By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
I yelled like a ninny, visions of plummeting down, down, hundreds of feet, splattering on my doorstep, the funeral, the fact that I would miss next summer’s Dinosaur Yacht Slaughter 10: Red Sea flashing through my mind.
“We’re not falling anymore,” Colander said. She tapped me on the shoulder and pointed.
“We only fell maybe a foot,” she said.
Warbell was standing on nothing. He was standing, though. Confidently. Nonchalantly.
“Don’t get off yet or you will start falling,” Warbell said. “We are standing in the tower, and the matter of the tower will open up around your bodies. You would fall right through the floor.”
“Tower?” Colander asked.
“Warbell wrote that there is a tower built to reach the portal, which is up in the sky somewhere above Final Pumpkin,” I said, still breathing heavily and feeling panicky. “It’s made out of some ghost material so human airplanes and birds and such can’t see it and just fly right through it or something.”
“What it actually does is… it dodges you,” said Warbell.
“How’s that?” Colander said.
“It’s programmed to dodge and avoid humans, animals, and machines here on your earth,” Warbell said. “So if a bird flies through, the various beams bend out of the way, holes open in the walls, that sort of thing. It’s made out of a special reactive material that constantly readjusts as needed, but in a way that keeps the whole building stable.”
“You have a flying castle that constantly morphs and warps to avoid all animal life and human transport?” Colander asked.
“Not flying,” Warbell said. “More like dancing. It has legs, too. It’s tricky when it has to move too many legs at once.”
“Wouldn’t that leave huge pits everywhere the dancing tower steps?” asked Colander. “This tower has to be pretty heavy.”
“The legs bond with the earth wherever it connects so that the elements of the earth become a part of the structure of the tower holding it up,” said Warbell. “Then they unbond whenever the feet move, and it doesn’t cause much damage to the ground or street or whatever.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Neither do I,” said Warbell. “But it works.”
“Well, what now?” Colander asked. “How do we close the portal?”
Warbell looked up and around, peering through the clouds.
“You aren’t going to like this, but we don’t have much choice,” said Warbell. “Thinkwilder and I planned for this. The only way for you to interact safely with the tower is to wear, uh, part of me, because only dinosaurs can interact with the tower. I hope you don’t mind.”
With that, Warbell burped up the pillow that he had had with him when I first met him, that he had supposedly had in the cavern beneath the rocky outcroppings out back behind my house. He apparently had swallowed it at some point. Now he shook it vigorously, once, twice.
Suddenly it split in two, the cloth outside dissolving and the entire pillow morphing into writhing leathery material.
“This isn’t very comfortable for me, either,” he said. “But to walk on the tower, you need some of my flesh, so to speak. You have to wear parts of me, and this pillow is composed of my own flesh and blood. It is a part of me which Thinkwilder and I built into living suits you can wear. I promise you can take off my, err, leather clothing at any time, but please wait until you are on solid ground before you do so.”