after you. Having your mother show up is just the thing to cramp an adventure. Oh, and if you happen to meet a man named Gabriel Reeve, tell him I’m watching him very closely.”
Chapter 4: Holston
Walking his horse-cat through traffic down a dusty street in a little town, Gabriel could have named any number of old westerns that might have been filmed there. The one and two story buildings were all made from wood, and the street was hard packed dirt. Wooden sidewalks and posts for tethering horse-cats lined the street to either side.
Most everyone was afoot, though some rode and there were a few wagons trundling by.
As he wandered aimlessly, he noticed two very odd things about the people
around him. The first was that many of the townspeople were armed with various swords, knives and spears, but his were the only guns. The second was that not everyone walking the street was completely human. They had the general form of human beings, but perhaps one in ten people had animal bits mixed into their features. There were men and women with triangular animal ears atop their heads, long lop ears like bunnies, floppy dog-ears, and more. Some had catlike tails, bobtails, or more bushy tails. He even saw one man with wings folded across his back and feathers rather than hair. The biting cold did not seem to touch those with animal bits, as they wore little to no protection from it. Some of the girls even wore ridiculously skimpy outfits. Finding it hard not to stare, he seemed to have wandered into anime cosplay hell.
Other people had non-animal related deformities. Withered limbs, grotesque
facial features, large, visible tumors, and the like seemed rampant. There was even a man with a third hand sprouting from the base of his neck. Millie’s words about pure human DNA were starting to make a whole lot more sense now.
One girl caught his eye as he stopped in front of what looked like an inn with a picture of a bed on the wooden sign hanging over the sidewalk. She was one of the animal people, and seemed to have been following him. Her silvery hair fell to her waist in two long braids and she had a bushy wolflike tail. Her eyes gleamed golden in the red sunlight. Baring her midriff, her clothes were plain and rather dirty, and her blue jeans hung low on her hips, dipping so low in the back under the base of her tail that it was a miracle they didn’t drop around her ankles while she walked. Despite apparent teenage youth, she had a spectacular rack. Even taking the tail and wolf ears into account, she’d probably be extraordinarily hot in five years or so. While not the strangest thing he’d seen all day, the black cat lounging across her shoulders did seem a little odd.
Wondering why she was following him, Gabriel tied his horse-cat to the post in front of the inn. As soon as he moved to do so, the girl scampered off into a back alley. .
Tying the strongest, biggest knot that he knew around the post, Gabriel slung his saddlebags across one shoulder, shoving the shotgun into the holster he’d discovered strapped to his back. He’d found a large pouch of what appeared to be money, triangular metal chips with numbers on them, in the bags when he’d stopped to rest and take stock of his belongings. Making sure it was still in his pocket, Gabriel stepped into the inn.
Sitting behind a counter, a youngish woman read from a magazine, chewing
loudly on a piece of bubblegum. She seemed the embodiment of pop culture dropped into a blender with the old west. The contrast was jarring.
Peering at Gabriel over the top of her magazine with an expression of bored
indifference, she blew a big pink bubble with her gum. It popped and she sucked it back into her mouth.
“You a Law Man,” she drawled, eyeing his guns, pronouncing lawman as two
separate words. Gabriel was pretty certain that he could use the twang in her voice to tune a banjo. It took him a few seconds to pull up his mental hick to English dictionary and translate.
“Uh, no,” Gabriel replied. “I don’t think so anyway. Why do you ask?”
“Yer packin’ iron ain’cha? Only Law Men is allowed to carry them things.”
“Right then. You got me. I must be a lawman. I need a room for the night.”
Gabriel’s stomach rumbled loudly, reminding him that he hadn’t had anything at all that day. “And something to eat too.”
Flipping through her magazine, the woman behind the counter blew another
bubble. “You talk pretty Law Man.”
“Uh,” Gabriel said, looking over the top of the magazine. “Sometime today,
please?”
“I heard ya the first time,” she replied. He vaguely wondered if she ever needed to floss or if the twang in her accent took care of it for her. “I ain’t seen the color of your chits yet.”
“Oh, right,” Gabriel muttered as he reached into the pouch in his pocket and
pulled out one of the triangular chits. It was gold with a 20 pressed into one side. He placed it on the counter and she sat up with a big smile.
“Welcome traveler,” she said. “How long will ya be stayin’?”
“Uh, just tonight, maybe tomorrow,” Gabriel said. “I need to do some
information gathering in town. I don’t know how long it’ll take.”
“We’ll call it two nights room and board,” the innkeeper said as she snatched the chit and counted out a couple silver and bronze ones, setting them in a neat stack in its place. “Want longer you come back to me and say so in two marnin’s.”
“All right,” Gabriel said. “That works, I guess.”
“I assume you got a cathor due to them saddlebags,” she said with a nod. “I took stablin’ costs out already.”
“Cathor,” Gabriel mouthed. It took him a second to realize that she meant his horse-cat. He nodded his assent. “So, my room?”
“Hold on,” the innkeeper looked him up and down like a piece of meat. “You
look mighty fine pure blooded. How clean is yer DNA?”
Gabriel gave a start. He could imagine a night in bed with this woman, and doing so made him want to puke. She looked like one of the crack whores you saw on street corners in bad neighborhoods from time to time, willing to sell her body for her next fix.
There probably wasn’t a number high enough to count all of the STDs she was carrying.
“Uh, twenty one percent drift,” he hastily spat out.