By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
“But I don’t understand,” I said. “In that last encounter, in the field. How did she fly and light up the field with all those zappy-blasts, and then zip out in her wiggly-air if she was stunned by your tranquilizer fire stuff?”
We were high over the city now, and Warbell turned and began levitating with determination towards what seemed to be empty sky.
“Ed was prepared,” Warbell said with a pause, and seemed to dodge something midflight before continuing. “After getting knocked out in the city, she must have rerouted her cannon and flying mechanisms so that they wouldn’t get disabled with the rest of her body if she got hit by the green fire again, and then programmed in a series of reactions that would be set off in the event that she was knocked out.”
“So when she was hit with the green fire ball,” I said, thinking it through, “it activated her flying switch so she could fly into the sky and shoot everything in the area without moving a muscle.”
“That’s about the long and the short of it,” Warbell said.
“It is beyond my ken that your daughter wants to kill you,” said Colander. “How awful.”
“She didn’t try to kill me back there,” Warbell said. “She wanted to talk about it first… and I guess beat me up as well. But she has tried to kill me before. More than once.”
Colander and I each exclaimed our dismay in the tones of our peculiar personalities, though Colander’s sieve of emotions produced a particularly long wail.
“I didn’t write that part in the journal,” Warbell said. “Just a minute.”
And the old lizard maneuvered around in the air again, flying over sideways and about something I couldn’t fathom. I did catch a glimpse of Six Degrees of Bacon down far below, though, and suddenly felt pretty hungry.
“You don’t have to tell us anything that makes you feel sad,” Colander said. “You need to concentrate all your saurian brain molecules on healing up good and strong.”
“The nanobots are taking care of most of the healing,” Warbell said with a grimace. “Whatever sadness I am feeling, even still, to express that sadness is also a means of healing. Permit me the indulgence if only until we arrive. When I consider everything that happened, well, I guess there are a lot of reasons dads often think they are bad parents, but I can’t think of much that would make a fellow feel that regret more keenly than when their kid attempts patricide. The first time was right after I discovered Razzberry was dead. Ed was off in another area. Hunting. She never fully gave up on hunting. I think that’s why Furbud never felt as comfortable around Ed as he did with me—Ed always had a lot more killer instinct. But when Ed found out about her mom, she immediately turned on me.”
“Oh my gosh,” I said.
“I know what it feels like to be bit by a tyrannosaurus rex,” the old lizard said. “In the neck. I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t even thinking about protecting myself. I was still in shock over… everything. Didn’t even enter my mind that Ed would… Luckily, there were medics at the scene at the time of the attack. Still, when it happened, Ed didn’t have the full cybernetic enhanced system, so we couldn’t just knock her out so easily. There was quite the fight. I’d rather not go into details.”
“You don’t need to,” said Colander.
“What about that weird robo-worm?” I asked. “The one you stomped on.”
“That is a standard-issue pair of dinosaur handcuffs, or its equivalent I suppose,” Warb said. “Dinosaurs have all sorts of shapes and sizes, which makes standardizing equipment tricky. But the “robo-worm” as you call it—that attaches to dinosaur spines and takes over the body. You can still think and feel after it gets you. You just can’t move your body at all, and no amount of foam or green fire or time will get you free.”
I shuddered.
“I’m completely okay with snakes and lizards and the like,” Colander said, voice wavering. “But not if they are going to stick their claws in my back and take over my brain. That’s just not right.”
“We’re here,” Warbell said.
I looked around for a moment, confused. We were just floating about in mid air. There was nothing interesting to see—I mean nothing more interesting than a flying t-rex.
Then Warbell turned off his flight mechanism.
And we fell.