Fodder Squad- Chapters 1 and 2

A Fourth Age Tamalarian Tale

Chapter One

When Ralphie came awake to the smell of his mother's sweet rolls, their captivating aroma drawing him softly from slumber, he made an unintelligible noise low in his throat, eyes creaking slightly open. His initial calm belied the excitement coursing through the back of his mind; today was the day of the Saviors Day Parade, and he was going to see it right up close! Singers and dancers and musicians of every sort had streamed into the township of Bronze Pot for over the last two weeks in preparation, hooting and tooting, clanging and gyrating in the parks and alleys and fields just outside of town to practice and make ready for the event. Ralphie caught glimpses of them here and there as he ran errands for his father, always taking his time going back to the forge with whatever his father had sent him for in the hopes of catching part of an act.

The boy well understood that outside of the Kingdom of Graneck, the parade and its namesakes, the Saviors of Graneck, meant very little. But for the people of the small nation to which he'd been born, they had become the stuff of modern legends. Four brave souls had banded together in the kingdom's hour of need, and they had driven back the dread forces of Pel Droma, the sorceror bent on conquering the nation! 

The noble King Trayech had, the previous year, pronounced the Saviors receive official, nationwide recognition in the form of 'Savior Days', a ten-day celebration that saw the fabled quartet lead parades through five chosen townships within the kingdom, starting at its northern reaches and making their way south to the village of Quaintsville, hometown of the leader of the Saviors. This year, Bronze Pot had been selected as the second-to-last town to host the Parade.

Each township had to supply its own dancers, musicians and floats, of course, to avoid harming the crown's treasury. Ralphie didn't comprehend what this meant, just that it caused his father to grumble and curse about "Bloody aristocrats pushing off the bloody expense on the bloody commonfolk", amid other words he was not yet allowed to utter according to his parents. His mother had tried to point out that the entertainers came from all over the kingdom, and so they weren’t footing the bill personally, but his father had retorted that the town itself was paying a price it could not afford. 

Ralphie could feel the gravity of his father’s words, but didn’t feel it was his place to try to get involved in the conversation one way or another. He restricted his own input to asking if he could watch the parade out on the street, and though his father seemed reluctant at first, his mother had been all encouragement and smiles. It was ever thus with his parents; if he really wanted something badly enough, Ralphie knew to bypass Dad and go straight to Mom.

He swung his legs over the side of his creaky old bed and stretched, breathing deep of the sweet roll scent wafting up to his room from the kitchen below. As he rose, Ralphie looked over to a squat wire metal cage situated against the wall some three feet from his bed, tilting his head to one side and smiling at the occupant within. “Good morning, Professor,” Ralphie said in his shaky, border-of-puberty voice to the sleek, black-furred rat sitting on its haunches in the cage, appearing to glower at him with half-lidded eyes. 

Let me out of this godsdamned cage and I’ll show you what kind of morning it is, you little shit, the rat thought silently, wiggling its whiskers back and forth, irritated. Ralphie had not a clue how much his pet, Professor Squeaky Von Whiskers, despised being caged up at night. By its nature a nocturnal creature, it had, for the past two and a half years, been forced to live his life in an inversion of his compelled natural cycle. It stuck around primarily for the comforts of having a warm, clean home to reside in, as well as regular meals, though what the boy fed him could hardly compare to the feasts he had once enjoyed when he was younger and living among his own kind. 

But that, of course, was in the time Before the Slaughter. Ralphie heard none of these musings, of course; the rat was just a rat, by and large, and could no more communicate with him than it could saddle and mount a horse. The rodent took a couple of skittering steps back as the boy knelt down in front of his cage and sprung the pressure bars to open his door, allowing him to clamber down out of his confinement. 

“Mother’s making sweet rolls, Professor,” said Ralphie happily. “Let’s head down.” The rat followed closely behind the boy as he led the way out of his bedchamber out into a narrow, dusty hallway, remaining dutifully by the next crooked wooden door as the boy made his morning necessary in the bathroom, whistling while he did so. 

Who whistles while they piss, thought the rat, folding his arms over his chest and leaning to the side against the wall. He wouldn’t let even Ralphie see him behave or move this way; he had been warned from very early in life not to let the humanoids of the world see his ability to move in ways similar to their own. “If they can anthropomorphize you, they can start to experiment on you,” his father had warned him and his brothers and sisters. When the toilet let out its belch of watery descent and renewal, Professor Squeaky dropped back to all fours, following the human boy once more as he headed for the top of the stairs. 

Opting to delight the boy for a change, the rat scampered up the railing with his claws, carefully thrusting them into the previously established grooves he’d worked in, until he was atop the sloping handrail leading down. Claws clacking loudly on the wood, Squeaky descended swiftly and jumped off of the lower bannister just before crashing into the rounded wooden ball at the termination point of the railing on the first floor, sticking the landing next to the stairs. He looked up and found the boy beaming down at him, hands clasped together tightly in front of him. 

“This is going to be a great day,” Ralphie proclaimed. Squeaky took up his following once more, guided into the broad kitchen, filled with its delightful, tempting aromas. Ralphie’s mother, a husky and towering woman of middle years with full, rounded cheeks, long scarlet hair held down with a kerchief, and wearing a much-stained apron over a simple lavender house dress, stood at her over, tapping her foot impatiently as she stood in profile to them upon entry. She looked to her son and beamed at him, and Professor Squeaky, not for the first time, thought that that smile must have been what did Ralphie’s father in all those years before when they’d gotten together. 

“Why Ralphie Olafson, did these sweet rolls actually get you out of bed just after sunrise,” asked his mother, planting her mitt-covered hands on her wide hips. The boy nodded mutely with a broad grin. “Good. You can go rouse your father, then.”

“Dad’s still in bed?” Like the boy, Squeaky found this rather peculiar. The bigger human male of the home had rarely not been the first member of the family awake and about in the house.

“He was working on the town’s offering to Savior Jack until late last night at the forge,” replied Martha Olafson, turning to the oven and dropping the squeaking metal door down before reaching in and drawing out a rack of perfectly rounded cinnamon sweet rolls. She set the tray on a raised rack sitting on the broad kitchen island behind her, plucking up another tray of the pastries and sliding them in to go through their bake time. “If you hurry and get him up, he may even have time to show it to us before he has to take it to the mayor’s house.”

Staying staunchly behind Ralphie, the rat followed his ostensible owner down a pair of hallways off of the kitchen toward the bedchamber shared by the boy’s parents. The door stood half open, the interior cloaked in darkness and shadows, the sounds of some queer elephant blatting out an incessant but steady drone from within. Samuel Olafson’s snoring could wake the dead, and on a few occasions, when he fell asleep in the living room directly beneath Ralphie’s bedroom, it had disrupted Squeaky’s slumber. The rat remained at the doorway as the boy crept into the dark room, moving toward the unseen but clearly heard patriarch of the Olafson household.

“Dad? Wake up, dad, mom’s first batch of rolls just came out of the oven,” the rat heard Ralphie saying. There was a grumble of some sort, words perhaps, but of the language known to many as ‘It’s Too Early To Form Real Words With, You Know, Letters and Shit’. The springs under the mattress let out a series of thin metal protests as the blacksmith got himself up, the floorboards rumbling under Squeaky’s tiny, clawed feet as the burly fellow clambered up out of bed. A moment later Ralphie was pelting back down the hallway toward the kitchen, leaving Squeaky to chase after.

When the Olafson trio was round the kitchen table, the parents drinking strong black coffee and eating their rolls, Ralphie tearing small bits from his to hand down to the eagerly upright rat, Samuel loosed a low rumble in his throat. “Son, I have told ye time and again, I dislike the way ye feed that rodent from the table.” Squeaky couldn’t see the older male from his vantage point on the floor, but he could feel the baleful stare aimed at him through the dense wood of the table. 

“Hush now, Sam, every pet gets treats betimes,” Martha replied. She smiled down at Squeaky, who tried his best to mimic the expression without giving away the full range of his ability to do so. When first he’d been brought home with the boy, it had been difficult to manage this balancing act; time had made the act much easier to pull off convincingly. “Besides, in all the realms of Tamalaria, I suspect Professor Squeaky is the best behaved rat a boy could own.”

“The dwarves might disagree,” Samuel replied lightly. “After all, their rats have the good sense to be bashed in and cooked up in pies.” Ralphie gasped, and his father let out a dark snort of a chuckle. “It’s true, son. Dwarves and gnomes and kobolds all eat rats. Goblins and other greenskins commonly do as well, though I’m sure none would find yours appealing. As thy mother speaks, it is so; yours is a behaved rat.”

And here, once more, a small indication that, as gruff and menacing a man as Samuel Olafson could be, at the end of the day he was a decent man, prone to indulging both wife and child in their desires. Squeaky sometimes thought that his family was all that kept the smithy from smashing his head in with one of the massive shaping hammers he kept in the front closet by the front door of their humble little house. 

“I needs must take the Savior’s gift to Mayor Dunnum’s house for the presentation,” Samuel said, rising from the table with a scrape of his chair on the floor. He came around the table then, towering over rat, wife and child. “Remember, the parade begins at noon. It should come past the forge around half an hour after the start, but get there early if you want to see the whole thing.” He leaned over and gave Martha a fierce kiss, wrapped an arm around his boy’s shoulders in half a bear hug, and even spared a moment to lean down and gently pat the coarse, callused palm of his hand on Squeaky’s head. “Ye may even bring Professor Squeaky Von Whiskers here with ye for the excitements, son,” he said, straightening up and heading for the front door.

The rat looked up and saw the overwhelming joy on the human boy’s face as Ralphie looked down at him, sweet frosting blotched at the corner of his mouth, and considered that perhaps this life as a pet among the humans wasn’t so bad after all.

Chapter Two

The blast of wintry water over his head brought Azira of Batang flailing upright, snorting and flapping his hands around his soaked head for a brief moment before his body’s momentum carried him back and out into empty space, legs kicking wildly as he crashed painfully to the hardwood floor. The barstool, having gone over with him, offered no greater comfort than to lodge painfully against his balls as it skidded with him a few inches toward the nearest table.

“Pathetic,” snarled an unfriendly and vaguely feminine voice in the water-and-hangover-induced blur of his field of vision. Blinking rapidly to clear his sight, Azira found himself looking up at the scowling visage of a Red Tribe werewolf woman, her muzzle carefully combed back from her snout, one thick eyebrow cocked down at him, arms folded over her chest. A wooden bucket dripped water as it hung limply by the handle in her right hand, getting her plain green tunic blouse clingy against her. 

“I do not deny that charge,” Azira responded, groaning as he pushed the stool away and tried to sit up. He felt a throbbing in his long, hooked nose, and the pain pulsed out along his face and up into he very tips of his triangular ears. “Gods alive, what time is it,” the goblin asked, attempting to right the barstool and dropping it, his pudgy green fingers fumbling with the furniture. The tavern tap room around him was empty, he saw as he looked around, save for him and this giant werewolf woman. 

“It’s time for you to admit you have a problem, Az, and time to get the fuck out of my bar,” the werewolf woman snapped, tossing the bucket over the counter without a look. “I have to finish cleaning up and go get a couple of hours sleep before I have to be back here to open up for the parade.” Azira snorted, shaking his aching head. 

“Right, the Saviors Day Parade,” he mocked, pumping his fingers in air quotes at her, still trying to regain his footing and having to steady himself with one hand on a nearby table. “Saviors my warty ass,” he muttered, orienting himself toward the doors of the tavern. “So, so what time’re you opening back up, then,” he asked over his shoulder as he started to limp toward the daylight outside. 

“Eleven o’clock,” the werewolf replied behind him. Azira made it to the door, reaching out for the handle. A huge, hairy red hand closed gently over his own as he grabbed it, and he looked up into a much-softened, pleading expression. “Az, I’m serious. You shouldn’t come back that early, if at all. I’m worried about you,” she said. 

“Diana, I’m fine,” he replied, his vision finally sharpening enough to see the genuine concern in her eyes. He hated seeing that there, that concern, and more than that, the pity. "The only thing to worry about is if I don't come back; I'm half your night's till." He gave her a lopsided smile then, one he knew revealed the missing teeth on the left side of his mouth and stretched the discolored patch of scar tissue on his face. Even the finest healers could only do so much when days passed between the initial injury and treatment, and Azira had survived four days in the wilds before stumbling into a Wayfarer troupe with a shaman on hand. The lizardman's rituals and short-term spells had been mostly focused on defense and repelling the undead; however, he'd known enough basic healing magic to piece Azira back together.

The goblin skirmisher pressed his way out into the hateful early morning light, the sun gracing him with the kind of touch to his eyes one usually only had available from an amped up prizefighter who has just seen an opening in their opponent's defenses. Azira let out a grumble as he brought one hand up to shield his eyes, the other reaching for the zipper on his fanny pack. Searching blindly, his fingers happened upon the sunglasses he kept tucked within. Once they were on over his eyes, he sighed, sagged, and looked around at all of the townsfolk already flitting here and there to make ready for the parade march down the township's central north-south thoroughfare. 

They have no clue, he thought as he made his way back toward the cruddy little complex on the west side of town that housed most of the folks who worked the nearby copper mines. Azira himself was one such worker, and after nearly three years digging in the mines, he'd managed to earn himself a single raise. It wasn't that he was an unproductive employee, so much as he proved a persistent safety hazard to the other miners. Hungover or drunk as a lord even during his shifts, the skirmisher would often fly into a kind of rage at the walls being explored in the shafts, swinging his mattock like a wildman and cursing in his native tongue. He terrified the rest of his crew, and the foremen took note.

They have no clue, these people, he thought, repeatedly having to pull his eyes from townspeople making last-minute preparations to celebrate the Saviors of Graneck. But I know, oh yes. I know what those four are capable of, the wanton horror of it. Azira had initially hoped to avoid the parade altogether, remove any chance he might see any of the four who had brought the annihilation of his entire clan. But the previous evening, as he'd been leaving the mines with his day's wages, one of the work foremen announced that the mines would be magically sealed for the parade the following day, so everyone could go partake.

"Whoop-a-dee-doo," he groused, twirling one finger in a lazy circle as he stepped through the archway into the compound grounds, aiming himself at his little one bedroom unit. "A day off to cheer for a quartet of butchers." The condos in the compound had originally been constructed by The Black Axe Company, an international guild of swordsmen and strongarms for hire to whoever could pay for short-term protection assignments. However, when the guild had folded some twenty years earlier, its founder and Chief Guildmaster, Artemis Tsol, had offered to sell the property to the crown of Graneck for a reasonable sum. The king's small council agreed, and immediately had the compound's residences updated and set aside for miners to reside in.

Azira fumbled his keys from the right pocket of his dun-colored trousers and unlocked his unit, slipping inside. He took off his shades and set them on the small table to his immediate left, depositing his keys in a little bowl of dark blue glass. He left the overhead light off for the moment, relishing the relief of the darkness inside. Every window hosted blackout-style drapes and shades, offering him total darkness in his abode. As a goblin, Azira possessed a weak kind of night vision, so there were sometimes entire days when he never bothered to flip a light on.

With his hangover pressing out from the center of his skull like a beast trying to snap its bonds, he moaned, moving toward the bathroom. From the medicine cabinet he withdrew a slender vial of tiny white pills, dry swallowing two of them and lowering his head, eyes squeezed shut. I may have fucked up this time, he thought as he made his way groggily to his bedroom for a brief lie down. Most nights, Azira made sure to start drinking water alongside his ale or liquor, to keep himself properly hydrated and avoid the worst of the aftermath headaches. The previous evening, he suspected, he had likely forgotten this vital part of his daily routine, and now he suffered for it.

The goblin tried to lay down in his simple cot-style bed, but it was no good. Slumber would not claim him, and he couldn't justify just lying around all day. Turning on the bedside lamp, he selected a fresh change of clothes from his dresser and put them on. "I've got errands to run," he said to himself as he laced up his small combat boots. "May as well do them today."

A few minutes later, shades on over his aching eyes, the goblin skirmisher-turned-miner strode out of his condo, to rejoin the citizenry of Bronze Pot. 

**

The juggler would not apparently cease his persistent rotation of balls, and though he had taken an oath never to harm a civilian without proper provocation, Bruce could feel the urge to at least slap the narrow buffoon tugging at the back of his mind. That the fellow had managed to keep his little cadre of objects going whilst retrieving his papers for the town guard had been mildly impressive, it had also been annoying. What should have taken all of a minute out of Bruce's day was now becoming a thing, and he didn't want the trouble.

"I trust you'll see that all is in order, constable," said the juggler, eyes fixed on the apex of his juggling arc, drawing out the 'l' sound.

"Swinton," Bruce offered.

"Constable Swinton," the juggler said. His permit had the proper stamp and signatures gracing its bottom lines, yes. The document could have been said to be entirely and completely in order. The only reason Bruce was even questioning the street performer stemmed from the fact that the veteran town guard didn't recognize him from the dozen or so other jugglers he'd seen over the last week or so at practice in the town's streets and alleys. 

But there was one catch, right at the top of the permit; this fellow had procured a Busking Permit, not an Entertainer's Permit. Technically, the juggler could use it to sell any wares he might have along the sides of the street, but this document did not give him permission to put on his act for financial consideration. If he wanted to, he could put the screws to this man and ruin his stay in Bronze Pot. Instead, he took out a green pen from his belt and sketched a small star in the upper-right corner; this would indicate to any other officer that the papers had been given the okay by another constable, the holder deemed no trouble.

"I'm giving you a pass, Mister Jacobs," Bruce said, offering the Permit back. "You mistakenly got a Busker's Permit instead of an Entertainer's. But don't worry about it for today. Enjoy the parade." The juggler caught his spheres and looked at the stiffened tag board permit, nodding. 

"My apologies and thanks, Constable Swinton," he said, heading off down the street. Swinton made his way over to a public bench and eased himself down onto it, taking a small blue notebook from his back left pocket. A pen came from a breast pocket, and with a posture that spoke of fatigue, the dark-skinned human officer began documenting his brief permit inspection for his personal records. 

At fifty-eight years of age, Bruce Swinton had taken a graceful approach to the tail end of his middle age. His career as a constable had been legendarily long, running thirty-five years. Only three of those years had been in Bronze Pot, however; the rest had been in his hometown of Harip, a village that no longer existed, thanks to the forces of Pel Droma. For thirty-two years, Bruce had patrolled the streets of the very same village he'd been born in, conducting himself with a quiet dignity and authority. Harip, being a town of only a few thousand people, had hosted a constabulary of only a hundred or so men and women of various races. In all of the realms of Tamalaria, even including the Elven Kingdom, the town had held a reputation for being idyllic, peaceful. 

And in less than a week, the entire township had been wiped off the face of the world. Bruce had fought side-by-side with his fellow guardsmen against the swarm of goblins, illeck and lizardmen Pel Droma had rallied to his cause, proving to them and to himself that his constant exercises in the practice yards had not been in vain. It had been the sorceror Droma's magic, however, that had taken him out of the fighting. As he'd been trading blows with a bulky hobgoblin, the earth under his feet had given up an enormous rumble, and in an instant, he had been launched skyward, only to come down in a crater, half-buried in soil.

When he had come to, Bruce felt every muscle in his body lobbing protests against movement. He managed to get himself up to the rim of the crater, his vision blurry and his mind dulled from pain. Yet when he looked out at the street around him, he saw a quartet of people fending off a ring of lizardmen, fighting against Droma's people.

Among the quartet, he spotted an elven man in the robes of a magic wielder. And what he saw this elf doing made him wonder just whose side the man was on; the elf's arms were stretched out before him, and a cone of virulent crimson flames streamed from him into the shattered doors of a nearby tavern. 

He had passed out again, from the pain and efforts to get out of the crater. When he awoke, days later and in a healer's wagon, he heard someone say that Pel Droma's forces had set fire to the entire town. But Bruce knew better; it had been the elf whose magical flames spiraled out of control. Motives be damned, it had been these so-called heroes who had destroyed his hometown and nearly everything in it.

And now the kingdom threw them an annual celebration.

"That goblin knows," he muttered to himself as he closed up his notebook and rose with a sigh from the bench. He'd had to forcibly remove one of Bronze Pot's only greenskin residents from the Rusty Tankard a handful of times over the last year, the little greenish man drunkenly raving that the Saviors of Graneck were a pack of psychos, murderers. Bruce had thrice had to carry the little man home to his condo in the miners' compound. He wondered, briefly, how the goblin was going to handle the parade coming right through town this year. 

He checked his timepiece. The parade would be starting in a couple of hours. Bruce decided it might be a good idea to patrol around the Rusty Tankard for a while.