Delivery for the Damned Sneak Peak
Added 2024-06-01 01:29:26 +0000 UTCThere’s something wrong in these lands. Something deep and dark, that gnaws at your bones like arthritis on a rainy day. Every step forward sinks your boots a half-inch lower into the mud, but you know not to look down. Never look down.
Although you can’t glance at the ground, you’ve delivered to this address enough times to know that there’s a puddle in front of the rickety plank stairway leading up to the even ricketier wooden porch. The puddle is too deep to be walked through but too wide to jump over. The only way to cross is to pay the toll.
Reaching into your T.H.A.B. mail satchel, you take out a zipped plastic baggy. Within is today’s offering:
CHOICE:
#A half-eaten digestive biscuit from morning tea, crushed to teeny-tiny bite-sized crumbles.
*set tealover true
Pixies love sugar. And you love tea, so always have a surplus of biscuits.
#A couple blueberries which I picked off the bush growing in my balcony garden.
Organic, of course. Pesticides are toxic to Pixies.
*set garden true
*set biscuit “fruit”
#A few stale pieces of my hellhound’s kibble.
*set hellhound true
*set biscuit “kibble”
You’re not quite sure what the ingredients are in your pet’s food (nor do you want to know, given the way it burnt through a plastic food bowl before you switched to ceramic). Nutritional value probably doesn’t matter since the Pixies use it as ammo for their slingshots.
Without looking down (NEVER look down), you empty out the baggie over where the puddle should be.
A wave of freezing water sloshes over your right ankle, soaking your sock and settling down to your sole. The ${biscuit} has been accepted.
You step on top of the puddle.
It holds.
Congratulations! You now only have a five percent chance of drowning. (Pixies are capricious like that.)
