Our Hero awoke with a start. He'd been lost in a deep sleep, the first such since leaving the jasmined colonnades of Loquaesthesia. The firm-breasted wide-waisted friend for a night squirmed under her sealskins and murmured something incomprehensible. He had the uncanny sensation of being watched. This was materially reinforced when he noticed the fur-clad form standingat the longhouse's doorflap. "Wh-whooz thar??" he croaked through a sleep-dried gullet. Then he noticed something falling out of his hand. He looked, and saw two small colorful totems remaining in his palm, growing glutinous from his oneiric perspiration. Wait - there were the hallmarks of - "Oohmagawd", he moaned.
He lurched out of his bedroll toward the Casull hanging from a cetacean rib; close enough to see but right now further than some of the near stars. Suddenly conscious of his state under the sealskin, he stopped semi-erect and clutched the blanket to his midriff. He'd come within a hand'sbreadth of exhibiting his tattoos in a fully-deployed condition. Realizing his predicament, and intimately conscious of what the angular bulge under the intruder's furs signified, he felt his inopportune turgidity receding with remarkable speed.
The intruder's concealed arm tensed on her weapon. They remained motionless for an eon of glacial seconds, then with her free arm, Rambi pulled the hood back from her head, revealing a glorious disarray of flaxen tresses.
Their
eyes
locked.
The tableau was broken by Hero's bedmate, who scrambled off the floor in a panic and fled into the frozen night without a stitch on her petite football of a body. His face, which had so recently been the canvas for sequential expressions of dreambound insouciance, confusion, shocked realization and lately a mask of saturnine intransigence, dissolved into discomfiture. "I-it's not whut y'all thaink", he explained. Rambi was not about to be diverted by such insignificant details. She advanced one step, interposing herself between the fur-clutching Adonis and his armaments.
Rambi marshalled her courage and drew a breath, all the while resting her thumbupon the safety of her Uzi. Her voice blossomed forth in a melody of euphonious vowels and silver plosives. "Who are you, and why have you been following me??!" she demanded, at last.
Hero relaxed somewhat at this indirect evidence that his fading golden tan was not in immediate danger of being perforated. He gathered his thoughts, cleared his throat and pronounced:
(to be continued) |
