9:4
When Dan said stay on the path, Patti listened. Guy hadn’t been wrong so far on these things. Made sense. Stay on the path. Don’t go into the dark. Here be monsters.
But, here’s the thing with being responsible for something smaller and more vulnerable than you, whether it was a kid, a dog you were watching for your brother’s wife, or let’s say a mouse – you could do everything right; you could keep your eye on them, you could keep them on a tight leash – not if they were a kid, that stuff was cruel!; you could do everything right but you blinked for a mikro – a single damned mikro, and that was it.
They clashed with a strange dog that dashed at them, they ate a questionable mushroom, they… oh, let’s go with they jumped out of the house on your belt and dashed off a path and boom – that’s all it took for you to lose your damned mind.
You threw yourself between them and the strange dog with no thought to the sharp teeth set to tear you apart, you shoved your finger down their throat to make them puke up the mushroom as they clamped their teeth down on your finger, you dove off the path you’d told yourself no damned way you were going to leave because that’s just what you do when you are responsible for someone. That’s just what you do.
In that instant when instinct ran up against reason, reason lost.
Was there a chance you’d be ripped up by the dog? Fuck, yeah. Lose a finger – or at least need stitches when the kid chomped on you? Likely. Did that stop you? Fuck no. Because that’s what you do.
So, of course, when Sass jumped out of the house on Patti’s belt and went darting off the path Dan had explicitly said to stay on, Patti dove after the mouse.
She wasn’t completely without reason though. So, she hefted her cudgel, prepared to bash whatever needed bashing, only to be blinded by a blast of bright light as she cleared the line between path and woods. The best laid plans…
Instead of going in like a warrior, ready for anything, she stumbled over the line, swinging her cudgel wildly in the hopes that if something should come at her she’d connect. Maybe.
The first thing that hit her – not physically, shit, at least there was that – was the silence. It wasn’t immediately obvious, had to wait until the blood stopped thundering in her ears and that was several mikros, but once it did… yeah.
The silence was profound. No. The silence was profane. The silence was mother-loving, greasy evil, bad touch pro-freaking-fane.
Deny a bard sight and, well they got whiny but they lived. Deny them scent and, ‘eh. But deny them sound? Yeah. No.
You wanna see someone lose their ever living freakin’ mind, like someone a mikro after being hit by a sledgehammer before the pain kicks in when they are still gaping like a fish popped onto a shore by a freak tornado? Yeah. That. Right there. That exactly.
It was a real testament to how much this was A Thing that it took several mikros for Patti’s brain to catch up and catalog the fact that not only was she completely deaf, but she was blind too.
She blinked and in blinking realized her eyes were open but just not seeing a thing. And didn’t that just set her heart racing? Her eyes darted in her head, ticking in rhythm with her thundering pulse. Which, fuck, she could hear.
Okay. She wasn’t deaf. Or maybe she… nope. Rushing blood, pulsing so hard it was a visceral punch, punch, punch inside her ears, a timpani pounding out “I’m here! I’m scared! Do something!”
Patti flailed her cudgel in an arc. Resistance met the swing, like the air had become honey, hardened by time, sluggish and thick. Or maybe it was time itself pushing back, countering the floundering assault of blood in her veins.
The harder she swung the more resistance she met. Like the world or whatever Off the Path was fought her every movement. The air wasn’t honey, hardening with time. It was sap. It was hardening into amber. And Patti was the bug it was going to trap, suspended within it and time forever.
Well, if her blood hadn’t been racing before that!
She thrashed her arms and she thrashed her legs and…
She thrashed her legs? The fuck?
Blind eyes darting, crazy pulse thumping, Patti kicked. One leg. The other. They both moved freely and at once and it was then Patti realized there was no ground beneath her. Or, if there was, she was not in contact with it.
She stopped the kicking. Stopped the swinging arms. Took a long deep breath through her nostrils. Slowed the dart of her eyes. A little. She slowed the dart of her eyes a very little.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. She clenched her abdominal muscles, shook her ass, pursed her lips as she felt her body move against the resistance of the air or whatever it was exactly she was suspended in.
Could be her crazy panic brain had latched onto something because for sure she was suspended in something thicker than air. Syrup? No. Syrup was sticky and she was not. Not sticky. She darted her tongue over her lips just to be sure. Nope. Not syrup. More like water. If you could breathe water.
Actually that made… sense. If it was like water then the silence made sense. Something about that realization settled like a weighted blanket inside of her, pushing down some of the panic, evening out her pulse so it became more a timpani than a 3-year old banging on a snare with a wire brush.
Maybe the blindness made sense too. Like she was somewhere like that trench in the ocean that she’d heard about and always thought “well, that’s for sure where monsters come from” that was so far removed from the surface that it got no light and the aquatic life that existed near it developed without eyes.
Testing a theory Patti shoved her cudgel into her belt and shoved her shield into the back of her sweater then thrust her arms forward, backs of her hands together and palms cupped outwards, then drew them apart in a long, slow stroke that pulled her through that which she was suspended in. It parted, flowed, heavy, and she glided forward.
Son-of-a-! Patti pulled harder on her arms, kicked her legs, glided more.
Okay. Okay! She still couldn’t see and she still sure couldn’t hear but damn it, she was doing something! She didn’t know where she was going but she was going somewhere and that felt better than standing still. Or floating still. Or… whatever.
Patti couldn’t really say how long she glided through the dark. Could have been mikros. Could have been oras. Her existence narrowed to the persistent pull of her arms and wiggle of her torso and the push of whatever she was swimming through gliding along her exposed skin and pulling at the clothes making themselves known in odd slorps sucking and releasing the skin they covered.
As she swam – she was going with “swam” – she strained her senses for any hint of Sass. All she got for her efforts was more of a sense of the rush of blood in her ears. And still she persisted because ‘that’s what you do’, right?
Without sight or sound she really had no sense of the direction she went in. For all she knew she was just churning her ass in the same spot. But at least it felt like something. Because standing still – uh, floating – in the dark felt a little too much like maybe she was dead or in a coma or something and thrashing her limbs at least screamed “I’m alive”.
Unless she was in a coma or something and was really just lying flat on a bed somewhere with tubes and shit… Nope. Magicker. Couldn’t happen. It was far more likely she’d stepped off a defined path into nothing and nowhere than she was hooked up to a bunch of machines making her breathe and her blood circulate and shit.
And since she was (probably) not dead or in a coma then that meant that she was in a situation she could affect and that kept her scooping her hands through the dark, pulling against the whatever she was suspended in.
A sense of purpose filled her, lending strength to arms and legs. It wasn’t long before the rhythm of the movements settled into something like a song, a steady beat she slowly fed her magic into until she was buoyed by it.
Hoo. Hoo. Hoo. Hoo. She bounced her abdomen to the beat, wiggled her ass in time so her movements became more dance than glide. She shook her shoulders, closed her eyes, gave into the rhythm, let it guide her. The rhythm settled in her, resolved through some odd osmosis into Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry About a Thing”. Only it wasn’t Stevie singing it but a delicate female soprano.
The nulls had produced a movie – movie, moving people on a screen, damn technology was kinda cool! - with animated characters in it some time back in which a female had sang the song. Maybe that’s why it was a female voice and not Stevie’s?
A smile stretched Patti’s mouth remembering seeing it at the drive-in and how all the kids had jumped up from their folding chairs and blankets and danced. And she had joined them without fear of judgment because kids… Kids didn’t look at an adult dancing with them as a weirdo. Well, unless there was inappropriate touching – of the adult by the adult or of the kids – and that was just another thing.
In the moment, jamming out with all those enthusiastic little ankle nippers Patti had actually contemplated a future where maybe she had a kid but… responsibility. Blah blah. How could she? And then along came Sass. Huh.
An image of Sass, standing on her track above the bar, little hands on hips as she well… sassed drew Patti’s thoughts back on track. Sass. Darkness.
She bopped along with the song, arms and legs moving in tandem as they matched the rhythm and pulled herself through the dark. When the first bubble of light drifted towards her from the direction she was hauling she ceased pulling and peered hard at it. What the…?
Due to the nature of whatever the crap it was she was swimming in Patti was able to contort herself in interesting ways as she shifted her head this way and that, pushed her torso forward from the waist with ribs floating free so her shoulders and head extended forward in an exaggerated S as she contemplated the bubble. In her contortions she shifted in the darkness, her angle adjusting to reveal a trail of bubbles behind the one closest to her.
Patti reached a finger forward and delicately tapped the surface of the bubble which instantly popped, releasing an explosion of gilded light.
“Damn!” Patti reared back, flowing backwards with the movement, eyes wide as a cue ball as she watched a golden bubble plop out of her mouth like the world’s slowest bubble gum bubble then release from her lip with a subtle pop of suction before drifting a spare inch from her face.
“The Fuck!” made another bubble which gently collided with the first so that it drifted forward just like the pool ball image that first jumped into Patti’s mind. The first flowed forward, popping as it collided with a glowing bubble heading out of the dark in her direction. The dual pop produced a nova-effect, a ring of light radiating from the point of the contact and carrying with it a distinct sizzle as the light ate the darkness Patti floated in.
It seemed like a pretty flowery way of describing it, light eating darkness, if not for the fact that it did seem to do exactly that as the dark did not flow back in and push back the light like it should have. Instead the light caused by the dual explosion pulsed, not growing but also not dissipating.
Small frown creasing her brow, Patti swam-wiggled in the direction of the small pulsating globe of light. As soon as she got within an arm’s width of it another bubble came from a slight angle and to the front and banged into it. The light globe drifted towards Patti, impelled by the collision of the new bubble even as it expanded to engulf that bubble.
Bubbles came floating from the other direction in a rhythm that matched the song still playing in Patti’s head. ‘Buh buh buh, buh buh, buh buh’ each collided with the larger bubble, impelling it towards Patti. Transfixed by the effect, at first Patti didn’t consider questions like “Is it hot?” or “Will I explode if it hits me?”. As soon as those thoughts did form her eyes bulged and she started backpedaling, trying to get her ass away from the expanding nexus. To little avail as the substance she was drifting in resisted her movements.
She watched with growing trepidation as more bubbles cascaded through the darkness and impacted with the globe of light, nudging it closer to her. There was a sense of the inevitable to the whole thing between her inability to dig her way backwards and the light’s clear ability to defy the darkness and expand towards her.
The surface of the growing globe swirled, spins and flashes of light forming patterns, patterns forming rhythms, rhythms translating to melody that entered her eyes and settled in her chest where it swelled until the pressure was too much and she had to release it.
Rather than let it rip from her chest, which it felt like it might do, she opened her mouth and released the song on an exhale. The golden bubble that formed expanded as the song released from her lungs into her breath into the bubble into the darkness and was impelled by some interior force towards the rippling surface of the other bubble.
The Patti bubble encased the other bubble, the joint mass pulsing outwards on a clear trajectory to engulf her. No matter how she thrashed against the darkness she was suspended in she could not move away from the expanding thing of light.
Clenching her eyes (and her sphincter) like that was somehow going to help at all, she braced for impact with her hands thrown up in front of her face. Rather than an explosion of, well, Patti there was an explosion of sound as she hit the surface of the bubble and was absorbed within it.
One mikro complete and utter darkness-induced silence, the next her senses were blitzed by a burst of sound. Patti clenched her teeth and her butt harder and flinched back, rainbows forming behind her clamped eyelids. Slowly, so-so very slowly, words resolved from the blare, “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing.”
The. Actual. Fuck?
How?
What?
Not one to deny the message of a Song, capital S for Smacked-Up-Side-The-Head-By-Magick Song, and yet really struggling to find her calm, Patti very slowly forced one eyelid up. Only to rear back as a small figure drifted through the other side of the bubble and dropped to the bottom of it.
After the very momentary shock of it all Patti let out a squeak as the dark blob oozing across the bottom of the bubble resolved into the gray and white tones of Sass and the oozing became the scampering of little feet as Sass travelled the very small distance separating them in the roughly five-by-five bubble.
Patti dropped to her knees and cupped her hand on the ground so Sass could climb into her palm. Tears pricked her eyes as she pulled the hand and the mouse into her chest. They more than pricked as Sass patted her boob with a tiny hand. They, in fact, straight up cascaded down her face in a hot wash of happiness and relief.
So overcome was she by her joy at being reunited with the mouse at first she didn’t attribute the sound of, “Don’t you worry about a thing, mama!” to the little face turned up to her or the little mouth mov…
“The Fuck!?”
She flung her hand out as far as it would go on her arm and then maybe even a little more than that as Physicks morphed with her surprise.
For its part Sass had a very, very startled look on its mousy face.
“Don’t worry ‘bout thing?” came tentatively again and the sound was definitely in synch with the movement of the little mousey mouth.
“The. Serious. FUCK!”
“Mah… mah?” dragged out in a small, lyrical voice.
Patti reached forward very slowly with her free hand and gently tapped Sass on the nose. “Did you say that?”
“Mama,” Sass sang in reply.
“Uh, you can talk?”
Sass shrugged. Yep, straight up shrugged. Then wriggled so its little front legs were free of Patti’s grasp and made a distinctly “metza metza?” motion with its tiny hands.
Patti adjusted the question. “You can sing?”
“I can sing!” came a sweet little alto or possibly baritone, it kinda drifted between the bridge of the two.
“You can sing.”
Patti plopped straight down on her ass on the spongy bottom of the bubble and contemplated. When Sass wriggled in her grip, she loosened it and the mouse ran up her arm and settled on her shoulder. Very, very slowly Patti turned her head to eye the mouse. “You couldn’t tell me this before?”
Sass shrugged real deep and shaped its mousey face into a very expressive mousey expression of chagrin. Or that’s how Patti translated it. Who knew. Maybe Sass had gas. She wasn’t an expert on mice. On Singing Mice?
Great Singer of Songs! This was just… Awesome. This was just Awesome! She had a singing mouse. Or, well, a singing mouse had her? She wasn’t real sure on the provenance of this whole thing but they definitely had each other and Sass was definitely a singing mouse and…
“This is awesome!”
“Is!” Sass sang.
“Also weird.”
A beat then Sass sang, “Is?”
“So this is a bit of a mess you got us in, my friend.”
“Is?”
Patti nodded, hard. “Is.”
Sass did the Sass-shrug.
Patti shifted her gaze to take in the bubble they were in. “So, here’s what I’ve got. We are in a bubble. That was created by sound. Which somehow translates to light in this place,” she gave a vague wave with the hand opposite Sass, “After that it’s a lot more questions. Like, why was I floating in the dark stuff but the light stuff seems to have gravity or something? It can’t be as easy as dark bad and light good because that’s too simplistic. Who says floating is bad and sitting is good? No one, right?”
Sass just kept up with a steady stare. Patti stretched her legs out in front of her, her feet butting up against the far side of the bubble and surged on with the thought spaghetti, “Does any sound make the bubble? No. That’s wrong because in theory moving through the darkness should have created some sound. It’s the whole tree falling in the forest thing. So, what is special about my voice? Oh,” she shifted her attention to Sass, “and your voice? Is it any voice?”
Sass continued with the stare.
“As Dan would say ‘unknown’.”
Sass shrugged.
“Seriously, Sass, now that I know you can communicate the mouse gestures are a little irritating.”
Sass trilled and it was real clear that was some serious mouse laughing there.
“Sassy,” Patti muttered half under her breath which lead to another trill and a butt wriggle from Sass.
Patti chewed over an idea then asked, “Are you willing to try something?”
Sass cocked their head.
“Would you sing with me?”
Nod, nod.
Patti started in on the first few lines of “Don’t You Worry About a Thing.” Sass joined in on the third word, their delicate voice interweaving with Patti’s. Something clicked and golden waves flowed from a point between she and Sass where their voices braided together. Like actually braided together. Patti’s voice formed a rope of light, golden in tone; Sass’s was a lighter shade of yellow that contrasted with Patti’s just as their voice did with hers.
The sound made manifest rippled out, like heat waves on a sunny day, until it met the edges of the bubble. At the touch the bubble expanded. With each incremental expansion heat and light released, chasing the chill Patti hadn’t even realized she’d been feeling. Except for where her legs and butt contacted the bubble. There it got exponentially colder. Like “mama grab the hot water bottle, baby’s hypothermic” colder.
Patti reached down with the hand opposite Sass and patted her butt. Yep, definitely a MF ice cube passing for ass. She’d served drinks that were warmer than her butt cheeks atm.
“What is up with my butt?”
This was meant as rhetorical, of course, but rhetorical was apparently not in a mouse’s toolbox because Sass looked up then craned to look at Patti’s rear end. “Up?”
“It’s cold.”
Sass hit all fours and scampered down Patti’s back, hooking their claws into her sweater to help the vertical ascent. The shield there providing a flat surface probably helped. Patti turned her head to look over her shoulder as Sass made a show of eyeballing Patti’s butt then patted it several times with a paw before shifting to pat the surface of the bubble Patti sat on then patted Patti’s ass another time before scampering back up to Patti’s shoulder.
Once they were situated again they sang, “Hooooooman Hard,” finishing on a hummed ‘huh’.
The huh cut off as Sass jerked their head to stare at the wall of the bubble directly across from them. Patti squinted to see beyond the swirling surface of the bubble.
“What is it, Sass? Did Timmy fall down the well?”
Sass stopped their perusal of the wall to tilt their head and give Patti a confused look. “Timmy?” they sang.
Patti waved her hand vaguely. “It’s a reference I heard. Something to do with a hero dog. I meant, is there something up?”
Sass’s, “There’s…” cut off on a screech as a spear of black flew through the far side of the bubble, wrapped around the mouse and yanked.
One mikro Sass was on Patti’s shoulder, the next plastered against the surface of the bubble. Patti scrabbled her feet on the surface of the bubble, rotating her torso so she could slash forward with her arm to grab the mouse. The darkness punched forward. Sass, in its grasp, came flying towards Patti who lunged to grab the mouse, only to have Sass ripped away from her fingertips as the darkness yanked backwards again, slamming Sass against the bubble’s surface. The surface stretched back under the force of the tug and Sass gave a pitiful peep.
“Oh, no, you do NOT!” Patti grunted as she slammed both hands around the mouse, her fingers interlacing over the spear of darkness. It was cold. Infinitely cold. Instant frostbite cold. Still, she held on and braced her feet against the wall of the bubble before throwing the entirety of her weight backwards.
The darkness doubled its efforts to pull Sass free of the bubble and Patti found herself suspended perpendicular to the bubble’s wall as she strained against the intruder. She drew in a deep breath and released it in a harsh exhale of discordant sound that carried in it her desperation and fear. It released as a golden whip that cracked against the surface of the bubble right where the darkness was jabbing through. Light flared at the point of contact and heat erupted as the bubble’s surface expanded more, shoving the darkness out with it and leaving Sass shivering in Patti’s hands as Patti crashed to the bottom of the bubble.
Oof.
Enter The Woods 