Free Spirit

Danish family home overlooking the sea | photos by Jesper Ray

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On Kuzco’s first night alone in the jungle, he sees a fly in a spiderweb. The fly screams “HELP ME” then gets eaten.

The theory was that that fly used to be human.

So my roommate really liked that theory and said “hey my dad is actually friends with the guy who wrote Emperor’s New Groove, he can ask him to confirm that theory for us.” (I’m not naming names here I don’t wanna get sued)

So a couple days later we get screenshots of my roommate’s dad’s email asking about the theory and the lead writer’s response:

“The fly is… Kuzco’s late father.”

My roommate’s dad: “is that canon?”

Writer: “It is now.”

So Kuzco’s dad was turned into an animal by Yzma, we assume, as part of her ploy to take the throne. It makes SENSE.

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

(noun) Defined as one who wonders alone, a solivagant is usually an extremely independent person, typically a loner, who has a need for freedom, adventure and transition. A solivagant loves, treasures, and preserves their solitude.

etymology: Latin, solivagus = wandering alone (from soli- + vagus wandering) + English -ant 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

It’s not really written down, except of course in more modern times. But for the vast, vast majority of that time, this knowledge has been handed down orally, from one leatherworker to another, from one generation to the next, in an unbroken line reaching clear back to the fucking stone age. 

And when a new technology arose, of course the new generation would experiment with it as is human nature, only to determine that it wasn’t as good, and go back to the same old tool that had been serving faithfully for tens of thousands of years. 

Fuck. I’ve got one that I made from a deer rib bone that I got from a deer a hunter friend of mine killed. (I got some venison too and it was delicious.) I’m using it to waterproof leather to make myself some moccasins to wear while hiking (which are another example of an old, old thing still being the best thing).

And I’m holding it now, reading this article and watching this documentary, and it’s kind of humbling and exhilarating all at once, to have something in your hand that so viscerally ties you to a thousand generations of your ancestors, people you’ll never know the names of but lived and worked and died using this same fucking thing. 

I just. 

By the time you realise that they can traverse water, it’s too late. The surviving members of your unit manage to make it back by shedding their excess gear and running for their lives; the slower ones were crushed to death within minutes.

You later describe the creature to one of the humans you captured, wanting to know the name of the monstrosity that will haunt your nightmares for cycles to come.

The human smiles as it speaks a single word, slowly and distinctly, in its barbaric tongue.

And at first you are, you’ve learned how to dodge. You’ve learned where their territories are. You know how to defend yourself.

But then one night you are sleeping in your shelter. You’re in a tree covered temperate part of earth. It seems benign. There are been no sightings of the dreaded “hippos” around. Not even any bears. But there is a slight rustle of the undergrowth. You try and ignore it telling yourself it is just the wind.

Then you hear the rustle again. closer this time.

You peer out into the darkness but see nothing amongst the trees.

The rustle again and now you realise you can smell something. It’s musky and slightly foul. It’s the smell of an omen, a warning. But what of? Where is this smell coming from.

You sit up, but it’s too late. The foul smelling creature is on you. You are hit with 17kg of coarse fur and vicious bites. Long dark claws tear in to you and you are pinned down white the striped creature tries to bite your throat.

It takes some doing but you manage to wrestle free. Blood drips from your wounds and already they itch with the sign of infection. The creature has a bloodied snout, rust rad, mingling with the black and white hairs. It lets out a terrifying growl from the back of its throat and looks to attack again. It’s between you and your knife, so your only choice is to back away.

Eventually the creature gives up and snuffles off in to the undergrowth, down a hole near your shelter you hadn’t noticed before.

When you make it back to your base you once again consult the captive human.

BAMrumblerumblethumpcrash!!!

You lost Jaxurn to a plant. Not even a mobile or carnivorous plant, just one that caused a vicious allergic reaction on contact that killed him in less than a rai'kor. Commander Vura'ko died to an insect bite, a tiny local pest that sucked a tiny bit of her blood and apparently replaced it with a bit of its last meal, which was full of disease. Backwash. She died to bug backwash. And yet you honestly envy them after that… thing you encountered…

When you got back to base the quarantine officer refused to let you inside. They had to roll a containment tank outside to put you in, because you all knew there would be no chance of eliminating the smell if it got into the ship’s air ducts. Smell. You wonder if your nasal slit will ever recover from this stench.

And the smell would. Not. Leave. After incinerating your gear the Q.O. had you use every cleansing agent they could think of, including a few janitorial ones, and still everyone fled the stench if they were downwind of your tank. Desperate to protect everyone’s nasal slits from the smell the quarantine officer interrogated the humans. From them, a glimmer of hope: there was a cure. Somehow the juice of a certain fruit on this mudball was the only thing that could break up the chemicals in the little horror’s spray. Immediately the Q.O. sent a team to recover buckets of the stuff and made you bathe in it. That was hours ago and it didn’t seem to be working, though. All it was doing was turning your blue skin an interesting shade of purple.

Sighing in frustration you wave the med-assist on duty over, who only approaches after checking the wind direction. Annoyed, you flip on the tank`s vox speaker.

It came for someone almost every night. 

Any soldier alone was a viable target for this native monster that moved unseen by any but the security viewers, usually only spotted in hindsight.  They were taken as silently as this earth-monster moved.  Sometimes they’d find the remains in the morning taken up a tree and hung there, mostly eaten, as if it were a grisly reminder that the monster was still there, waiting unseen, to strike again. 

What little they saw of the monster on the vidfeed showed true horror.  Yellow eyes that shone with all the light it could gather.  It had fangs as long as his grasping digits.  Claws half that size formed curved hooks that allowed it to climb up their fortifications with impunity.  And in the underbrush, its spots made it almost impossible to see clearly in the undergrowth, if it could be seen at all.

Even the native sentients, the humans, had a healthy respect and fear for it. 

The earth natives called the monster a leopard.  

It was a constant fear that muddied the senses, and let the monster hunt even more effectively as the soldiers were always on edge.  Sleep deprived with fear, it made them even better targets for the monster. 

But rumor was that there was worse on this planet.  Rumors of a monster like a leopard but larger, and bigger in every imaginable sense. Stripped instead of spotted, which leaped from the underbrush with a sound.

The troops were not-quite-looking at her in the way troops do when they don’t want to be seen to contradict a ranking officer, but can’t quite muster a correct Expression of Enthusiastic Assent.  “The name of this species,” she pointed out, “is synonymous with dullness and slowness in the language of the Earth barbarians.”  Well, one language out of several thousand—these creatures needed Imperial guidance more than any other world on record—but there was no point in confusing the rank and file.

“I would warn you not to fuck with us, mate.” Their forced guide, a prisioner, had warned with a chilling grin upon capture. “If you think a moose is bad, wait until you tango with a red back.” To this day Tar'van fears the creature known as the red back, and what horrors it would bring.

The prisioner turned out to be of little help,the stubboness of his people causing them to refuse the danger that the captured human warned of. Tar'van recalls a moment when one of his squad members approached a creature know as a dingo, insistent they had seen these creatures before and they were tame. They barely escaped with 5 of the original 7 members of his squad.

Another moment Tar'van recalls was the brutal mauling they witnessed by the hands of a creature called an ‘Emu’

“Don’t feel too bad,” the prisioner mocked. “We lost a war to the Emu’s as well.”

Now with only 4 members of their squad left, including themself, Tar'van had learned to listen to the prisoner, to be wary of the simplest of creatures. This human was of the sub-species of ‘Zookeeper’ after all.

The ‘Zookeeper’ looks off to the distance, where the creature is.

“It’s a kangaroo, leave it be and you’ll be fine.” Tar'van nods, a human signal of acknowledgement if they are correct. The human smiles a bit.

“That creature cannot possibly harm us.” Tar'van’s squadleader protests. “It is so docile. I will aproach it and bring back it’s head to show this human is a fearmongering liar.”

The human reels back, a look of disgust crosses their face and anger passes through their eyes.

“Fucking do it mate, I dare ya.” The human hisses. The squad leader puffs up their hoinn gland, a sign of pride to their species, and aproached the so called ‘Kangaroo’.

“This will be unpleasant.” A squadmate mutters as they watch their leader raise their fist and bring it down on the creature. The ‘Kangaroo’ looks a little stunned by the impact, before it raises itself upon its strong tail and uses its powerful heind legs to launch their squadleader backwards through the air.

Their squadleader lands upon the ground, unmoving with black blooded oozeing from them. It appears Tar'van is the squads leader now.

“I don’t know what they expected.” the human says, smugness filling their tone. “Kangaroos are fucking shreaded. 8-pack and all.”

Tar'van steps forward to the human, whom inches back in a sign of fear as Tar'van pulls their blade from its holster, and in their first act as leader, frees the human of the bonds around their hands.

They had faced Emu’s. They had lost one in the battle but had experienced them. But this was no emu.

Looking to their guide, they all stare in horror as his face changes from calculating to fear. Pure, heart consuming horror as he stares at the large bird. “Cassowary…” They mimic him in fear. Squawking the horrific name as another joins the first in the mad run towards them.

“Excuse me,” the native Terran guide speaks up in a tired tone, and the squad’s cheers die on their lips. “This is Japan. You haven’t seen what–”

“Silence, worm! No sting can penetrate this plating!”

The guide tries to warn them once again, merely earning a blow that throws them to their knees. The troops set out, morale high, certain in their ability to brave the wildlife now and thirsting for vengeance against the non-sentient native species. One soldier thumps his fist against a tree. A hollow sound follows.

In an instant, the soldier is the centre of a storm of the striped insects. At first, no one pays it any mind. Their little stings cannot penetrate the new plating, after all.

But then the soldier falls to his knees, and the squad stares in horror as the insects enclose him in layer upon layer of their own bodies, all moving. The squad’s medic yells a warning at everyone to stay back, watching the readouts of the unfortunate soldier’s armour on their diagnostic screen with undisguised horror. The insects aren’t even stinging. They simply keep moving, one atop the other, and the soldier’s body temperature is slowly rising until he drops to the ground, quite literally cooked alive. The insect swarm takes off, unharmed save for the ones that were crushed when the trooper fell.

The human bares its teeth. A smile, they call it. Something humans do when they are happy. Yet you can’t help but think of all the creatures with the their large fangs and sharp teeth. (What kind of species uses a threat signal as a sign of happiness?)

“Persistence and ingenuity.” The human answers, still smiling.