Introducing The Crustaceanthropies
Shawty and ¶‡¢ (which, in the tongue of shrimp sounds like wet glass crunching up) have been exhausted from traveling the long and confusing non-euclidian Isometric Möbius highways that act as the sole bridge between their underwater slot canyon valley home in the Puget Sound and the mirror world deep underground leading to the inter-earth.
The artificial tunnels were poorly maintained and the 3 path fork that all led to the same inter-earth gave their stress a threshold check when they had to gamble on which one was the 1:1 path that wouldn't shrink or gigantify them on the path there.
Luckily it was obviously the middle vector.
Their long and confusing journey finally came to an end when they met up with their broken party in the exit caverns, still 12 meters underground.
"Ah-hawwup!" Called Shingle, upon sight, his signature, awkward laugh. "Over here!" *Croak* he called, hoping and waving. "Long time no see!!!" Followed by Gophermole, who was currently scavenging for nothing in particular but committing himself to collecting whatever appeared useful. He showed no visible indication that he either knew them, or was a member of the party. Just collecting geodes, mosses, and cavern pool samples in individual vials, occasionally eating one of these things instead of putting it in his satchel.
"Yo, toad! How's the other side today???" Shawty called out, walking in lock step with ¶‡¢, constantly twitching their antennae together in silent communication, sharing magnitudes of information about the immediate surroundings and environment, so he could be Shawty's eyes. "Hey'ya, Shawty! Crash! Good to see you two!!!" He called back to her.
Since the wet shattered glass sound was truly a hurdle for standard humanoid tongues, everyone called ¶‡¢ 'Crash' for simplicity.
They all traveled together the remainder 60 km journey out of the center of the Earth and to the inter-earth mirrored surface "on the other side", where all the mythological and mystical beings and races hid from a catastrophically disconnected and prejudiced humanity consumed by technology and authority on the "other" surface.
Crash and Shawty were absolutely exhausted and overcome by fatigue before they even made it within more than 8km from their favorite tavern, outside of the metropolis cascade that gradually turned rural the further out you went, before 20km of wilderness separated the tavern courtyard and bazaar from the nearest village or civilized space. "You two go on ahead to 'The Servant's 75¢', and we'll catch up tomorrow morning!" Crash said to an oblivious Gophermole, who was evidently just starting off into space, wearing his Werelobster face, but with a Werepanther body, Weremantis-shrimp legs, and human arms for forelegs. Though the party was used to their amicable Skinwalker, he always had a knack for the unsettling.
Shingle croaked a laugh *Ah-hawwuurp* "I gotcha, gotcha!" He said, grabbing Gopher by the hand. Forehand? Idk. He took Gophermole by the hand and temporarily escorted him out of his own daze.
By the time they got to The Servant's 75¢, Gopher turned right around and went back the way they came. Shingle didn't care and just went to the tavern bar.
While Shawty and Crash rested not far from the cavern mouth, a disorganized Ogre was stumbling about in the vicinity in an abstract fury and distressed rage, a victim of one of life's chaotic and unforeseeable dynamos; coming down from a berserk rage triggered by complete happenstance not 10 minutes earlier. The details of which did not concern the Were-mantis-and-pistol-shrimp symbiotic duo, when his distress and wandering got too close and he directed his berserker rage at them.
Woken from a light sleep, they weren't slow to counterattack, since their antennae were always subconsciously communicating with each other; the subtle vibrations in the ground and air already had Crash ready and transmitting coordinate data to Shawty automatically, in their sleep. They got up and immediately began combat with the berserker approaching aggressively, apparently already aware of them and their location, unexpectedly entering a sprint that defied his bulky structure.
His joints all had an extra 12.5° of range and his flexibility more than compensated for his frame and shape, giving him inexplicably acrobatic movement and agility.
Crash and Shawty had to begin combat with evasion, but quickly overtook the fight when Shawty snapped her claw to create a bright and sudden flash that disoriented their attacker just enough to secure the situation in their favor.
Crash navigated the both of them to a higher ground, just 5 yards away from the berserk behemoth, instantly transmitting information and angles to Shawty through their antennae.
They turned and Shawty fired off a projectile snap that flew faster than sound straight into the Ogre's skull, piercing his brain without cracking the skull, liquefying the prefrontal cortex. Left with his brainstem intact, no noticeable effect was detected, as he immediately sunk into pure threat response and survival instinct. His inexplicable flexibility gave him a surprise advantage as he flung himself through the air at the pair of Crustaceanthropies, blindly consumed by fury and now hunger overriding his senses, trying to crush them with raw speed and mass.
Crash whisked Shawty to safety and abandoned her side to distract their attacker, and draw him away from her, effectively leaving her blind.
But when the Ogre's rage was firmly locked onto Shawty, Crash had to backpedal and attack. Lifting his fore claw and suddenly dashing directly at the ogre, he tapped his long spine into the Ogre's chest, at Mach 6, effectively obliterating his sternum in a body mess of gore and bone.
Gophermole showed up just in time to witness it, and began eating the carcass.
It wasn't even past 3:00 AM yet, but the exhausted duo didn't want any new surprises and trudged the rest of the way to The Servant's 75¢, completely unaware that their compatriot had arrived.
They reunited with Shing' in the bar before dawn, but retreated to the upstairs inn to recover from every angle of 'why me' in the last week. Shingle stayed at the bar until he passed out drunk. Gophermole slept at the edge of the woods on the horizon, in the form of a panther.
Meanwhile, there were family members in deep concern for their brother/son/husband/cousin who had departed from their hovel over 12 hours ago for simple errands and never returned. A horde of Ogres packed together in claustrophobic underground chambers beneath huge tree roots and abandoned Tardigrade-Badger-Platypus tunnels bickered and balked at each other, making and denying demands, creating an increasing cacophony of gruff ogre voices enough to collapse the dirt ceilings and effectively render them newly homeless.
The largest one, a Wereogre, and the father of the deceased, declared himself the leader of a search party. "We're gonna have to tell Gurn he doesn't have a home for his daughter anymore!"
The young 3 year old ogress squealed and gurgled a delighted sputtering giggle and drooled, teething on her grandmother's dark oak 3 string cryvolin.
An explosion of soot and steam collapsed the remaining ceilings because Gorf was tinkering again, and everyone got into brawling witch each other, mostly to calm down their 2 berserker friends who were the deceased's best friends and companions in troublemaking; who lost self control at the drop of a pin. But also because they were all extremely high strung enough all on their own even without Gurn's disappearance.
"ENOUGH" Boomed the patriarch, "Grandma" he says to his wife, "use what smarts you know about far-seeing and look for your son, will you?" "Sure thing, paw." She said, loosing her long sleeve tarp of a shawl, and extracting a crystal ball.
She wasn't skilled or even trained to perform farseeing, but had a natural talent enough that she could follow her son's path for up to the point he encountered a rare Tardigrade-Badger-Platypus and got stung, entering a catastrophic berserk state, which intercepted her ability to maintain connection with the farsight.
"Oh that fine plumb dumb bum found himself a damned Tardigrade-Badger-Platypus!! Or rather I should say the damn thing found HIM! He's flying off the handle, flipping his shit worse than an acrobat with diarrhea, let's all go together, follow me!" The granny ogre initiated without warning or explanation.
Their patriarch didn't like it that she overrided him as the leader, but didn't argue with his wife.
Granny Oma Griselda successfully brought the family and her son's 3 companions to the last known location before he lost his mind. "Fan out everyone" the larger patriarch commanded fatly. - I MEAN FLATLY. Flatly stated. Plain, without girth- I mean weight- I mean intensity!!!
Granny cackled and began playing her cryvolin like a lute, instead of using the bow, and played a jaunty jingle of a tune, setting a mood for the 13 Ogre search party.
But the mood didn't last longer than 3 measures, "I FOUND HIS BODY!!!" Piina, Gurn's acrobatic friend, called out, almost in a scream, when she saw he was dead and more than half eaten.
The disorganized family gained one thread of mutual direction; when the intelligence of the patriarch's Wereogre mind noticed and followed the unrecognizable Crustaceanthropy tracks, all of them followed, as far as they could: the tracks terminating in the direction of The Servant's 75¢, visible from the edge of the wilderness, currently on the horizon now.
Gopher woke up, now in the body of a bear, shapeshifting into a human as he stretched, and started toward the tavern behind them.
Inside the tavern, the party is waking up late and eating breakfast, meeting the new tavernkerp, barkeep, cook, and maid that replaced their old friends whom used to run it, sharing stories about old adventures and learning useless gossip about the nearby infrastructure anomaly and useless, trivial, tavern drama.
Wrapping up over drinks, just as Gophermole arrives as a human and sits with the party, the sensitivity of Crash's antennae picks up on the rapid approach of 13 large bodies, and Shawty's antennae, always intertwined, shared that relay with him instantly.
They showed no distress or concern, treating it like commonplace information, until the crowd stopped outside the tavern and seemed to be in distress and confusion.
"There's a large group of Ogres suddenly outside" Crash said nonchalantly.
Shingle shrugged, Gophermole looked out the window from his seat, only seeing about 3 or 4 of them. Shawty spoke "you think it's about this morning?"
The tension, while it existed, wasn't significant, and Shing' defused it entirely when a Chronosonic Warden descended from the inn upstairs "Get a load of this shiny housie!" He croaked, laughing.
The Human Chronosonic Warden was wearing his celebratory uniform because he was just promoted to the job. A Lapis blue overcoat with actual Lapis Lazuli dust interwoven into the fabric, giving it a constant gold sheen, and jet black slacks gave him a high status aura, like the admiral of a powerful naval force. He carried a leather bound notebook that has a faint cyan glow from within - clearly a digital notebook. Noticing Shingle pointing and laughing at him, he changed course from aiming toward the bar to veering toward the party's table.
"Hello, Valen Cross, newly promoted Chronosonic Warden. Pleasure to make your acquaintances." Extending his hand to the weretoad.
Shingle looked panicked and worried, and turned his eyes to an oblivious Gophermole who was still looking out the window, picking his nose, and then to Crash and Shawty who just nodded calmly. So he reached up and shook hands with the human.
"I'm actually looking to make a new chapter in my journeys, and was hoping to find a band of roguish adventures quite like yourselves! I don't suppose you'd take me along in your travels, strangers?"
Gopher hopped straight out of his chair and ran over and took his hand out of Shingle's, shaking it vigorously with the same hand he was just picking his nose with, "you're the perfect candidate to handle emergency food, happy to have you!" Smiling most sincerely, hiding his skinwalker nature from Valen...
An authentic threat if anyone, or specifically Valen, knew that he was a skinwalker. Shingle barely understood even if you explained it to him, but Crash and Shawty were intimately familiar with skinwalker etiquette and chucked quietly between themselves.
But in that moment, a small blast outside caught everyone's attention, and Crash and Shawty's antennae telegram transmitted an explosion of information between each other, feeling out the vibrations in the air and smog and haze of the soot bomb that just went off, giving them an ironically clearer perspective of the 13 Ogre gauntlet outside. Apparently one of them was a tinkering artificer dunce who compromised the situation and set off instant bickering and violence.
They relayed with each other and looked to Gopher. "They're looking for information about their dead companion, I think we should get moving before drama unfolds or involves us."
Valen intercepted the evasive maneuver by innocently asking "what do you suppose their intentions are?" And put heavy hesitation into Crash and Shawty's hearts.
"They're probably not even going to notice us, let's just go." Gophermole intuited, based on his own secret knowledge of the night before, effectively bypassing the brief hesitation.
The party simply gets up nonchalantly, discussing the infrastructure anomaly offhandedly, and walks out.
The Ogre Patriarch was meditating the cooling off bickering when the party exited, but he was in the middle of their path and slowed their progression. Blocking it entirely when he turned to approach them.
Being a Wereogre, he wasn't as imbalanced as his kin and family, had higher perception and wit, and was only sincerely trying to find information leading to the cause of his son's demise.
He looks down at the group, his expression sincere and heavy with grief. "Excuse me, travelers," his deep voice rumbles, completely overriding the bickering of his family. "I am looking for my son. We tracked his last known spiritual threads to this general area before his blueprint went dark. Did you see or hear anything out on the roads? Please, we just need to know what happened to him."
His granddaughter squeals and squirms in her mother's arms, who proceeds to pass her off to her grandmother, taking a sudden hyperfocused interest in the human, not knowing he's a skinwalker.
Valen Cross’s sharp internal clock instantly registered the high-stakes friction in the air. As a Chronosonic Warden, his mental processing speed allows him to read the room flawlessly.
He looks at his four newfound companions, and a cold flash of realization hits him: these four were most likely the ones who deleted the Ogre’s son last night.
Using this sudden internal suspicion to his tactical advantage, Valen channels the absolute, unfeigned truth of his own ignorance. Because he truly has no knowledge of the event, his confidence remains completely steady. He steps forward, his voice entirely sincere, meeting the Wereogre's searching gaze head-on.
Summoning from his personal journey, he attests, "We just arrived from the North Highway, sir," Valen says, his tone heavy with respect for the father's grief. "Truthfully, the road back there is a mess! There’s a major asphalt distortion loop causing massive traffic delays and throwing off coordinate arrays for miles. We didn't see anyone matching your son's description on our way in. If he passed through that distortion, though, we might never have seen him even if he was right beside us! It might explain why his spiritual trail is warped."
The infant ogress starts having a fit and her grandmother begins offering music to soothe the baby, using the bow on her cryvolin, revealing that she's actually not good with the bow, and just agitating the young ogress even more.
The Wereogre tilts his colossal head, his heightened intellect and wit running circles, trying to validate Valen's speech. Because Valen's personal demeanor is completely clean and he had no knowledge of the incident, the Wereogre finds zero deception or hostility in this human.
The patriarch closes his massive eyes for a brief moment, letting out a heavy, almost sub-tectonic sigh of exhaustion. "I see... a spatial distortion loop. It makes a tragic amount of sense. Thank you, traveler. Your honesty is a kindness." Still hiding his cards.
Finally fed up with the bad and screeching music, the infant ogress thrusts herself to the ground and scurries away from Grandma in distress, though giggling.
This shattered what focus existed and the groups started to relax in their own directions.
The physical and emotional atmosphere of the courtyard instantly warp as the party attempts to filter past the uncooperative horde.
As the Wereskinwalker moves forward, keeping a steady, non-threatening pace, the widowed Mother, Morgra, deliberately leans her massive, hyper-focused defensive body directly into his path attempting a shoulder check... Brakkar didn't even notice.
The toddler, standing near the party's boots, instantly registers her mother’s physical aggression. Operating on a raw, primitive familial link, she absorbs her mother’s unerring faith that these travelers are the anomalies responsible for his dark blueprint.
She doesn't know whether to weep or strike. Paralyzed by the emotional friction, she elects to act as a raw mirror for her mother's malice. She clenches her tiny fists, her little Ogre face contorting, and directs her mother's pure fury outward first, letting out a high-pitched, echoing scream of unadulterated chaotic anger straight at the party's frontline, like a supersonic attack, catching Brakkar's attention.
True to his balanced amicable and intellectual personality, the ogre patriarch completely misinterprets the structural weight of the situation. He takes it lightly, flashing a tired, apologetic smile at Valen. He chuckles warmly, "kids will be kids" he says heavily.
Unlike her husband, Oma Griselda's perceptive wisdom and maternity perfectly registers the child’s baseline instinct. Her sour music cuts off entirely. Her eyes snap open as she picks up on the hyper-specific, terrifying accuracy of the infant's intuition.
She lowers her instrument, her low-willpower defenses completely evaporating as she begins watching the party with genuine, rising alarm. Clenching her flabby fists tightly, lips pursed in increasing fury.
The party is currently trapped in a hypergeometric vise. The giant ogre grandfather is still relaxed, but the widowed Mother is glaring downward, her shoulder check reverberating through the Skinwalker's body, while the Grandmother is actively piecing together the child's screaming accusation.
The Weremantis-shrimp’s hyperspectral vision flags that the window for a peaceful, nonchalant exit is collapsing frame-by-frame. The infant’s scream is starting to draw the eyes of the lazy, mid-tier skirmishers and berserkers in the back line.
Another explosion sends a thick veil of smoke and vapor into the courtyard, instantly setting off the powder keg that these ogres were, causing blind infighting and confusion.
The air inside the tavern courtyard was thick with the scent of sulfur, petrichor, and charred barkdust.
A heartbeat earlier, thanks again to Gorf, a rogue explosion from the back of the Ogre ranks had shattered the fragile morning truce. Now, blinding gray smoke rolled across the cobblestones, plunging the fragmented giant family into absolute madness. Giant men bellowed conflicting orders, throwing wild fists at ghosts in the haze.
But amidst the chaotic fog, three generations of grief and maternal instinct operated in terrifying, silent synchronization.
"Look out!" Valen Cross shouted.
Morgra, a mountain of scarred muscle and burning fury, lunged through the haze. Her eyes were locked onto Gophermole's last known location. She brought her colossal fist downward in a sweeping arc meant to grind the travelers into dust.
Valen moved with the disciplined grace of a trained warden. He didn't draw his sword to spill blood. Instead, he planted his boots, thrust his hand forward, and wove a shimmering wall of chromatic force directly into the strike path. The Ogre’s fist slammed into the invisible barrier with a sound not unlike a tolling cathedral bell. The shockwave vibrated through the stones, completely halting her momentum, but Valen's wall held firm.
Behind him, Sula, the three-year-old Ogre toddler was screaming, her shrill voice acting like a homing beacon for her otherwise dazed family.
"I've got the little hopper!" Shingle loudly croaked.
The massive, human-shaped Weretoad dropped his center of gravity. With a wet snap, his long, muscular tongue shot through the smoke like a whip. It wrapped gently but securely around Sula's waist, plucking her off her feet and yanking her backward, and then he relinquished his tongue. With a soft thud, the infant landed safely in a large hay bale across the courtyard. The sudden, dizzying flight completely broke her tantrum, replacing her fury with wide-eyed, childish bewilderment.
To the left, Oma Griselda raised a crude, stringed instrument, preparing to play a disruptive, jarring melody to disorient the travelers.
She never got the chance.
Crash’s compound, multi-spectrum eyes flashed, his legendary vision piercing the smoke to calculate the exact distance. Silently, using their antennae, he communicated to her "Now, Shawty! Three paces ahead, chest height!"
Shawty, virtually blind regardless of the haze but trusting her best friend implicitly, snapped her oversized, spring-loaded arm claw shut according to his instructions. A blinding flash of compressed air and localized heat erupted from her chitinous limb. The resulting acoustic boom was nigh cataclysmic: a roar that shattered the tavern’s front windows and blew the remaining smoke completely out of the courtyard. The grandmother dropped her instrument, clutching her ringing ears as she stumbled backward in a total daze.
In the clearing air, Brashar, one of Gurn's berserker friends came barreling toward their flank, eyes bloodshot with rage. Crash virtually vanished, blurred on his hyper-flexible joints. Moving with the terrifying velocity of a striking mantis shrimp, the armored, human-shaped crustaceanthropy slipped beneath the giant’s guard and delivered a lightning-fast slap to the beast's jaw. The impact echoed across the courtyard, knocking the berserker out cold before he could even register the movement or hit the ground.
The widowed mother pushed past Valen’s fading barrier, her face contorted with furious desperation. But Gophermole was already prepared.
The skinwalker's body rippled. In a grotesque display of fluid adaptation, his right arm swelled, morphing almost instantly into the heavily armored, jagged crushing claw of a deep-sea lobster. Gophermole didn't strike to harm. He swept the massive, flat side of the mutated claw in a swift arc, swatting the heavy matriarch just barely off her feet. She hit the cobblestones with a heavy groan, flat on her back, completely knocking the wind out of her.
Silence returned to the courtyard, save for the groans of the dazed giants. The elite elder patriarch was finally pinning down his son's remaining berserker friends in the back. He looked up through the empty air, his sharp, intelligent eyes scanning the devastation. His family had been completely dismantled in less than ten seconds—and not a single lethal blow had been struck. It was a terrifying display of absolute restraint.
Valen lowered his hand, his expression neutral. "We are leaving," he firmly said quietly to the patriarch. "Check the North Highway. We want no part of your grief."
The elder patriarch, recognizing the overwhelming capability of the strangers, slowly nodded. "Go," he rumbled heavily, tasting regret at the word.
The five companions turned and walked away, blending seamlessly into the morning highway traffic.
The Ogres' Evening: The Birth of the Hunt
As the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in bruises of purple and ash, the Ogre family gathered in the dim, shadowed sanctuary of the tavern. The initial chaotic rage had burned out, replaced by a heavy, smoldering silence. The widowed mother sat by the hearth, her face tightly set as she nursed her bruised side, her eyes gleaming with an unyielding, unerrable certainty.
The elder patriarch sat across from her, his massive chin resting in a giant hand. His heightened intellect and wit were operating like a slow-burning furnace, replaying every micro-second of the courtyard disaster.
"They were too precise," the widow whispered, her voice cutting through the quiet groans of the recovering berserkers. "They didn't just fight us. They managed us. And Sula knew. Brakkar, She knew."
Slowly, over the long hours of the evening, the pieces fell into place within the patriarch's brilliant mind. Brakkar recalled the perfect, blind accuracy of the pistol-shrimp woman's sonic blast, guided flawlessly by the armored mantis-shrimp's multi-spectrum eyes. He remembered the unyielding wall of the human scribe, and the terrifying, casual weight of the lobster claw that had swatted his daughter-in-law.
Most importantly, he realized Sula, his three-year-old granddaughter, hadn't been throwing a road-weary tantrum. Her tiny, primal spirit had instinctively recognized her father’s killers.
A profound, chilling shift rippled through the patriarch. The internal bickering of the family died that night. In the shadows of the hearth, their uncooperative nature vanished, forged into a single, terrifying smoldering locus of vengeance. They finally had a definitive target. In the corner of the room, sitting on grandma Oma Griselda's lap, the toddler blinked. The immense emotional trauma and spiritual resonance of the day hardened her eyes, inducing a deep sleep upon her, her memory of the five travelers permanently burned into her mind as a hunting blueprint.
The Party's Evening: The Campfire Concession
Miles down the highway, the five companions pulled off the road, setting up camp beneath a canopy of ancient, whispering trees as night locked over the world.
Valen Cross sat near the crackling fire, quietly writing in his leather-bound ledger. He had recorded everything: the murder from the night before, the names, the exact coordinate metrics. He was an Akashik Witness; his reports were strictly for record-keeping and universal indexing. He held no intent to judge or betray them, but his ledger held the absolute truth.
The atmosphere was peaceful, almost enough to make Valen question the grim data in his notes, until Gophermole stretched his limbs by the fire. Breaking the quiet night air with absolute, catastrophic nonchalance, the skinwalker plucked a piece of gorp from his teeth and looked over at Valen.
"Man," Gophermole said casually, his voice completely devoid of tension. "That big guy back at the tavern today... his family was sure making a fuss. It's kind of hilarious they were hunting all over for his son. They would've totally lost their shit if they knew we were the ones who completely shattered his spine flexors and deleted his brain's blueprint into the dirt right down the road last night." Casually wearing a terrible impression of the Ogre's appearance while he said it. Having not consumed enough generic material to actually steal his face, the imitation was grotesquely wrong looking, even for an ogre.
The campfire popped in the sudden, dead silence that followed.
Crash’s oversized, multi-spectrum eyes froze. Shawty slowly shifted her gaze to the dirt, her human-like crustacean frame stiffening as she realized their cover was entirely blown. Shingle the Weretoad just let out a heavy yawn, and belched, completely missing the gravity of the moment as he rolled into his bedroll and drifted into a careless sleep.
The rest of the night was an agonizingly tense vigil. The crustacean-human hybrids sat in tight coordination, their antennae twitching in silent, rapid communication as they heavily reconsidered the safety of keeping this human addition in the team. Nearby, Gophermole began his unsettling resting ritual - shifting his face every hour to let each of his five werebeast aspects sleep in cycles, rippling from human to werepanther, to werebear, to wereserpent. Valen watched the grotesque display calmly, keeping his hand near his ledger, securing the least amount of sleep out of everyone in the camp.
When the morning sun finally broke through the trees, the heavy, defensive paranoia of the night cleanly evaporated along with the morning dew. Realizing that the human scribe had spent the night simply writing and indexing rather than drawing a blade to apprehend them, the Crustaceanthropy pair relaxed over a breakfast of dry trail mix.
A genuine burst of morning camaraderie washed over the campfire. The party decided it was time to officially introduce themselves to the Warden.
"Well, if we're going to be walking the highway together, you should know who's at your back," the skinwalker grinned, his face firmly human again. "I'm Gophermole, cuz a gopher and mole were in the vicinity when I was born."
The massive, human-shaped toad stretched his arms and webbed fingers and offered a hearty nod. "Shingle. Best brawler this side of the bog. All challenges accepted!"
The armored mantis-shrimp hybrid stepped forward. He let out a vocalization from his throat that sounded exactly like a handful of wet, broken glass being crushed under a heavy jackboot. He laughed at Valen's blinking expression. "Humans can't say it. Just call me Crash. I'm the eyes of our frontline." He nudged the human-shaped pistol-shrimp beside him. "And this is my best friend and projectilist, Shawty."
Shawty offered a sharp, friendly nod, her true deep-sea name kept a strict secret between her and Crash. Valen smiled, smoothly quashing any remaining doubts and locking the five travelers into a unified front.
Meanwhile, back at the tavern courtyard, the morning sun rose high into the sky, but the newly unified Ogre Gauntlet completely slept in.
The intense emotional fallout of the previous day, combined with the three-year-old infant’s exhausting late-night breakthrough, had left the family's physical reserves entirely spent. The widowed mother was snoring heavily, her massive vitality pool slowly recovering from the lobster-claw swat. The patriarch remained slumped against a bench, his brilliant tactical mind temporarily offline as his system rested.
They were stationary for now, wrapped in a deep, heavy slumber—but the embers of the hunt were burning hot, patiently waiting for them to awake.
WHAT, where was I going with thus again?
The morning sun was careening up the horizon when the five companions packed their camp along the highway, the tense paranoia of Gophermole’s late-night confession still fresh in the air. Before Shingle could hoist his bedroll, the local atmospheric pressure plummeted to nearly absolute zero.
A loud, theatrical cough echoed from a space that didn't exist a fraction of a second prior.
Stepping out from behind a colossal, ancient cedar tree was a figure dressed in an impossibly tailored tweed suit that flickered with a static, holographic glare. He leaned heavily on a cane topped with a glowing, miniature model of a hypercube. "Oh, thank goodness, real people! Or, well, close enough to people, I suppose..." Q said, peering through a monocle at Crash and Shawty with absolute delight.
"The local translation arrays are an absolute circus out here. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Q. Just Q. A cosmic surveyor, minor deity, and full-time enjoyer of dramatic irony. I've been tracking an absolute administrative disaster down the road, and frankly, your little band looks like the perfect crowd to hide behind."
Shingle made a protesting croak and Valen Cross immediately opened his leather-bound ledger, his internal clock registering a massive chronological anomaly radiating directly from the newcomer. "What kind of administrative disaster?" Valen asked cautiously.
Eyes gleaming, Q smirked, pointing his cane down the path behind them. "See for yourselves. I had to dump a rather... let's call it a developmental oversight right into the local geography."
"Just two miles back down the North Highway, the road doesn't just warp." He been explaining.
The major asphalt distortion loop that Valen had previously used as a clever trick to throw off the Ogre Patriarch now had an actual job potential.
The highway tarmac spun like a liquid record player, folding in on itself in a hypergeometric loop. "And trapped right at the center of the distortion, acting as the anchor for the entire anomaly, is Toidi Derewoprevo Ylomona." Q went on.
"He's completely harmless, really," Q explained cheerfully, as the party stared back down the road at the shimmering, geometric mess on the horizon. "He's functionally blind, nigh eternally stationary, and currently serving as the background text generator for the universe's upcoming tutorial screens. But because his spatial weight is so massive, he’s created a permanent roadblock. I figured if I left him there, your giant friends from the tavern would-"
Crash twitched and Shawty shot at Q reflexively. The sudden sonic boom and flat click of her claw shocked Gopher by the suddenness and got Shingle riled up. Gopher fluctuated through a series of his faces and sneezed. "Whatdya do that for? Scared the scat outta me! And the fertilizer!" But the Weretoad launched a leaping punch at Q.
"o..." Q whispered briefly "Oh heavens! What has gotten the lot of you so springy? Had I misspoke? Please forgive me."
Shawty started interrupting, "No, no wait wait that was my fault, it was an accident I- wait why are you still alive?" To which Q heartily laughed with a snobbish delight "My friends! Perhaps you will better ask Mr. Cross in your own time, that is much too much to discuss in short order. One thing at a time!"
"I meant, only, that they much stumble right into him while searching for you, giving you the perfect head start!"
Gophermole, his arm briefly rippling into a lobster claw out of sheer reflex, grinned widely. "A permanent decoy that breaks the road and repeats random dialogue? Yeah, you're definitely joining the party, suit guy!"
"Oh, heavens no," Q scoffed, holding up a manicured hand as Gophermole stepped forward to welcome him. "Join your little traveling circus? Travel down these poorly maintained Isometric Möbius highways on foot? I think not. I am merely a spectator presenting the evening's entertainment."
Q leaned heavily on his hypercube encrusted cane, his smirk widening as the tweed fabric of his suit rippled with static electricity. "Before I vanish back into the void, you truly deserve to understand the sheer absurdity of the roadblock I just left behind you," Q chuckled, waving his cane toward the North Highway. "That shimmering, pixelated monstrosity wedged into the asphalt distortion loop? His name - if you can even call it that - is Toidi Derewoprevo Ylomona."
The moment Q spoke the name out loud, the physical atmosphere of the vicinity shattered. The morning sun didn't just dim; it paused. A massive, fragmented montage cutscene collage abruptly forced its way into the minds of the five travelers, overlapping their vision in a chaotic, multi-layered visual burst:
A backwards-running cosmic sequence of an omniversal singularity folding inside-out, collapsing a decillion-digit-long string of stat points into a tiny, compact, biological container.
An incomprehensible stream of broken code text—&+/-∆-/+, y+4^³√π ;::; <("^. ~ ")( ^)!b—flashing across their field of view like a corrupt television broadcast.
A bizarre, sudden echo of a voice shouting, "And then, 789, but you had to be there!" followed by the distinct sound of wet, magenta gravity being crushed in a mortar with a potato.
The overwhelming mental collage flickered violently for three seconds before snapping out of existence, leaving the party blinded, blinking in the sudden, quiet morning air.
"He was supposed to be a god, you see," Q explained, dusting an invisible piece of lint off his shoulder. "An absolute, game-breaking, overpowered anomaly. But the universe's trolling architecture caught him, froze his level eternally, and compressed him into a permanent piece of spatial geometry. He is now completely blind, nearly flat as a pancake, and all but entirely incapable of real-world movement without bizarre anomalous geometric warping."
"I dropped him right into the middle of that asphalt warp," Q said, stepping backward into the shadow of the giant cedar tree. "Because his unspent Spirit pool is so massive, his presence has turned the highway into a labyrinth of unyielding reality. When those angry, uncooperative ogres finally wake up from their tavern slumber and try to hunt you down, they are going to march straight into his permanent dialogue loop. They'll be trapped reading backward tutorial text and staring at broken montage cutscenes for a week."
With a dramatic tip of his hat, Q's form glitched violently into a cascade of glowing blue pixels.
"Consider it a gift from an admirer of chaos. Do try not to encounter any Tardigrade-Badger-Platypus loners on your way out."
A sharp pop echoed through the woods, and Q was completely gone, leaving the five companions entirely alone on the quiet path once more.
