She stooped upon them, slaughtering the three demons easily; the two at the rear with a single pinch of one of her great talons. The unfortunate male lay quivering on the scaly ground, watching the demons’ blood pool dustily in towards him from three different directions. The beetle tried to take off; she screamed at it and with a two-legged blow ripped one of its wings right off and then tipped it over onto its back. It lay making clicking, chirring noises. When the pilot crawled out she wanted to rip him apart too, but instead she let him go.
She picked the trembling male up with one talon and stared into his petrified face while he voided his bowels noisily on the ground beneath.
“When you left the Real,” she said to him, “what date was it?”
“Eh?”
She repeated the question. He told her.
She asked him a couple of other questions about banal things like current affairs and civilisational status, then she let him go; he scurried away along the road leading from the mill. She might have killed him, she supposed, but she had already released one soul from its torments that day; all this had been a sudden inspiration, brought on for some reason when she’d come upon the mill.
She trashed the building too, scattering its screaming, protesting components across the valley’s slope, throwing wreckage splashing into the mill race and the header pond, displacing sloshing tons of blood while the building’s operators ran scampering for their lives. The blue-glowing door was not glowing at all, of course. It was just a plain, rough wooden door, now hanging off its hinges; a doorway to nowhere.
Oddly satisfied, she swept back into the grim skies with a single great clap of her wings, then beat off across the valley. She dropped the massive lump of wood that had been the door’s lintel towards the fleeing figures of the mill operators as they ran away, missing them by less than a metre.
She wheeled once above the valley, just a collection of pains and sundered lives, then struck out, cloudward, rising all the time, heading for her roost.
Always assuming the hapless male had been telling the truth, the uber-demon had lied.
Barely a quarter of a year had passed in the Real.
Vatueil was hanging upside down. He wondered absently if there were any circumstances when this could be a good sign.
He appeared to be inhabiting a physical body. Hard to tell whether he’d actually been embodied in a real one or this was just a full-sensory-spectrum virtuality. He was in no pain, but the blood roared in his ears due to the gravitational inversion and he felt distinctly disoriented, beyond the obvious fact that he was the wrong way up.
He opened his eyes to see a creature like a giant flying something-or-other staring straight back at him. It was also hanging upside down, though unlike him it appeared to be entirely happy with the situation. It was human-size, had a long, intelligent-looking face with large bright yellow eyes. Its body was covered in soft folds of golden-grey fur. It had four long limbs with what looked like thick membranes of the same soft fur linking the limbs on each side of its body to each other.
It opened its mouth. It had a lot of very small very sharp teeth.
“You are… Vatch-oy?” it said in a thick accent.
“Vatueil,” he corrected it. Looking away from the creature, he seemed to be hanging in the blue-green foliage of a great, tall tree. Further away, he could glimpse the trunks of other tall trees. The tree he was in was nothing like the size of the impossible tree, where he had spent many a happy holiday, winged and flying, but it was still too big for him to be able to see the ground. The branches and trunks he could see looked substantial. His feet, he noticed, were tied together with what looked like rope, while another length of rope ran through the noose his feet were in and then right round the metre-broad branch he was hanging from.
“Vatoy,” the creature said.
“Close enough,” he conceded. He felt he ought to know what this creature was, what species it was part of, but he had no internal access to any remote networks here; he was effectively just human, just meat, hanging here. All he had to rely on was his own all-too-fallible memories, such as they’d survived all the transcriptions they’d had to undergo over the years and regenerations, plus whatever unexpected intervention had led to him being here. His memories were anyway suspect, jumbled by a hundred different reincarnations in as many different environments, the vast majority virtual, unreal, militarily metaphorical.
“Lagoarn-na,” the creature beside him said, thumping itself on the chest.
“Yeah, hello,” Vatueil said cautiously. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Pleased meet you too,” Lagoarn-na said, nodding, its big yellow eyes staring at him, unblinking.
Vatueil felt a little groggy. He tried to remember where he’d been last. Where this version of himself had been last, anyway. A fellow could lose track when he was copied and re-copied so often. He started to recall sitting round a table with a bunch of aliens, in… had it been a ship? A meeting. In a ship. Not fighting a war then, trapped in tunnels or trenches or the guts of a land ship or a sea ship or a gas-giant dirigible the shape of a gigantic bomb, or finding himself downloaded into a smart battle tank or some sort of cross between a microship and a missile, or… his memories flickered past him, detailing what certainly felt like every single time he’d played a part in the vast war he’d been a part of, the war over the Hells.
It made a pleasant change for his last deployment not to have involved nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts soldiering — a meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. On the other hand, he felt he had just been… read somehow. All those deployments, mostly indicating gradually increasing seniority of rank and importance and responsibility, all flickering past in his memory — all tumbling past, like a pack of nearly a hundred cards — that had felt like something triggered, something called up.
Meeting. The meeting. The meeting in the ship. Lots of little aliens; one other pan-human. Big guy. Or at least important guy. He should know the name of that species too, but he couldn’t remember it.
He’d been far away for that meeting. In some rarely travelled bit of the sim… no, he’d been in the Real. In the Real again; how about that? He’d been given a re-useable, download-ready body and he’d been physically present at that meeting with the cute little aliens with the big eyes and the single larger pan-human with the hunched look and the attitude.
Still couldn’t remember the species the guy belonged to. Maybe he’d have better luck with his name. Vister? Peppra? It had been something like that. Important. Top brass in his civilian field. A big wheel. Paprus? Shepris?
He remembered not being bored at the meeting. It really had been important. In fact, he remembered feeling nervous, excited, energised, feeling that something genuinely momentous was being agreed here, and he was a part of it.
He’d been beamed into that body, transcripted into it. He might have been transcripted back out again, sent back to where he’d come from, his meeting-attending duties over. He probably had.
He looked at the big creature hanging beside him, gazing into its staring yellow eyes. “How did I come to be here?” he asked.
“How did you… get me?”
“Guff-Fuff-Kuff-Fuff not so smart.”
He stared at the creature. He closed his eyes, shook his head.
“No, sorry; didn’t get the first part of that at all.”
“GFCF not so smart,” the creature said.
Shaking his head seemed to have helped. Now he could see that the creature had straps and pouches distributed across his golden-grey furred body. Some sort of head-set — thin, metallic, glittering like jewellery — wound round the back of its skull, little armatures seeming to clasp near but not in its ears and eyes and nose and mouth.