Eleven

The dog dropped to one knee and cleared his throat.

"O beauty!" he declaimed. "O ruffled form that never the earth corrupted or the heavens marred with putrile jealousy!"

He had meant to say futile or puerile, and had said both.

"O sublime fur in dark cascade! O flawless skin of cream alabaster! O voice that surely broke a thousand hearts! O eyes of that really cool colour that looks green in a certain light and grey in others!"

This was harder than Suitov made it look. If only the mage wasn't ignoring him. Baskerville paused and scratched vigorously behind an ear... with his hand.

Desperately trying to fight the mixture of pride (she'd managed this without even trying!) and panic (she hadn't been trying to do this!) rising within her, Agueda forced back a giggle at Basky's last remark and replaced it instead with a smile.

There was a long pause. Had he finished? Was he waiting for her to say something? Maybe she should do something.

She approached him to sit on the knee that had been left upright.

With a soft 'poof!' there was suddenly a small, cute, many tiny tentacled thing on Basky's knee.

''PUH!'' said Bowman, on sighting Agueda's rump heading towards him, and wiggled his primary processes in alarm.

The red mouse on the shelf in the background moved. It shivered, actually. It wavered over the edge, dropped a couple levels, and did not squish.

Tiny feet traced a beeline towards the hound's knee. It was a theoretical beeline whose actual linearity would have resulted in arrest, has the mouse been known to drive. And had been pulled over, etc.

Baskerville swayed and almost landed flat on the grass. "Whatthe--?" he said. "Is this yours, Ms Molviddy?"


The red panda opened one eye. Ooh, what was this? Moving surprisingly quietly, he made a Bede-line after the mouse, which seemed alcoholically unaware of its surroundings.

A Bede-line was more direct than a typical bumble bee and your average drunken mouse, but he did pause every so often so's to catch the moonlight on his fur in a particularly adorable way. It was not at all clear what he intended with the rodent should they finally intersect.

The soused mouse continued towards the lowered knee, oblivious to trailer and target's change in elevation.

The large black wolf darted through the trees, snow crunching under his paws. Somewhere behind him, the shouts of the mob echoed in his ears. Suddenly he found himself falling, everything around him seeming to blur. The sounds become more and more distant, and things became more and more blurred. Yet he was dimly aware that he was still running even as he felt the sensation of falling.

Suddenly everything solidified, and Kerak found himself somewhere alien. Somewhere he'd never been before. Certainly this was nowhere that existed in the forest he'd left behind. Glancing around, the wolf took one or two unsteady steps before collapsing into an undignified heap.

The game, as all good games do, had continued into the early hours. It had been only slightly hampered by needing to explain a few things to Weft, whose take on the experience seemed to be "riiiight, very interesting".

Eventually Mendel had been forced to leave. ("Tiresome responsibilities," he'd said, "I can scarcely get in a ten-hour stretch any more." He'd patted Whatever on the head, tried to do the same to Weft, performed some complicated handshake protocol with Suitov and flapped off.)

They'd also reluctantly come down off the roof. The assassin wasn't sure, but he thought the whole building had swayed just slightly.

Dawn seemed to be on its way, but had stopped to check the oven was off and to find its car keys.

"Wolf ahoy," said Weft, who was leaning on a surprisingly intact balustrade and surveying the overgrown thicket the plans referred to as the garden.

"Aru?" replied Suitov, coming to look.

Kerak managed to get back on his feet, and began to perform the usual check common to most life forms in strange situations. Paws, four. Tail, one. He gave it an experimental wag. Just to be sure, he even reached out and gave the ravening madness inside him a prod. The wolf gave a noticable wince when it prodded right back.

Since that meant he could probably still shift, he stretched...and didn't stop. Bones elongated, his tail vanished, his entire body rippled and changed. And suddenly where there was a wolf, there was now a man. Tall, with long black hair that flowed down in waves to just above his shoulders. A lightly muscled body honed from years of surviving through hunting, fighting and running. A roman nose, and an aristocratic set to his jaw. Sad hazel eyes, and the unmistakable air of a predator about him for all that he looked rather lost. A basic black tunic and trousers.

And, as he noticed Suitov and Weft, a rather sheepish smile. "Hello there. I wonder if you might tell me where I am?"

"Hullo," said the mage. "You are in the grounds of an old inn, currently under renovation. It's neutral turf, so you're free to stay or leave." (For a second he still sounded as though he were storytelling a game, then the sensation passed.)

Kerak saw a tall chap of average build, healthy but not muscular, and a particular kind of noble bearing. Suitov's hair was also dark and fairly long, but his was tied back out of the way. Quick grey eyes regarded the werewolf, evaluating him in a friendly sort of way.

Suitov was dressed smartly, but the good-quality boots, more suited to tramping around the wilderness than attending ambassadorial functions, belied the image of an idle aristo. So did his demeanour, which seemed a lot more approachable and less judgmental than the average noble.

Suitov gave every indication of genuine goodwill. He was good at that, which made it difficult to tell when he was really pleased to see you.

The monk stayed quiet, looking ever-so-slightly nervous. He would have denied shrinking imperceptibly closer to the mage.

"An old inn, on neutral turf?" This didn't seem to alieviate Kerak's confusion at all. "I think there must be some mistake. You see, I was running through a forest and everything went blurry....." The Werewolf trailed off, suddenly realising he wasn't all that eager to be back there.

There was a moment of silence, then he spoke again. "I think I'll stay a while, thanks." If he noticed Weft's nervous movement, he didn't show it. But then Kerak was used to that sort of thing, and it was refreshing, and a little worrying, to find Suitov was apparently unaffected.

''Mine? No... but isn't it adorable!''

Bowman was seen to wiggle a little, raise himself onto his secondary processes and, with an uberkjoot ''Puuuuuuuuuuuuuh!'' that may have been interpretted as a ''Weeeeeeeee!'', did a little leap off Basky's knee and landed on the toe of Agueda's white leather knee-high boots.

Agueda, however, had hardly noticed. She had spotted Kerak over Basky's shoulder. She also saw the mouse and Bede, but thought them less interesting... and less cute.

Suitov Iceheart did not intimidate easily. If anything, his thoughts were more along the lines of specimen! and perhaps potential ally! - which made it probably a good thing that nobody in the vicinity was able to read them.

"That's an interesting thing about this area, in fact," he offered. "This place and the surrounding territories are located on something of a boundary of worlds. A crossroads, if you will. It is extremely easy to find, though nobody seems to know quite how they ended up here."

He wondered if the new arrival was a boundary theorist. One lived in hope.

A little further off, Baskerville regained his feet. Agueda's distraction did not go unnoticed. Baskerville wasn't the jealous type, exactly, but he did like attention.

"Wuff arf?" he said to the squishy-kyoot creature on her toe.

Kerak was not a boundary theorist. Werewolves by nature fear and distrust magic almost as a matter of instinct, being highly susceptable to it. He did however, have a theory about this.

"Well, I was...." He trails off, unsure of how well the news people wanted to kill him would go down. "I recall thinking very shortly before things went funny that I would like to be anywhere but where I was. A very very deep desire, you might say."

Not yet having noticed Baskerville and Agueda, he considered this for a moment. "So there are other worlds....and I'm on one of them?" He seemed to be taking this remarkably well, all things considered.

"That's about the long and the short of it." Suitov nodded. "Though we don't know if this place is really a world, per se. If one explores very far away from these areas, things get strange."

Hmm. Running through a forest, he'd said - so running from what?

Weft stirred. "It all struck me as very strange too, initially," he ventured.

Weft's voice was higher than one might expect for a fully-grown male. It was just one of the slightly confusing factors in his appearance, which was of a fairly small, sleek humanoid. There was something a tad odd about his face, aside from the slightly feminine angles*; perhaps it was the eyes, which were bigger than average and a pale green in colour.

His hair was grey, although he didn't look any older than his early thirties, and he stood very very still - a factor that was surprisingly offputting.

"I see." Kerak pondered this for a moment. "So in essence we're trapped here for the foreseeable future."

Weft's stirring drew the Werewolf's attention. "I can see why." He agreed. The stillness was indeed offputting, and Kerak decided Suitov was far more interesting and returned to him. "So how many of 'us' are there anyway?" He asked.

Suddenly his earlier words about the foreseeable future sunk in, and the proverbial 'Uh oh' was written across his face. He did not, however, say anything.

''I don't think it speaks dog...''

Dog? Dog... dog.... dog....

The word reverberated round her head, getting louder and louder as it rang out.

Dog... DOG... DOG!

Wonder what that's all about she thought.

Bowman had sidled off her shoe and was now running at full pelt round and round one of Skerv's feet 'puh'-ing madly.

"Oh, it is possible to leave here," Suitov amended, "though it is more difficult than finding the place. Rather like a lobster pot, perhaps."

Weft wondered what a lobster pot was. Mm, seafood. "People come and go," he said with a hint of shyness, "but at the moment there's me and him and his dog, and some women I don't know very well... a few people are inside, though the building seems far from safe to me."

"Well, I wasn't expecting anyone to show up here before the builders had come and gone," Suitov prodded mildly.

Kerak also wondered what a lobster pot was, although he didn't ask.

"I see. Well, regardless I think I'll stay awhile."

'Until the next full moon, anyway.' He added mentally.

"So you own this inn then?" He asked Suitov, on hearing the man was expecting the builders.

Ooh look! the lovely monk with the cute toushy was with him!

"Such as it is." The mage bowed lightly. "The land was up for development, and so. I'm fond of these old buildings, and it was this or let it become another Golden Arch Speedy Fried Fish."

Even now it was a nice structure. The lower walls were grey stone, and the timbering had been lovingly finished once.

Baskerville watched Bowman's antics, finding them highly amusing and not a little provocative. In a predator/prey sense, please.