//------------------------------// // Chapter twenty six, Chaos Curriculum: Science Matters. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -Spitfire- “We came, we saw and we kicked its marinara covered ass!” I flew up, but didn’t go too high or far from the group. “Who’s ever heard of a linguini noodle covered in marinara sauce anyway?” Well at least the annoying cat Jaded wasn’t complaining about her messed up leg, those corn chips really dug salt into her badger wounds and she’s been griping about it for the last hour or so. “Alfredo sauce goes much better with linguini noodles. Thanks for carrying me Sekhet and thanks for rescuing me Maries.” “Anytime beloved Jade.” The goat headed Maria answered. “You’re paranoia to bring along two of the five medical kits you had stashed behind the Hayburger counter was quite warranted it seems.” The so called war goddess commented dryly. Sekhet seemed kind of aloof towards me, but everyone else she treated warmly. I have been meaning to ask Sekhet how she knows Celestia, but I doubt that now was really the time to gossip. Not when we’ve been busy avoiding the many strange creatures since we got past the noodle incident. I’m talking strange creatures like the flying stingrays with bladed bee stinger at the end of their tails, they appeared the second time I tried to fly high and ahead of the group. I would like to think that I’ve learned my lesson to slow down, because if I didn’t Jade would keep taunting me about every incident I got into. There were also these things we’re going to call ‘literal woodchucks’, which spent what seems like an eternity chasing us while chucking logs, tree stumps and branches at us. Sekhet kept driving them off with blasts of light, but they still kept coming back with more wood. Where were the ‘literal woodchucks’ even getting the wood from? I haven’t a clue… we were in some plains with deadly grass, magically malicious flowers and smiling exploding pineapples with lazy eyes. There was just the one thing that was worse than all the rest. “Doo-doo-doo-doo-de-doo~, WEEEEE!” A watermelon nearly smashed into Flamberge, he pulled his sword and sliced it into two flaming halves with the sword that is supposedly on fire all the time unless it’s asleep. Ah yes, the one really annoying thing out here… the kamikaze watermelons that fly by farting air out their backsides. You could at least hear them coming, since they were always quite loud and they made that same annoying noise before they were about to hit something while screaming with glee. There were just so many of those damn things and they came at us at random, at least the pineapples didn’t do anything if you didn’t excite them in any given way. The second you did something exciting near a pineapple, they would explode and try to cover us in sticky fruit juices. By comparison the watermelons were always actively attacking us when we let our guards down. I don’t think I’m going to touch a watermelon for a year after this. “I think I’m scared of watermelons now, I mean I thought Wary Berry was kidding about deadly fruit and here we are actively waiting for the next one to come at us.” Jade clutched closely to Sekhet who had grown slightly in size to accommodate her. “Do you think she somehow got temporarily stuck in the chaos realm and that’s why she’s always thinks that fruit is out to get her? I know for certain she’d hate it here and would probably proclaim that she was right about every bad thing she’s ever said about fruit.” “I think we’re almost done being attack by them now Jaded, though I must admit they are trying even my nearly infinite patience by singing that annoying tune over and over.” Sekhet muttered loudly so we could all hear her. She was leading us to what looked to be an upside down mountain in the distance. “Well at least they aren’t highland pukwudgies, I’m feeling really useless here.” Without her bag of tricks Jaded seemed to have very little in the way of defending herself, kind of sad really. Ten seconds later an entire log slammed into the ground in front of us, we could hear the loud sounds of pan flutes and harps playing beautiful music. “Jade… what are the chances that pukwudgies exist in the chaos realm?” The chimera asked while shivering, whatever scared a chimera would definitely scare me. We heard thunderous sounds and a shadow soon fell over us and we looked up at what was standing over us. Shining might have thought the pukwudgie attacks at Airship Mauled were bad, but this would probably be worse. -Jade, twenty minutes later- “Thanks for the lift and the wagon for my friends to move me around in guys!” I waved to the giant pukwudgies that started to stomp away. “Gabba gabba!” One giant pukewudgie intoned while waving back at me before setting off with numerous other friendly giant mutant hedgehog creatures. “Benevolent giant pukwudgies, who knew?” The three heads of Maries’ stated in unison with some laughter in their harmonized voices. Mara followed up that statement. “Our beloved Fizzle is never going to believe this one.” “Even if I were to back you up on it? Anyway, enough musing about the heroic and surprisingly friendly chaos pukwudgies, we’re close to where we need to be.” Pointing a paw ahead of us up the hill, Sekhet made us look at the one foot high stone wall surrounding what would be the very tiny peak of the mountain we were all standing in the shadow of. Making our way up, we could see the land mass floating above us was barely touching the ground beyond the only open spot in the very small stone wall. The spot with a large toll booth ahead of us. As we approached it, something popped up into the booth. A very highly familiar figure. “I be Quintessential Quarrelsome Quality Quintin the Quirky, I disparage crows and assert my own reality!” He shouted out that last part towards me before asking something also familiar. “What’s your barter?” It was definitely the same guy that exploded a just few hours ago and Spitfire looked to be having a really bad brain fart. “How the…” Spitfire started up, only for Sekhet to cut her off. “What part of chaos realm do you not understand? The ‘chaos’ portion of it or that this is a different world?” In response to Sekhet slightly scathing diatribe, Spitfire’s mouth just clamped shut and she just stared blankly at the troll. “Ten bits says he’ll have the amulet and that we’ll see him again after this occasion!” That was a suckers bet and you knew it Flamberge. He approached the troll, but turned to Sekhet first. “Do we need to get beyond the booth oh great goddess Sekhet?” “Yes, we also need to get onto the mountain and this troll is blocking our way… again.” Once Sekhet figured out the noodle was not a sphinx trap, she absolutely destroyed it for harming me. Salt in the Sweet Badger wounds was not pleasant. I knew Sekhet cared a lot about me, mostly because she was quite vindictive about what the noodle did to me. Never had I seen something shredded so fast or violently before, not to mention she burnt all the ripped up pieces to ashes and then destroyed the ashes beyond that just to make sure it understood her ire. “We wish to pass, what must we do to continue forward beyond this troll booth?” Flamberge asked the not very sane troll. “Quintin is not a few bricks short, especially when I’ve already smashed the house to get more!” Likely meaning Quintin wasn’t going to do the question thing this time, he was going to be smarter about things and given his previous statement about crows… wait a second. “It’s by the fires we’ll fight, to make a pumpkin a far sight! You know, unless it reigns with kings, jacks and queens. We need a siege device and some catering smuggling rings. You must launch for the stars and go the distance, or else you’ll be dead… at my insistence. Do you wish to eat the nut log little firefly?” The troll pulled out a huge wooden club and started to pat it in a loving manner while sending us a grinning fanged face. He was waiting for our answer. Crow? As in… he knows I’ve reincarnated? How in the… right chaos realm and it is a troll after all. Though now everything he’s ever said is quite suspect and probably has more meaning then I’ve given it credit for, what if the troll just sounds crazy and you had to paraphrase everything it said? I now had a headache, because I ‘think’ I understood how trolls think now. “He said he was disparaging the crow, I think that means he isn’t going to deal with me this time or even acknowledge my very existence.” The troll didn’t look like he heard me, I waved my hand in front of his face and it was as if I didn’t exist to him. “He’s actually literally rejecting the reality where I exist to him. Though I’ll still attempt to translate anything he says. He just basically wants us to get a pumpkin farther than he can or else he’ll kill us and won’t let us by him. Though judging by how his previous attempt went, he’s going to try and make this a physical challenge instead of a battle of wits.” “Can’t we just jump over the wall?” Was Spitfire still trying to apply logic to this situation? “It’s only a foot high you know!” “You know very well that we can’t do that Spitfire.” I shook my head at Spitfire in a fake sad manner. “Why it’s the very principle of the matter now. Even if challenging a troll to a contest of physical strength is a really, really dumb thing to do and we could just skip the whole situation entirely. No, we’re taking the troll.” “You don’t care that this is unfair to us in the slightest do you? This guy looks a lot stronger than any of us and he’s definitely going to stack the deck in his favor on this one!” She pointed out the thing this troll had going for him, brawn and the fact that he can apparently survive exploding to death. “Stop talking to the wind chicken hawk, it doesn’t know it can’t talk back! Does the wee little firefly wish to have a taste of the nut log?” He turned back to Flamberge who looked somewhat insulted by the troll and I think this was intentional on the wheedling troll’s part. “You’ll taste my spicy flames before I’ll ever taste you’re…” Having to stop Flamberge from finishing that sentence I shouted. “Phrasing!” Everyone blinked at me, except for the troll who was ignoring anything I did, then they realized what Flamberge was about to fully say and nodded in agreement. “I accept your challenge.” Realizing what we did and because the troll was smiling about it, Flamberge became quite blunt and angry. I wondered what he’d do to win the pumpkin distance contest. -A minute or so later, Flamberge- This heathen is an annoying monster of the highest order, but Spitfire was quite correct in that he was stacking the deck in his favor. The troll had a very small pumpkin with a glowing flame inside to throw, while the pumpkin I had to move was bigger than my body… twice my size even. It was even giggling at me in a derisive manner letting loose bits of flame everywhere as it did so. I was hardly that much bigger than Jaded herself, I was not a mountain sized dragon of the likes of the one known as Lord Torch of the dragon lands. How would I best this monstrosity when my strength is not as great as a troll that is very clearly cheating? I may be a Viking, but cheating wasn’t in my blood. I need to use my wits… unfortunately I have very little of those as my brothers so rightfully pointed out to me multiple times in the past. Why, my only way of winning debates was to be louder than everyone else, something of which I’m known to excel at. Oh… now there’s an idea! “Spite Fire.” I called out to our traveling companion. “It’s Spitfire, what do you want?” It would come to Spitfire’s surprise as much as anyone else’s, but I have a mighty plan to beat this foul being at his own game! Just like Jaded did before, I will beat him with wit. I told them of my plan and they were all surprised that I showed even a hint of great intelligence in it and Jade gave it her seal of approval, as did the war goddess Sekhet. I would be the victor today! It wasn’t long before we were ready to move our pumpkins a great distance. Being the valorous dragon that I was, I let the monster dumber than I was go first. “Flinging with the strength of a ripper I come to thee, make kidney pie from a dragon’s liver that’s the size of a flea~. Going to win me the flesh of which I stripped her, can’t believe that she was just a scaly kipper~. I married the fish and then ate her fist, but she made quite a tasty dish~.” Quintin the Quirky spun around daintily and threw the pumpkin like a shotput. It went a fair distance down the hill and almost landed at the bottom. He turned to me with a very smug grin. Said grin was wiped off his face when he noticed my own. “Are you done?” I asked for clarification, he nodded and thus sealed his defeat. Spitfire was hovering ten or so feet away from the pumpkin and would aid in my endeavor without being directly involved, she just needed to flap her wings and get a strong breeze going like in the tales of breezies that the ponies assist every few years. I loved stories of grand adventure at any scale, this was my grandest yet and this would be a story that will be remembered by many. It would be how I, Flamberge, beat a troll in a contest of strength by using my own special brand of strength as a dragon. I inhaled to fill my chest to the brim with my inner fire. Then I released it all in a roar and a blast of fire that made my ancestors proud, the pumpkin exploded into bits sending flaming pieces of it everywhere. Spitfire started creating powerful gusts that sent the embers of the pumpkin scattering to the four winds. “I win.” The troll just gave me a long disbelieving look, so I explained it to him. “You only moved the pumpkin in one direction. I moved it in all directions at once and scattered it to the four winds. I believe that covers more directions than your pumpkin did.” The troll didn’t say anything. He just took up his large club, roared and then bashed his own skull inwards with it. He fell over with his club embedded in his head and the troll booth’s arm rose up out the way. “He’s dead for sure this time… right?” Did friend Spitfire not really understand the meaning of 'chaos'? Even I was clever enough to know he’d be back.