Ramona and the Orc Princess

[rvm45]

Friends,

This is a weird story about a man who's daydreams come to life.

Be warned—IT IS WEIRD.

I only have it plotted up to the point that Romana meets the Orc Princess. I'v been stuck there a LONG ASS TIME waiting for inspiration—years.

I have it written up to Chapter Five. It may take two more chapters to get to the meeting—maybe only just one.

BE WARNED—The story may never progress beyond that point…

But if you like the outré and the bizarre—enjoy...




Ramona & the Orc Princess







After ten years in the hole, the bright light outside hurt my eyes. I was perfectly content in solitary, but the order came down from on high, to turn the political prisoners out into the general population.

They couldn’t have cared less, that I preferred living in the hole.

I’d been out for three days, when Ironhead and his crew caught me in a deserted corridor. Yeah, like it was a crowded prison. How could a large corridor end up deserted, without some sort of collusion on the part of the guards?

“Broom, you political prisoners act like you’re better than the rest of us,” Ironhead accused.

“Well, of course I’m better than you. I’m better than everyone,” I told him.

“But I’m in prison for manufacturing illegal firearms and refusing to be chipped with real ID. You’re in prison for being a pimp, a pedophile and a drug dealer—not that I have any prejudice against better living through chemistry,” I told him.

“In prison, you’ve become a sodomite and a serial rapist. How dare compare yourself to a holy man, such as myself!?!” I asked.

He dropped his britches.

“You’re going to kobbadah my knobadah,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

I hadn’t been idle those 10-years in solitary. I had been 49-years old when I went in, and I’d rolled back over 20-years’ worth of aging—and I was far stronger than I had ever been in my youth.

What? The benefits of yoga, tai chi and lucid dreaming—a special sort of lucid dreaming that I had developed while in the hole.

Not that I was necessarily a match for more than a dozen vicious thugs, but I’d leave two or three of them dead on the floor, before they took me down.

I had no fear of being raped either. I had acquired the ability to pop my cork and solve my life’s equation any time that I chose to.

Just then there was a loud popping noise and a tall figure wearing a long form-fitting black leather duster appeared.

Ramona!

I never dreamed that Ramona would appear here, in reality, to help me fight my battles. I never asked anyone’s help for anything—not even from Ramona.

“You won’t need this anymore,” Ramona said.

Ramona’s hand went around Ironhead’s knobadah and yanked it lose from his body as blood flew everywhere. Ramona had superhuman strength.

I once heard a vulgar old hillbilly say that he could boast one Hell of a long yard, if he could measure it the same way that you’d measure a cat’s tail—from the rectum outward.

That’s the way that Ramona yanked off Ironhead’s yard—all the way back to the rectum.

Ramona grabbed two thug’s heads and smashed them together hard enough to crush skulls.

Enough of the pronoun game—Ramona is male. He doesn’t look like a man. He has the body of a tall, big-busted beautiful Amazon queen—but he is male—very definitely male.

“Aren’t you men ashamed to be nasty perverts?” Ramona asked in his well-modulated baritone voice.

He killed six more of Ironhead’s compañeros with skull smashing maneuvers.

“I know you. I dream you,” Ramona said to me.

“And I dream you,” I answered in surprise.

“Coming here, to this dreary place, has drained me. I need to feed. Can you handle the others?” he asked.

‘Well yeah, since most of them are running away, I think that I can handle it, Cool Breeze,’ I thought.

“Cool,” was all I said aloud though.

Ramona grabbed a prisoner. His mouth grew outwards, to give him a wide enough bite to use fangs—high and low—that were larger than my little fingers.

He looked more like a movie werewolf at the moment, than a vampire—but there you have it.

A sort of special purpose, but very powerful telekinesis wrung every last drop of blood from the unfortunate prestoopnick and not a drop was spilled or wasted. It took less than two-seconds.

Ramona could feed far more delicately, when the purpose of the exercise was to leave the client alive. Ramona only fed on men in dire extremis and he never formed a partnership with a male.

Ramona only liked sexy young fems.

“I have to go now,” he said as he faded away.

The few convicts that hadn’t ran away, were standing there awestruck. I kicked one with a Savate stomp that ruined his knee. I had to reach out and grab another one’s wrist, in order to apply a twisting pump-handle style joint lock that ruined the elbow and the shoulder joint simultaneously…

And then the guards arrived. They hosed me down with Mace and pepper spray without even asking what was going on or offering me the chance to surrender.

Once I was thoroughly inundated with spray, they started hitting me with both TASERS and hand-held shock prods.

I don’t know that much about TASERS, but isn’t it dangerous to the client, when you hit him with two at one time? Let alone five?

‘Thank you though, low-born knob-gobblers. You’re helping fill up my lightning chi reservoir—though this is rather feeble lightning chi…’ I thought.

If only I could contrive to be struck by lightning somehow…

There was little opportunity for that in the underground cell that I’d been in.

It is rude to receive without giving back. When one the guards came within arm’s reach, to beat me, I reached out and touched him. I only gave him back about 30% of the lightning chi that I’d just absorbed.

I was a bit stingy, but it seemed to be quite enough to put him into cardiac arrest—go figure. He died on the spot and they knocked me unconscious an instant later.


************* **************** ***********************

I was restrained in an interrogation chair when I awakened. Kinda like a dentist’s chair with restraints, or a take-off on “Clockwork Orange.”

They showed me a surveillance tape of the corridor.

“What is this?” the inquisitor said as he pointed to Ramona.

“That’s Romana. He’s a vampire,” I said.

The inquisitor hit me with an electric shock.

‘Thank you, Sirrah! Can I have another?’

Still, it wouldn’t do to let on that I liked current. They’d cut off my supply and find something that was less pleasant. Not that the shocks didn’t hurt—some.

“Every time that you lie to me, I will punish you with a shock,” the inquisitor said.

“I curse you and your family. May your wife be unfaithful. May your son become a leprous faggot and your daughter become a prostitute—O wait, these things have already come to pass…”

He zapped me.

“Eat shit!” I ground out between my teeth, before he gave me a very long satisfying jolt of electricity.

“That looks like a woman,” the inquisitor commented.

“Ramona is male, despite appearances,” I said.

“She looks more like a werewolf than a vampire,” the inquisitor’s assistant remarked.

‘“He’ not ‘she.’ If Ramona was here, he’d rip your yard off for calling him a ‘she’,” I corrected.

Actually, Ramona wasn’t a rat-prick bastard. He could be quite forgiving when people mistook his gender—but not when he was already pissed—like I was at the moment.

That got me another shock.

“Be respectful,” the inquisitor said.

“That’s a big negatory, good buddy,” I said.

I never used CB slang, even when it was in style, but it just seemed right, to use it on the inquisitor.

ZAP!

“Are you sure that she isn’t a werewolf?’ the assistant asked.

‘Dickhead! Have you ever seen a werewolf or a vampire in reality? They don’t exist! So, how in Hell would you know what either one “really” looked like?’

“You two aren’t worth speaking to. I’m through talking,” I said.

I had all the current that I could absorb at the moment, and goading these two fools was without meaning.

The comedy team tired of zapping me, so they injected me with some of the new psychedelic truth serums.

“Why are you so defiant?” the inquisitor asked, once the drug had taken effect.

“Because, I hold both of you in infinite contempt,” I answered.

“Who is Ramona?” he asked.

“Ramona is me,” I said.

“He won’t tell the truth, even under the effects of the truth serum,” the inquisitor told his compañero.

“Broom, you killed a guard—not to mention several convicts. You’re scheduled to be summarily executed the day after tomorrow. If you cooperate, I might be able to have your execution commuted to life,” he said.

“I wasn’t afraid to be born. Why would I be afraid to die?”

They left me alone for awhile to think, still strapped to the chair.

The psychedelic was still active in my system and I borrowed the power that it contained. to perfect a few more neural connections and then I entered my dream world.


************* **************** *************************


Once I wanted to an artist. My sister got those plus-sized “Roman’s” clothing catalogs. There was one model that I especially liked to draw, and I dubbed her “Romana.”

My version of “Romana” became taller, darker complexioned and more muscular—and let’s be honest, her boobs grew a couple of cup sizes. A 6-foot 3-inch, broad-shouldered phantasy swordswoman type.

I could visualize my version of Ramona in great detail.

When they stuck me in the hole—well, one thing that I missed a great deal was cigarettes.

I didn’t feel comfortable inserting my lucid dreaming ka into a male avatar. At first, I just dreamed that I was Romana and that Romana chain-smoked.

Surprisingly, my dreams of Romana became increasingly vivid and I could gain real satisfaction when she smoked in my lucid dreams.

I didn’t just miss cigarettes though. I was bored shitless in the hole. I started to create a whole world for Romana. I wasn’t very good at world-building at first.

Ramona lived in a much larger and more comprehensive version of the labyrinth-like steam-line tunnels that ran under Purdue University. They were simpler to visualize than the broad vistas outdoors.

Why does Romana live underground in steam tunnels like someone who is homeless? Wait, I know! Romana is a vampire! She can’t go out in daylight…

And she buys her cigarettes and the Scotch that she drinks, with the money she takes from deceased clients…

Ah, could Romana have sex?

Hell’s belles and cockleshells! Why did I make Romana female! I sure didn’t want to experience her having sex with a man. Even the thought of her being a lesbian was less than satisfying.

At least for now, I can only have one alter-ego in the dream world at a time. I had far too much mental energy and chi invested in Romana to scrap her and start over.

Who says that Romana can’t be a man? But if Romana is a man, why does he look like a beautiful Amazon warrior princess?

Is he a tranny?

Vampires in Romana’s world can’t go out in sunlight and they have a 350 to 400-year lifespan.

Romana asked an afrit to give him true immortality, invulnerability to sunlight and freedom from most other vampire restrictions.

The afrit agreed, but said that there would be a price.

The unspecified price turned out to be Romana looking like a beautiful woman. Was the afrit a pervert or a practical joker? Who knows?

Anyway, that was Romana’s back story. Every night I became Romana. I fought monsters. I made love to women. I smoked many, many cigarettes and drank 21-year old Glenlivet by the quart.

Romana was the type vampire that could eat and enjoy food. He was actually a bit of a gourmet. Since he relied on blood to satiate himself, he ate much less ravenously than I did, so he savored his food more than I ever could.


************** *************** *****************************


Romana laid down to sleep. He didn’t need as much sleep as a human, but he did get weary.

Lately, he’d been having increasingly vivid dreams about a middle-aged man who was locked in a prison. The dreams were vivid and incredibly tedious at the same time.

Just recently, the man in his dreams—Broom—had been released from solitary and at least there was a bit more to see.

Tonight though, Broom was accosted by a gang who wanted to use him like a woman. Since Romana was often accused of being splayed—though he was simply the victim of a curse—Broom’s situation filled him with white-hot fury…

And wonder of wonders, the “Crack Between the Worlds” opened and let Romana step across dimensions and help the colorless man, that he’d been increasingly dreaming about lately.

Once Ramona was back in his universe, he found that blood from the other world was full of power. He’d never been so close to breaking through into a whole new level of power.

He laid down again, to sleep off his surfeit of energy and vitality.

He dreamed once more:

What was this shit!

The prison officials had Broom tied down hand and foot and they were torturing him.

HMMMmmnnn…?

Broom was a beginning lightning mage and he was using the electricity that they were using to punish him, to move closer to apprentice-level.

Romana didn’t panic when the prison officials injected Broom with psychedelics. Romana liked psychedelics. He often indulged in all sorts of concoctions, taking advantage of his robust vampire’s vitality to protect him from any untoward circumstances.

“Who is Ramona?” the prison official asked.

“Ramona is me,” Broom said.

Psychedelic!

Those words occasioned a huge information dump into Romana’s mind.

Who was real? Was he real, dreaming Broom? Or did Broom dream Romana? Did it matter?

The torturer said that Broom was scheduled for execution soon. Romana wasn’t sure who was real, but he sensed that one of them couldn’t continue to exist without the other at this point.

He had to rescue Broom!

He had opened the “Crack Between the Worlds” once. He could do it again!

Ramona had absorbed the lifeblood of a resident of Broom’s world. Broom had been pumped full of electric current, along with the accompanying adrenaline and he’d been given a heady dose of psychedelics.

It was debatable, which of their increases in power was more influential. In the end, did it matter? It was like obsessing whether money was coming into one’s left pocket or into one’s right pocket.

It was an accident and painless the first time the “Crack Between the Worlds” opened for Ramona.

This time, Ramona felt as if his skull would split open—but eventually, the crack opened again.


************ **************** *************************


I giggled hysterically when I saw Romana appear yet again, from a crack in reality.

“Damned nation! What a time for you to be tripping out of your skull!” Romana said.

‘Well whore’s spit! Sorry to inconvenience you, Cool Breeze,’ I thought.

“Don’t call me ‘Cool Breeze’! You’re Cool Breeze—what with your head full of that bastard spawn of mescaline and sodium pentothal!” Romana said.

Psychedelic! We could read each other’s thoughts!

Let’s turn the settings on the punishment shocker all the way to “Electrocute” and give me a stiff jolt. That should burn the residual drugs out of my system and charge my battery big time.

Yeah, I was at the point of satiation, but that much more voltage would force more electricity into my body and forcibly expand my storage capacity…

And it hurt like being boiled alive! I didn’t see that curve coming.

Romana tore my restraints asunder and went to stand by the door to ambush the two inquisitors when they came to see what all the creeching was about.

There wasn’t much worthwhile around the lab/interrogation room. I grabbed a handful of rubber tourniquets, a couple of sheets and a handful of disposable scalpels.

What? I was strip-stark naked. It was better to look like I was on my way to a toga party than to be naked—maybe. More cordage and a means to cut are always a plus.

Romana tolchocked each of the interrogators lightly upside the skull as they walked through the door. He handed one to me,

“Quit gathering trash. Hold onto him tightly. He’s my next meal,” Romana said.

Then he opened the “Crack Between the Worlds” once more, and the four of us disappeared from my world forever…

And we reappeared in Romana’s world.


************ ************** **********************


Friends, it did my heart good, to see the looks of terror on the inquisitors faces, as they woke up and found themselves stark naked and trussed up like chickens.

“You knob-gobblers wanted to know more about Romana. I’ll introduce you,” I told them.

Romana angrily grabbed the assistant inquisitor by the face.

“You doubted my manhood. Should I drop my pants and show you?” Romana taunted.

“Keep it family friendly. There is nothing that they can tell me, that I wish to know. I just wanted to see their faces when they realized that the tables were turned…the assholes! You can feed now,” I said to Romana.

Ramona was a couple of inches taller than me. He was thinner in the thighs and thicker through the hips. He was built like a woman, after all.

I could wear some of his larger tops, but his britches were hopeless. Thankfully, both of the inquisitors wore jeans. They were both hippy, fat-asses, so I could wear their trousers.

I found a Buck Lockback, a Swiss Army knife and a Leatherman tool on the two.

Yeah, they were VIPs. I guess that they didn’t have to walk through a metal detector on the way to work.

Romana belched after finishing the second inquisitor. Where did he put the entire blood content of two fat-ass adult human males? His waist wasn’t even an inch larger.

“This world isn’t complete. The strain of both of us trying to exist here simultaneously, is tearing it apart. We need to go elsewhere. Your world is for shit. We’ll just have to take a chance,” Romana.

He handed me an ALICE pack.

“Bug-Out Bags,” he said.

Apparently, he kept more than one on hand, just for eventualities. I hadn’t known that Ramona was so well prepared. It made sense though. He was me after all.

Once Ramona started to have a sort of life of his own. I would find that days or weeks had passed in his world, since the last night that I’d dreamed about him.

At first, I couldn’t create the surface world very well. I would come back to Ramona’s world, to discover that he’d taken the money from clients, and went to buy the Newport 100s that he favored, from the small convenience store on the corner, just off campus.

Having him shop in my absence, spared me from having to visualize the convenience store.

For backstory reasons that I never filled in completely, Ramona had recently come to this area, with very little but the clothes on his back.

Soon, he had enough money to special order 21-year old Glenlivet that he craved, from the small local liquor store. He got a post office box and ordered his clothing from catalogs.

What? He ordered most of his clothing from “Romans.” I know very little about women’s clothing, but I’d drawn most of the outfits in my sister’s catalogs, any number of times.

Hell’s belles! Romana was a man! Men’s clothing didn’t fit him, but why would he wear women’s undergarments? He wore boxer shorts.

He also had a lot of clothing custom-made in a little 3-person tailor and dressmaker’s shop that I imagined for him.

Stocking his underground hideout was a bit of a trial.

He had money after the first few days and unlike most vampires, he could walk about in daylight, though he very much preferred not to. He could go to “Target”; “Ethan Allen”; yard sales—just wherever.

That’s cool for buying pillows and bean-bag chairs.

Most delivery companies worked during daylight hours and having a king-sized bed, a refrigerator, a stove or a recliner delivered at the entrance to a tunnel and then taking the stuff into the tunnel in plain sight of God and everyone was problematic.

Fortunately, Ramona had hypnotic power and he quickly enlisted some brick masons, carpenters, electricians and even some coal miners to modify some nearby houses to give him secret passages into his lair.

He didn’t entirely trust living on the surface, but his crew built him several hidden underground chambers adjacent to the network of tunnels.

Ramona had a distaste for slavery. He asked nothing unreasonable from his enthralled clients and after using them for a short while, he would set them free—only putting in place a prohibition against ever speaking about their activities on his behalf.

He never wiped memories. So far as Romana was concerned, having one’s memory tampered with was rape with violence—a far worse fate than mere death. He just put in a prohibition against speaking about the things that they had done for him.

Ramona gave compensations. He tried to select middle-aged men to do his secret-passage construction. He rolled back each man’s chronological age about 17-years. He raised their IQ 29-points and made them 17% stronger with 17% more endurance than normal.

None of Romana’s former clients would ever have obesity, cancer, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, male pattern baldness, dental caries, cataracts or depression.

Although he couldn’t very well ask them, he felt that it was a worthwhile trade in exchange for a bit of forced labor. He also tried to pay them what the jobs were worth, in coin of the realm—when he had it. He didn’t always have the cash on hand though.

So, while I had no idea that Romana kept Bug-Out Bags, I wasn’t shocked.

“That is why I told you not to bother collecting all that miscellaneous garbage in the lab. I have much better gear here,” Ramona said.

“We may never meet again, face-to-face. We will have to dream each other. I think that integration lies in our future. It might seem a loss of sovereignty, but what we’re experiencing now, is a false dualism,” he said.

A gigantic black crack appeared in the tunnel. It was a far different thing than the gentle well-ordered “Crack Between the Worlds” that we had utilized before. It was a sign that this reality—such as it was—was threatening to break apart.

That would be a damned shame. The people in this partial universe had done no wrong to me—or to Romana.

Romana grabbed his own Bug-Our Bag and grabbed me. Then he leapt into the chasm.

[rvm45]

Chapter Two

3790








I lost consciousness momentarily. When I woke, I was lying on the ground. I was alone.

I found myself in a boreal forest—kinda. Boreal forests have little but pine, aspen and poplar trees. Other trees cannot survive that close to the Arctic region.

In this world, there were oak, maple, walnut and pecan trees—amongst a few others—that had adapted to the cold. The years are about two-and-a-half Earth years long here, so the long summers might have had something to do worth the deciduous trees moving into the extreme North.

I didn’t know any of that at the time. All I knew was that I was in a forest and that it was ungodly cold.

Strange as it may sound, I had a moment to miss Ramona. That mood didn’t last long. It was about 25-degrees below zero—real degrees, not Centigrade degrees.

I quickly rifled through Ramona’s Bug-Out Bag.

Silk long underwear, woolen long underwear, silk and woolen socks, a long-sleeved silk undershirt and a woolen sweater.

Cool, but Ramona was a vampire. He was cold blooded and cold didn’t affect him—why the cold weather gear?

Well, never mind. The underwear was flexible enough to fit, silk on the inside and wool on the outside. The only thing that I had to put on over the woolen underwear was the inquisitor’s blue-jeans. Fortunately, the fat-ass jeans had enough room to accommodate two levels of long underwear.

Cotton kills though…

Surprise, surprise, surprise!!!

Ramona and I had the same shoe-size—12 EE. There was a pair of Corcoran jump boots with the extra thick “Fort Bragg” soles.

Thing is, leather boots stored in sub-zero temperatures get chilled. It can be agonizing getting them up to body temperature. I thought that my feet would freeze before the boots warmed up.

Meanwhile, my hands were getting pretty frosted too. I’d place them briefly in my armpits to warm them enough that I could continue getting dressed.

I had to get dressed without delay, or suffer from hypothermia.

Silk shirt on. Cotton blouse/shirt of Romana’s on. My shoulders are broader and my chest is deeper than Romana’s—but I don’t have Dolly Parton-sized bazongas, so his shirt fit me okay.

Wool sweater and then a long black leather duster. Apparently, Ramona wanted to take no chance of being caught without one of his vampire-style, long leather dusters.

There is a nice watch cap and a Doctor Who style woolen scarf.

‘Romana, you cold-blooded piece of vampire shit!’ I cursed him mentally.

The only gloves were a pair of army surplus leather glove shells. Ramona would have no worries about frostbite, even if he swam in liquid nitrogen.

I was already in the early stages of frostbite of my hands—maybe my feet too.

Well, standing in the open and whining about it won’t do any good. Get to tree cover and attempt to build a fire.

Wait! What is this? If I circulate my lightning chi, it warms my chilled flesh. I even feel slightly feverish.

I’m using up my lightning chi extra-fast though. I need to make hay while the sun shines and build a fire before my lightning chi runs out…

A couple of hours later, I had a good-sized fire going. It used the last of my lightning chi to light the fire. There are other ways to get fire, but this way was faster.

Then, when I took the time to go through the rest of Romana’s gear, I found several BIC lighters, a huge box of kitchen matches and a ferrocenium rod. Sure, butane freezes in the cold, but not if you keep it in a pocket next to your body—not that I had time to thaw a frozen butane lighter when lighting my fire.

There was also a Western Bowie, a Nessmuk double-headed hatchet, a folding wood saw and a Smith and Wesson Model 13 .357 Magnum revolver with two 50-round boxes of cartridges.

There was coffee, sugar and cocoa, but no food.

Blockheaded vampire! Just because you don’t need to eat!

There were two cartons of Newport 100s and a couple of fifths of well-protected 21-year old Glenlivet though.

There was one wool blanket in the pack along with an 8-foot by 10-foot Tarpaulin—what vulgar people insist on referring to as “a tarp.”

I was exhausted and I didn’t feel up to pitching a lean-to tent.

I folded the tarpaulin to make a ground cloth. I lay on it and shivered, covering myself with both the wool blanket and both of the sheets that I had inherited from the interrogation room.

Yes, a raised bed would have been better and yes, I did fold a portion of the wool blanket and the cotton sheets underneath.

It was dusk. If I made it through the night, I’d try to build a raised bed and a fire reflector—at the very least—tomorrow.

I needed to cut more firewood once. I found that I had regained enough lightning chi to keep my hands warm long enough to cut two or three hours’ worth of firewood, in spite of the quite insufficient leather gloves.

It would be well past sunset, the next time that I needed to cut firewood. I couldn’t cut more during the long twilight, because I had exhausted my small store of lightning chi. My hands chilled too quickly.

I really needed to be struck by lightning. Lightning storms are a boilerplate rarity in the Winter though.

Around 9:00 pm, I fell asleep.


************* ************** **********************


Ramona looked around the crude campsite ruefully.

‘Blockheaded vampire, indeed!’ he thought.

When Broom dreamed Ramona, he vanished as well as all of the gear that he’d brought with him, but the fire and the small supply of firewood remained.

Ramona didn’t have a Nessmuk hatchet in his gear, but he did have a full-sized double-edged axe. Though it had been sheer happenstance, which bags he’d grabbed, it worked out well this way.

He had the strength to use the full-sized axe much better than Broom could have. Ramona would have been considerably handicapped with nothing but a small Nessmuk hatchet to channel his strength through.

He wished that he’d thought to grab a second ALICE pack for Broom. Surplus gear could always be jettisoned, but if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t shit it.

The Baraka was with him in his choice of bags. Some of the bags held less cold weather gear than these two.

Ramona set to work with a will.

He built a raised bed. He had superhuman strength, so he wasn’t limited to logs that a human could lift. The bed he created was quite robust and it would hold Broom a good 3-foot off the ground.

Then he built a lean-to around the raised bed.

A human would generally build a lean-to with logs of 2 or 3-inches in diameter. Romana built his lean-to of 8-inch diameter logs.

Then he took some logs of 5 or 6-inches in diameter. He sharped the ends, and sawed off a flat pounding-surface on top. Then he used an enormous maul that he’d made from a tree, to drive the logs into the hard-frozen soil to form a wall on each side of the lean-to. Then he sawed the tops off again, all nice and level. He tossed the end pieces onto Broom’s scanty pile of firewood.

The sidewalls helped hold in heat and block the wind. They also kept a predator from sneaking up and snatching Broom from the side of his lean-to.

That done, Ramona sank a fire pit a foot onto the ground and lined it with stones. There was no need to sink the fire pit or to line it. That was simply Romana’s compulsive perfectionism.

Then he built a fire reflector and he even added a couple of side wings on the reflector.

Finally, Ramona stripped several small pines of their boughs to thoroughly thatch the roof and sides of the lean-to and to thoroughly fill the hollow in the log-cabin raised bed.

It would be dawn soon and Ramona expected to vanish at dawn. He spent the last bit of his allotted time piling up firewood for Broom.

He didn’t vanish at dawn.

Over the next few days, Broom and Ramona learned that the days here were about 31-hours and 20-minutes long.

Vampires had quite an accurate internal chronometer to let them know when to expect sunrise and sunset. Ramona was no longer vulnerable to sunlight, but he still had the super-accurate internal chronometer.

The people here also divided their days into 24-hours, but each of their hours were a bit longer than 78 Earth minutes.

Broom and Ramona split the days. Broom existed from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. Ramona existed from 9:00 pm till 9:00 am the next morning. Kinda like the Russian vampires of legend.

Russian vampires weren’t bothered by sunlight, but they only existed from midnight until noon. They vanished like a popped soap bubble at noon only to reappear again at midnight.

Anyway, Romana made the best use of his time, by laying in some more firewood for his fragile alter-ego.


************ ************* ***********************


I was well aware of everything Romana had done while I slept. I was dreaming him after all.

There was plenty of firewood, but I cut some extra. In this Siberian climate, there was no such thing as having too much firewood. I mainly sat around most of the time, to conserve energy.

I made some coffee and drank it with plenty of sugar. Then I sipped the Scotch judiciously.

“Whisky” roughly translates as “water of life.” By some accounts, the olde tyme Highland Scots only managed to endure their cold and rainy environment by supplementing their diet with a pint or more of high proof Scotch every day.

I know what modern medicine says about whisky not really warming one in cold weather, but the Scots prospered using whisky as a staple in their diet—and they weren’t drunkards either.

Be that as it lay. I wasn’t Scottish and I only had two fifths of Scotch. Nonetheless, the Scotch had some much-needed calories and it raised my spirits. I also smoked a few of Romana’s Newports. It wasn’t as if he could ever lay hands upon them again.

Anyway, it was schizoid thinking to be stingy with one another, He was asleep and dreaming about everything that I was doing right now.

Then the bear appeared sometime after sunset.

[rvm45]

Chapter Three

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Fortunately, I guess, it wasn’t a grizzly or a polar bear. It was a black bear—but way bigger than an Earth black bear, He might have weighed 1000-pounds.

I had the 4-inch .357 Magnum—less than ideal against a bear. I should have prepared a long wooden lance. Sometimes, if you do the lion-tamer thingy and keep jabbing at the eyes with a long sharp pointy stick the carnivore will get tired and go onto bigger and better things.

I had taken all of the shit that I intended to take from anyone or anything. I screamed my defiance at the bear while assuming a good weaver stance and aiming at the bear’s nose.

There was time to rip off 4-shots at the bear’s head, and then it hit me like a moving freight train. It clamped down on my shoulder and crushed my clavicle while driving four fangs deep into my shoulder. Fortunately, it missed both my jugulars and carotids and it missed my subclavian artery but it hurt like all Hell.

Then I poured every ounce of lighting chi that I possessed right into the bear’s mouth. The bear collapsed atop me and I passed out.

The Baraka was with me. I was close to my fire and it had been fed recently. Also, the bear atop much of me was insulation. Best of all, it was less than an hour until Romana came on the scene.

************** **************** *********************

Ramona threw the bear off of him contemptuously. 1000-pounds was nothing to him.

He wasn’t injured. He hadn’t fought the bear after all.

Romana worked quickly. He built a tripod and butchered the bear and then placed the meat up where it was safe from most predators and scavengers.

Then he lay in a day’s worth of firewood, stacked close to the fire.

Then Romana went hunting. The bear’s blood was frozen and unavailable, for the most part. Romana needed blood. He particularly needed fresh blood if he was going to have enough surplus vitality, to channel some to the injured Broom.

He had to work fast. He only had until 9:00 am IHST (I’m Here Standard Time). Broom couldn’t survive if he wakened somewhere away from his fire and gear. Roman had to be back at the campsite in time to fall asleep and dream Broom.

Romana sniffed the air. He had a nose as powerful as a Bloodhound’s and a predator’s sixth sense where game was.

As he hunted, he came across a couple of hidden squirrel caches.

The pecans here were the size of large plums. There were some hulled walnuts bigger than golf balls and a few white oak acorns.

He hadn’t travelled far, when he encountered a big mule deer—very big by Earth standards.

He grabbed the deer and sank his huge fangs into the deer’s throat.

The mule deer had more blood than a human. It took Romana almost 4-seconds to drain the deer dry.

When he was done, there was no need to bring the deer carcass back. It looked like a mummy. All of its blood and vitality was drained. Romana cast the dry husk to one side and started to trot back toward camp.

There was no need to rush. He had plenty of time.

It must have been a day for bears though. A huge grizzly confronted Romana with a fearsome snarl.

“Don’t dick with me! I’m not a mortal like Broom,” Romana told the bear in a cold fury.

The bear chose to attack Romana. That was a bad move on its part.

Romana grabbed the bear’s lower jaw as it went to bite him. He ignored the bear hug that it initiated. He grabbed the head with both hands and twisted the bear’s head around until its neck snapped.

‘Yeah, there is still time,’ Roman thought.

The bear had more flesh that Broom might, in theory, eventually eat. Romana wanted some of the bear’s blood, but if he drained it dry, the meat and the fur would be ruined.

He wanted to save the meat for Broom—though that wasn’t crucial—but he craved the bearskin for himself.

He arrived back in the camp with over 3-hours to spare.

Romana carefully erected a tripod to store the second batch of bear meat on.

He was a vampire. It wasn’t surprising that he had a couple of collapsible buckets that he could gather blood in.

Ramona managed to consume several gallons of bear blood. He butchered the bear fairly neatly and stored the meat in the small raised platform that he’d just built.

He wrapped the still bloody grizzly skin around himself, skin side out and lay down on the raised bed to sleep.


************* **************** **********************


When Broom awoke…

Well, first of all, imagine that the bear had done 20 to 30% less damage in the first place. It wasn’t that Romana could turn back time, but that was the best way to imagine the healing that he brought to Broom’s crushed body.

Then imagine that the best possible team of osteopathic surgeons had carefully repaired Broom’s wound to the best of their ability.

Then imagine that Broom had spent 12 or 13-weeks in a top-quality hospital, being fed plenty of high protein, calcium-rich foods and being regularly dosed with Anavar and Boldenone—and getting the best possible physical therapy.

In short, Broom’s right arm and shoulder still ached abysmally. His right arm was weak and it lacked a great deal of mobility.

At least he could move around, feed his fire and fry himself a few bear steaks—at the cost of a great deal of pain.

Broom wasn’t sure that he needed to eat, just so long as Romana managed to feed. There was no need to put it to the test though. Especially with a severe wound that needed to recover.

Broom looked at himself in the small mirror that was in the kit that Ramona had given him…

Mirror? Did Ramona have a reflection?

Yes, upon reflection, Ramona did have a reflection. Broom remembered Ramona gazing into mirrors. Did all vampires in Ramona’s world cast reflections? Or was this one of the afrit’s gifts?

At any rate, the reflection that Broom saw was that of a young man, but he had three deep bear claw scars across his right cheek.

Broom had managed to increase his vitality while in the hole, but he hadn’t managed to reverse the great curse of male pattern baldness. Now, there was half-inch long hair growing in wherever he’d been bald before.

The only thing was, that all of the new hair was purest white without the barest hint of melanin.

Broom didn’t care even a little bit. With a full head of hair, he could once again hold his head high without cause to be ashamed anymore. Who cared what color the new hair was?

It turned out that Broom was right to be prudent and continue to eat.

Romana didn’t find any prey for the next three nights, so it was good that Broom ate.

The next morning, it was like 20 more days of healing had passed. The second morning, Broom was only about 10-days closer to healing. The third night only added about 3-days’ worth of healing.

The fourth night, Ramona caught a caribou. On the basis of that, Broom was almost completely healed—such as complete healing could be. Also, maybe 65% of the things that would never fully heal, if Broom was a normal mortal, were fully restored.

[rvm45]

Chapter Four

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Broom was a survivalist, but Romana was a dilettantish scholar with total recall, superior intellect and he’d had unrestricted access to the libraries of Purdue University for many years.

With the aid of Ramona’s built-in chronometer—Broom found that he could also access the chronometer—and a crude analemma that they sketched on piece of buckskin, Ramona concluded that they were only at the beginning of what would be a very long and progressively colder winter.

Once Broom was recovered, it wasn’t so necessary for Ramona to hunt in order to feed and transfer vitality to Broom.

The two of them. or the one of them—depending on one’s viewpoint—concentrated on building a log cabin.

Ramona gritted his teeth in frustration. He fervently wished that he had a shovel, a broadaxe, a drawknife and a couple or three augers.

At least he had heads for an adze and a froe and a few wood carving chisels.

Romana really wasn’t expecting to have to build a homestead in the middle of the wilderness—at least not anytime soon. He’d only included the gear that he had, out of a sense of completeness—and because he was bored and stocking Bug-Out Bags was a source of satisfaction to him.

Broom wasn’t frustrated at all, at the lack of tools in the bags. He had no expectations and he was simply glad that he had as much gear as he had.

Romana had superhuman strength, endurance and resistance to cold. He could see better in the darkest night than Broom could see in the daylight.

He did much of the heavy lifting, but there were things Broom could do too—especially, in light of their seamless communication and cooperation.

Ramona found clay in a nearby stream and made bricks. He also found enough mussel shells to make fairly good mortar. Wading in an ice-cold stream in the arctic winter would have been a no-go for Broom, so would digging out the frozen clay.

Romana could cut and move much heavier logs than a lone human working alone.

There was no need to be stingy. On the other hand, all the gear that he and Broom had, all added together, wouldn’t amount to very much. There was no need to make the log cabin overly palatial either.

They settled on a thick-walled cabin with a brick fireplace. It was 12-foot by 16-foot, with comfortable 7-foot high walls. It was a modest increase on Thoreau’s 10-foot by 15-foot cabin.

They shingled the roof with wooden shakes pinned with laboriously carved wooden pegs.

Heat went up, and they had thought of creating a loft, but it was simpler to simply move the bunk close to the fireplace. The cabin had rough-hewn wood floors, a stout kitchen table and two bunks with rawhide rope mattresses.

There was little need for the second bunk, except that it made a convenient catchall.

Lo and behold, Romana actually had a couple of books in his pack. Broom couldn’t read them—except through Romana’s eyes at night.

There was no way to make windows, except that Romana scrapped some deerskin exceedingly thin and they installed a couple of small Southward facing windows so that the windows could let in a bit of light during the day and be shuttered over at night.

The nights were getting increasingly longer. Romana expected a protracted period of darkness. The years here were longer than on Earth, ergo the period of complete winter darkness would be longer.

Romana could hunt perfectly well by starlight, but if by chance, he failed to return to the cabin by Broom’s advent, Broom’s prospects of surviving for 12-hours in the stygian gloom would be quite depressing.

Romana might be forced to hunt, but once the long night settled in, caution should dictate him hunting closer to home.

He had superhuman strength and superior senses, but he wasn’t indestructible. He could even break a leg, for instance, and without fresh blood to supercharge his vitality, it might take him 4 or 5-days to heal a broken leg.

Hopping on one leg or crawling through the snow seemed equally impractical.

He needed to lay in some more meat for Broom. There was meat, but how much was enough? How long would this infernal Winter be?

He also wanted to feed at least a couple or three more times, just as a precaution.

Broom had a long bearskin coat that reached to his mid-calf, made from the black bear’s skin. He now had voluminous Cossack style drawstring britches of deerskin, and a billowy buckskin shirt.

He had an extreme cold-weather cap of rabbit fur that fit over his wool watch cap. He had a couple of big rabbit-skin comforts for his bed and a pillow made of buckskin and filled with goose down.

He passed the time by making himself a long bow, arrows and a quiver.

Broom was quite strong—stronger than all but the strongest humans by now—by virtue of his shared vitality with Romana, but he wasn’t yet superhuman. That day might come, but it wasn’t yet.

He made the draw weight about 150-pounds. He could handle that much weight. Not only was he extra strong, his endurance was unusual and so was his eyesight. A lighter bow wouldn’t have fully exploited all of Broom’s extraordinary qualities.

He wished that he had metal for arrowheads. He wasn’t at all sure how flint arrowheads would hold up when driven by a 150-pound bow.


************* *************** **********************


This day, when Ramona went hunting, he encountered others. They weren’t humans, but they were hominid, nonetheless.

There was a troll—over 8-foot tall. He was built more robustly than a human. His skin was green and he had tusks coming out of his lower jaw. He had a crude splint on his right leg and he had an ugly, unhealed gash across his face.

He fought with a two-handed sword against eight ogres and what appeared to be a human woman clothed in bright scarlet clothing from head-to-foot.

Romana didn’t remember ever encountering any other haints, but he found that he had a built-in encyclopedia about non-human but humanoid races.

The ogres were about Romana’s height. Ramona was 6-foot 3-inches tall, while the ogres ranged from about 6-foot 2-inches to maybe 6-foot 6-inches.

They had oversized heads and shoulders and they had prognathous snouts filled with fangs and shearing teeth. Their gray skin was lumpy, with many wart-like nodules ranging from pea-sized to the size of big Lima beans.

Ogres liked human flesh, but they were more than a little cowardly. They robbed graveyards and ate carrion. They would only fight, as a general rule, when they were backed into a corner.

Today, they rushed at the troll with crude war hammers or maces with long wooden handles. The weapons were so crude, it was hard to know what to call them.

The creature that resembled a human with a red hooded woolen cloak was the cause of the ogre’s courage.

When her hood fell back, her skin was the same brilliant red as her clothing—except that her eyes and her mouth—when she opened her mouth to shout spells and instructions to her enslaved ogres—seemed like bottomless pits filled with some sort of glowing magenta.

A crimson witch!

The troll, for his part, seemed to have been driving an 8-dog, dogsled. When he’d gone through a narrow passage, he’d activated a deadfall and came close to being crushed by avalanche of stone.

Five of his giant wolf-dogs were crushed flatter than grapes. The other three had chewed through their harnesses to go and offer whatever assistance that they could, to the troll.

The wolf-dogs were huge, by Earth standards, standing over 6-foot at the shoulder and massing more than a large bison.

The crimson witch utilized some sort of fireball, to blow up one of the wolf-dogs. The last two dogs, looked at the crimson witch and snarled.


*********** ************* *********************

When the crimson witch saw Ramona, she issued a curt command to her subordinates. Two ogres charged Ramona. He brought his axe down on the skull of one ogre while he grabbed the other by the throat with his left hand, lifting it clear of the ground. He brought the axe down on the skull of the second ogre.

Now there were only six ogres left. Three weren’t sufficient to restrain either Ramona or the troll—and there were only six ogres to go around.

The crimson witch recited some sort of incantation in an inhumanly deep raspy voice. All sorts of red misty smoke came from her lips and formed into some sort of vaguely defined flying haint.

When one of the smoke birds contacted Ramona, his guts felt as if he’d been force-fed a big bucketful of long; sharp glass shards and he felt an odd burning sensation.

Ramona abruptly transformed into Broom, who cast one modest-sized lightning bolt after another. When the last red fog bird fell, the crimson witch vomited blood. Nonetheless, she started chanting another incantation.

Broom shot the enchantress through the head and then followed up with a half-dozen lightning bolts. Haints don’t like lightning; flames or silver as a general rule.

“Friend, popping up like this and using all that lightning has drained me. Can you handle the rest of the ogres?” Broom asked Ramona aloud.

There were only five ogres left by then. Broom had time to hastily shoot one ogre through the bicep before he transformed into Ramona again.

“Please! There are only five of the knob-gobblers, That was a waste of a perfectly good .357 round,” Ramona complained.

[rvm45]

Chapter Five

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Shortly after the last ogre fell, the troll collapsed unconscious. First of all, Ramona drained the blood from the recently deceased crimson witch. Her blood seemed to supercharge Ramona with psychic energy.

The ogres neither looked nor smelled appealing, yet Ramona was loath to let so much blood go to waste. A brief taste of the ogre’s foul-tasting blood, was more than enough to convince Ramona that ogre blood was best left alone.

He thoroughly searched the corpses for any useful items or anything metal. The crimson witch had a couple of small knives; a metal spoon; what looked like a set of acupuncture needles; a magnifying glass; along with a few curious small instruments and a few small glass bottles and a fire-starting kit in a small brass box that featured flint; steel and char cloth.

The ogres seemed as much a stranger to metals, as giant squid were to wienie-roasts. One wore a boar’s tusk arounds his neck on a putrid leather cord and they had the crudest sort of flint knives.

Ramona examined the troll. He wasn’t sure what to do with him. He wasn’t precisely an ally…

Then one of the great wolf-dogs looked at Ramona and gave a plaintive whine.

Ramona sighed and placed the gigantic troll onto the dog sled. He examined the other wolf-dogs to make sure that none of them could be rescued or needed to be put out of their misery. They were all deader than Judas Iscariot.

After a moment of frittering with the harnesses, Ramona contrived a set-up where he could pull the sled.

Back home, he left the wolf-dogs outside and carried the troll to the spare bed.

Broom had always loathed people who kept their dogs outside, but there was no question of the two bison-sized canines fitting into the little 12’ x 16’ log cabin.

The bunk was about 6’ 6’’, So the troll’s calves and feet stuck out at the foot of the bed, but Ramona contrived a small stool to support them.

Ramona had some medicine, but he had no idea how the troll’s metabolism worked. A Penicillin tablet; a Dilaudid or a simple Aspirin might have been deadly poison to the troll.

He washed and dressed the troll’s wounds and then bandaged them and waited, in hopes the troll’s natural recovery would pull him through. He made sure to keep the cabin nice and warm—though God alone knew what the comfort-zone for a troll was.

When it was Broom’s turn at bat, he was absolutely delighted by the two wolf-dogs. They seemed kindly disposed towards him. He found a brush in the troll’s sled and spent a happy half-a-day brushing and currying the two giant dogs.

He was happy to find quite a bit of dried meat in the sled as well, otherwise the dog’s huge appetites would have quickly exhausted Broom’s small stores—and he couldn’t bear to see a dog go hungry.

The troll woke briefly on the second day and asked for water, by way of gestures. He drank several times, but then he would promptly pass out. It was only on the third day that he truly awakened.

Broom fed the troll a bowlful of boiled meat; broth and some cattail roots and wild garlics. Edible plants were something of a rarity—especially in Winter.

Ramona’s hyper-sensitive nose and sense of taste could tell if something was poisonous or nutritious—but that was scant help when there were no wild edibles to be found.

After the troll ate, he tried to communicate with Broom, but all Broom heard was a stream of guttural, and very low-pitched gibberish.

Broom pointed to himself.

“Broom,” he stated firmly.

“Broom,” the troll repeated.

Then the troll pointed to himself.

“Tamack,” he said.

Broom pointed to the troll’s sword; one of his knives; the fire and the bed and repeated each of their names in American. He concluded that the troll had a great deal of difficulty pronouncing some human words.

Anyway, teach a troll to speak American, and you can communicate with one troll. Learn to speak Trollish and you can communicate with any troll that you might happen to meet.

Troll speech made Broom’s throat feel a bit raw, but some of the words seemed half-assed familiar.

Then Broom remembered, trolls spoke Old Norse—which was very similar, but not identical, to modern day Icelandic.

Broom had been briefly inspired to try to learn Old Norse, listening to Professor Jackson Crawford’s videos on the Old Norse tongue and the Old Norse Culture. Broom rarely stuck to anything very long—but he had acquired a smattering.

He was pretty sure that Old Norse hadn’t torn one’s throat raw to speak it. Apparently, given centuries to tinker with the root tongue, the trolls had gradually altered the language here and there, to make it more troll-friendly.

He wondered if he encountered a leprechaun, if they would speak Gaeilge. He knew a lot more Gaeilge than he did Icelandic or Old Norse.

Broom recalled a video by some foul-mouthed; bitter little fellow, who loathed Saint Patrick’s Day, because he inevitably became the butt of some leprechaun jokes.

“Anyone who believes in leprechauns is a faggot!” the little bastard had proclaimed.

Now Broom hadn’t necessarily believed in leprechauns, but he hadn’t disbelieved either—at least until coming here had thoroughly opened his mind to almost anything.

At any rate, he wished the little bastard was here, so he could call Broom a “Faggot” and have the shit kicked out of his shit-talking little ass.

The troll made a gesture denoting huge bazongas, and then he shrugged broadly and then held his hands up, denoting utter confusion while Broom laughed.

He repeated the gesture and then said in a firm tone:

“That is Ramona. Ramona! He can’t abide in the same place as me,” Broom said.

“Ramona,” repeated the troll.

“What hey! It’s almost time,” Broom said.

He tapped the troll with one hand. He pointed to his own two eyes, with two forked fingers. Then he pointed the same two fingers at the troll’s eyes and then pointed at himself.

The pantomime was meant to convey the concept:

“Watch me.”

It seemed to work fairly well. The troll’s eyes grew wide in amazement as Broom quickly morphed into Ramona.

************ **************** **********************

Tamack seemed to have the capability to heal very quickly. Once he was better, he and Broom went on a number of hunts along with the two wolf-dogs.

The troll had never seen a bow and arrow before. It wasn’t ideal, because the wood should have seasoned for awhile, but Broom made Tamack a tolerably good bow out of a large hedgeapple stave—what high-fallutin folks insisted on calling “Osage Orange.” Broom had even seen a few splooges who insisted on making the “O” in “Osage” long as in “Toe.” Rather than short as in “Toss.” As if mislabeling hedge apple as Osage orange wasn’t pretentious enough already.

Although the days were short and extremely cold, if wurst came to wurst—as if the pair was caught in a sudden blizzard or lost—Broom could easily build a commodious lean-to with the troll’s assistance and he could lay between the two warm furry dogs for warmth as well.

Tamack was not impervious to cold, but he was far more resistant to it than Broom. As has already been said, Ramona could swim in liquid nitrogen without being discomfited—though it was an open question if Ramona’s body would be buoyant enough to float in liquid nitrogen.

Tamack, who had seen Ramona feed the night before, was rather pensive.

“Ramona,” he said, while making two vampire fangs with his index fingers.

It was kinda funny, since the green-skinned troll had two lower tusks that were longer than Brooms middle-finger and much more robust.

“Ramona is a vampire,” Broom told him.

“Vampire,” Tamack repeated the human word.

“He lives by drinking blood—and life-force—from his clients,” Broom said.

Tamack’s face showed comprehension.

He taught Broom the Trollish word for “Vampire.”

“You are Romana?”

“Kinda. I’m not a vampire though,” Broom said vaguely.

His own understanding of his situation was rather vague.

“Tamack. Are there any towns—places with people? I’d really like to buy a few more pieces of metal, perhaps some metal tools, if the tools are like cool and the price is like cool,” Broom said.

“Towns are. The closest town to here is an orc village—small town—say 8500-orcs. Humans and trolls can go there, if they come in peace,” Tamack said.

“What is an orc?” Broom asked.

“Some people say that an orc is a junior troll—but that statement will offend both trolls and orcs, if they hear you say it,” Tamack laughed.

Tamack was about 8-foot 7-inches tall—yes, there was a metal tape measure in Ramona’s pack. Why not?

To hear Tamack tell it, an adult male orc would be around 7-foot 4-inches—or a bit less. Tamack was extraordinarily thick and muscular, by human standards. An orc was more heavily muscled than most humans, but not to the same degree that trolls were.

Like trolls, orcs were green-skinned—but trolls were a dark-green while orcs were a mellow, light-green.

Trolls had tusks in their lower jaws. Orcs had protruding teeth in their lower jaws rather than tusks. About half of the orc females, to hear Tamack tell it, had small enough lower fangs, that they were concealed by their lips when their mouths were closed.

Tamack laughed heartily and then told Broom a good joke.

“The trolls say, that orcs came about because some human men couldn’t keep it in their britches around some troll women,” Tamack said.

“It is like: Really man! Be for real! Look at the size of you. What human male could possibly satisfy a troll woman?” Broom objected.

“Humans can and do mate with trolls. I’ve seen the hybrids—but they’re not orcs—they’re something else again. When humans mate with ogres, you get ghouls. Pray that you never encounter a pack of ghouls,” Tamack said.

“Are ghouls exceptionally formidable?” Broom asked.

“No, just disgusting—and obsessed with getting more human blood into their bloodline. There is a hole in your thesis though. A female does not have to achieve satisfaction to become pregnant,” Tamack said.

“Besides, Ramona could easily satisfy the most insatiable troll woman. I take it that there are at least a few humans as large as Romana,” Tamack said.

Broom shook his head.

“Romana isn’t human and it is rude to discuss people’s personality. Romana made it a point to piss in front of you—just once—to firmly establish his maleness in your mind—just in case you had improper thoughts. You do know that Ramona knows everything that you say to me—and I know everything that is said to Romana?” Broom said.

“I haven’t slandered Romana.”

“How far away is the town?’ Broom asked.

“Far enough that we will have to wait out the Winter before we can go there,” Tamack said.

[NCWEBNUT]

I learned a new word today, and with the upmost respect intended outré suits your writing skills very well rvm45, it stimulates the mind to think about story lines well outside of the normal genre of fiction.

[rvm45]

Chapter Six


10 271






“Do you have coin?” Tamack asked Broom.

“None to speak of,” Broom replied.

“We will search for gulli the next time we go hunting. Gulli has value almost everywhere,” Tamack said.

Some panning in a stream, and later, creating a sluice, convinced Broom that “Gulli” meant “Gold.” It turned out that they were in a gold-rich area and Tamack was an expert prospector.

They had three fat little leather sacks filled with gold before the interminable winter ended. They divided the gold three ways.

Of course, Broom and Ramona were one, but gold in Broom’s possession wouldn’t do Ramona any good, if he wanted to buy something.

Once spring was well under way, Broom; Tamack and the two wolf-dogs headed out.

************ *************** *********************

When they arrived at the city, there was a wall around it and there were orc guards at the gates.

The orcs did look like somewhat smaller and lighter-green copies of Tamack—only the orcs wore well-made black brigandines. They appeared to wear a mail shirt beneath the brigandine, because bright shiny long sleeves of mail came out from the arm pits and shoulders and reached to the guard’s wrists.

Thick brass-studded vambraces anchored the distal end of the mail sleeves, otherwise, any time the arm was raised, the mail would tend to fall and expose wrist or even the entire forearm.

The orc spoke to Broom. The 7-foot tall orc with his underbite, sure as Hell wasn’t a wee-person, but damned if he didn’t speak Gaeilge. Broom could only recognize the tongue. He had no idea what the orc was saying.

“Is there a problem?” Broom asked Tamack.

“Nah. He just remarked that he had never seen a troll archer,” Tamack said.

“Do you only speak Trollish?” the orc asked Broom in Old Norse.

“I speak some other languages, but I’m far from fluent in the one that you speak,” Broom said.

“That is ‘Human Speak.’ 85% of the hominid species use it—most as their first language—but at least as a second language. What is up with you?” the guard asked.

“Tamack’s parents found me floating down a small river in a wickerwork basket, when I were but a wee infant. I was raised by two trolls, way out in the boonies, and never learned human tongues,” Broom lied outrageously.

No one would believe the truth. Might as well be creative.

The guard wasn’t sure if he believed Broom’s fable or not, but there was no reason not to let them enter the town.

As Tamack led Broom through the streets, he alternated pointing out things and telling Broom their Gaeilge names, and translating various things that they encountered.

Later, one of Broom’s most distinguishing characteristics was that he spoke Gaeilge with a barbarous Trollish accent.

“I thought that bow and arrows were unknown on this world,” Broom commented.

“I never saw any, but apparently the guard had,” Tamack shrugged.

“What means all this Babylonish jargon? They’re twittering like a bunch of magpies!” Broom asked irritably.

“There is an orc princess from a warm Northern kingdom—warm, but exceedingly poor and barren. No one wants to step up and take her hand and become ruler of her chickenshit kingdom,” Tamack said.

“Then Klondus the Troll stepped forward to claim her hand. She came here, to beg for a champion to challenge Klondus. If she cannot find a champion who can defeat Klondus, she will be forced to marry him,” Tamack said.

“So, why the desperation? Are orcs that opposed to marrying trolls?” Broom asked.

“No. The princess would not be too opposed to marrying an ordinary troll—though I’m sure that she would prefer a fellow orc. The thing is: Klondus is infamous for a certain modus operandi. A few months after they are married, he will fabricate evidence to ‘prove’ that she cheated on him. Then he will have her enslaved and sold to a brothel. He will loot everything that can be looted from the kingdom and then he will look for his next fiancé. He has done this at least five times before,” Tamack said.

“If everyone knows it is a scam, then why haven’t they put a stop to his depredations?” Broom asked.

“Klondus is quite formidable,” Tamack shrugged.

“Would you be afraid to fight him?” Broom asked.

“Not afraid—but there would need to be sufficient profit or provocation for me to challenge him,” Tamack said.

A few of the orcs apparently spoke Trollish, because several of them glanced at Tamack as if he was talking out of his asshole.

They went to the marketplace and exchanged some gold dust and some nuggets for some coin of the realm. They had a good carbohydrate-rich meal, featuring both bread and mashed potatoes along with plenty of milk gravy.

“Let’s go see this freak show,” Broom said.

************ ************** **********************

The orc princess was sitting on a sturdy and very ornate chair—or a simple but sturdy throne—depending on your interpretation.

“Any potential suitors need to talk to the princess and get her permission to contend for her hand,” Tamack said.

Broom examined the princess. From time to time, she would stand up and turn slowly around to let everyone have a good look at her.

She was maybe 6-foot 8-inches tall and she was a mellow lime-green color. Her lips hid her prominent lower fangs, unless she smiled.

The princess carried more muscle than the most heavily muscled female bodybuilders that Broom had ever seen—but unlike the bodybuilders who were floating in male hormones and who had diligently tried to purge every bit of fatty tissue that it was possible to purge…

The princess had a soft feminine face and generous and natural bazongas.

Perhaps it was a bit off-beat, but Broom had often been turned-on by a female bodybuilder showing off her peaked; split bicep. The primping and showing off was so typically female—even if few females had a split in 18-inch biceps.

What chilled Broom’s nascent enthusiasm, was the certain knowledge that such a body was a temporary phenomenon, brought about by a rigid schedule of workouts, strict diet and a large cocktail of drugs that couldn’t be maintained indefinitely.

Like the cherry blossoms, it was an evanescent phenomenon.

But then again, all life is a fleeting, evanescent phenomenon.

While, regrettably, the orc princess didn’t seem to have any tendency to strut; primp and flex, on the other hand, her physique was innate.

“Why isn’t anyone speaking to her?” Broom asked.

“Do you see that oversized troll standing close to her? That is Klondus,” Tamack said.

The top of Tamack’s head would just come even with Klondus’ bottom lip. He looked half-again as wide as Tamack. He had shredded-wheat style muscles piled on top of well-defined muscles.

Half of one of his long; pointed ears had been chopped off and there was a deep scar running from the corner of his left eye all the way to the corner of his mouth. The scar pulled his whole face into a fierce asymmetrical sneer.

“Don’t tell me that they’re intimidated by that punk!!” Broom said in amazement.

“I’m going to speak to the princess,” he added.

He made a kissing gesture with his lips as he passed Klondus, just to infuriate him.

“If you blow his brains out, with that thing that you call a ‘Revolver,’ you will never leave here alive,” Tamack warned.

“Neither will he,” Broom replied blandly.

“Princess,” Broom said.

“I am Princess Daniela. Don’t you kneel in the presence of royalty?” she asked.

“Tell her that I kneel to no one but God. Now, if she wants to knight me, I will kneel before God to accept my knighthood,” Broom said when Tamack translated.

“I speak Trollish,” the princess said.

“Are you willing to let a human contend for your hand?” Broom said.

“You would die to no purpose,” Daniela said sadly.

“What? Is there a strong contender for your hand? I thought that I only had to defeat that lover of young ogre boys,” Broom said while pointing at Klondus.

“You might as well let him be your champion, since I intend to kill him anyway. At least that way, he’ll die fighting for something!” Klondus roared.

“Yeah, about that—if there were no better men than you in the world, I wouldn’t need toilet paper. I’d just grab one of y’all’s punk asses and wipe with you,” Broom said.

Klondus rushed at Broom with his sword drawn back.

“Hold on! Hold on! I need to clarify something first. I’m a shape-shifter. Will that disqualify me, if I shape-shift?” Broom said.

“Do you become a dragon?” one of the referee’s inquired in a hostile tone.

“No, no, I definitely cannot turn into a dragon,” Broom said.

“Any other form is acceptable then—no dragons. A dragoon might destroy the whole damned town as collateral damage,” the referee said.

“Okay. According to the rules, I get to select a weapon,” Broom insisted.

“Don’t you have a weapon!?!” the referee asked in disbelief.

“Well actually…no. I meant to buy a weapon in town. I didn’t know that I’d encounter a chance to win a bride and become the ruler of a principality, simply by slaying a midget,” Broom said.

Broom selected what looked like a top-quality Zweihänder sword. Well, in an orc’s hands, it would only be a rather longish Longsword.

Tamack had warned Broom that his lightning would have little-to-no-effect on a troll.

“What are you? A werewolf? Everyone knows that werewolves cannot be cut or pierced, except by mystic weapons made of Silfur. However, your eyes are vulnerable. Your bones can be broken, even while protected by your impenetrable skin. You can be strangled to death as well. I have slain more than one werewolf,” Klondus boasted.

‘Note to self: “Silfur” apparently means “Silver” in Trollish,’ Broom thought.

“Werewolf, your candy ass! You’re gonna wish that I was a werewolf,” Broom said.

Klondus’ Broadsword was almost as long as Broom’s Zweihänder and it weighed a bit more. Klondus wielded it in one hand, striking at Broom as if he was trying to kill a snake in high weeds.

Broom deflected three blows skillfully and then managed a thrust that made a small cut above Klondus’ right eye. With any luck, blood might run into the eye eventually…

Then Klondus went berserk. He pounded Broom’s guard like some sort of demented blacksmith beating an anvil that had offended him.

Sometime around the sixth or seventh blow, Broom’s sword broke.

The assembly sighed. For a moment, it had appeared that Broom had a slight chance of winning, if he could continue to wound Klondus and he could take advantage of Klondus’ towering rage to wear the troll out. Now it was hopeless.

Broom shrugged. He wanted to beat this blowhard with his own three hands, but now he’d need to summon Ramona. That had become far easier to do, over the long Winter.

The spectators gasped. They had expected Broom to shape-shift into something more formidable. Instead, he had transformed into a very slight—from an orc viewpoint—maiden—again, to an orc’s perception.

“Trollish piece of shit!” Ramona said as he cast aside the broken sword.

The sword probably wasn’t forged by a troll; but Tamack had told Broom that troll-made weapons were famous for their lack of quality. That’s why Tamack carried human-forged weapons.

Everyone sighed again. The 18-inches of blade; the extra-large cross-guards and the foot-long handle still had some tactical advantage—but Roman unwisely cast it aside.

Klondus chopped downward, aiming to split Ramona down the middle. Ramona contemptuously slapped the flat of the sword—knocking it to one side.

After three slaps, Ramona took a step back.

“You are a warrior—though a weak swordsman and an evil person. Your next attack will be your last action on this Earth. Make it an attack worthy of a warrior,” Ramona said.

Klondus aimed a powerful blow at Ramona’s head. Ramona pulled Klondus’ sword arm out straight and dislocated the elbow—a massive dislocation.

Ramona quickly switched arms.

“I surrender! I surrender!” Klondus shrieked.

“Has Klondus ever allowed a client to surrender, when they knew that they were defeated?” Ramona asked the crowd.

“NO! NO!” they screamed

Ramona knew that the crowd had also screamed:

“Give us Barabbas!”

Broom glanced at Tamack.

“It is true. He slew many clients who were pleading for mercy. If you spare him, not only will it disrespect those folks that he slew; you will also be breeding future problems for yourself,” Tamack said.

Ramona broke Klondus’ fingers one at a time.

“While I’m doing this—you should take the opportunity to get right with Jesus. You will meet him soon,” Broom said.

When all of the fingers and thumb on Klondus’ left hand were thoroughly mangled, Ramona dislocated Klondus’ left elbow as well. Then he positioned himself behind Klondus and fed.

“Vampire!” the crowd buzzed.

“A very powerful vampire, that can blithely walk about in sunlight,” the crowd added in dozens of asides.

“Now, are y’all gonna rush up here like a mass of lemmings, wanting to challenge me? Or have I won the princess’ hand?” Ramona asked.

No one stood up to challenge him. That was one reason that he had tormented Klondus for awhile. Not only did the man deserve to suffer some, but it was a handy way to deter the ambitious.

The princess regarded Ramona.

“Never in my life have I contemplated being intimate with a woman,” she said in a less-than-pleased voice.

“I despise vulgarity, but if you will lend me your hand for just a moment, I will prove to you conclusively that I’m not a woman,” Romana said.

“I will take your word that you are a man, if you say so. You are a vampire though,” Daniela said.

“I can’t argue with that,” Ramona said.

“Who will I wed—you or the human?”

“Es Macht Nichts. We are the same person—like a right hand and a left hand,” Ramona said.

“This will be interesting. Use this form at our wedding. It will be fun to hear the nidderlings gossip,” Daniela said.

[rvm45]

Damned Nation!

I somehow switched from 1st person to 3rd person, without realizing…

My OCD Ass will have to fix that—eventually….

[feralferret]

Very entertaining chapter.