THE VROL TRILOGY (52 page)

Max climbed out, albeit a bit more slowly,
and sat back up on the wall saying, "So, what are you doing here?
Just sitting around?"

"Mmhhmmm. Watching people. I like checking
people out."

Max looked around and saw no one, then turned
back to her curiously, "There's no one around. Who are you
watching?"

"Oh, some bounce by every now and then. One's
coming now."

She was right - Max smelled the air and
detected the disagreeable scent from earlier. But what arrived
shocked even the lycan commander who had travelled to different
worlds. A humanoid with short, yellowish fur covering its body and
a cat-like facial structure approached them as if everything were
totally normal, while not emitting any scent of fear.

Max tried to keep from growling, as lycans
had a certain dislike for anything feline. He watched as the cat
person, who was obviously a female (as one could tell from her
ample, fur-covered breasts), sauntered over and popped up on the
wall on the other side of his new acquaintance.

"Yous gots a new puppy friend, hmmm?" asked
the odd arrival.

"Hey Cassandra. Yeah, this is Max. He has two
names!"

The cat-like girl then made a perplexed face,
and counting the fingers on her paw-like hands, attempted some
rudimentary math.

"That only onesies. Max-Max is twos!"

Feeling a bit at ease with the odd kitty, he
leaned over and waved.

"Hi. I'm Max Gunnarsson," he said, and then
smiled.

As soon as the girl saw his teeth she hissed
and jumped back three meters, landing in a low crouch and extending
her claw-like fingernails.

"Max," exclaimed Jessica, "don't bare your
fangs at her! That's rude!"

"Max Gunniesman is meanies!" screeched the
cat-girl, as she licked the back of her hand and started to clean
her face, much like a real feline.

"Hey! I'm sorry. I'm new around here. That
was called a smile, and where I'm from it's meant to be friendly! I
won't hurt you, honest!"

Jessica giggled and started swinging her legs
again.

"Cassandra, Max is nice. He's just
visiting anyway. And Max, I heard stories of the old days. People
would smile by showing their teeth, but ever since
nekos
started coming around that
changed."

"Ermm, nekos?

"Yesh!" purred Cassandra, "me ish neko. We
niceies toos."

"And you also have your own take on the
English language, I presume."

Cassandra shot Max an odd, confused
expression that he couldn't quite understand, so he turned and
looked out to where Jessica was staring.

"Hey Jessica, can you tell me about this
place? I mean, I kinda got dropped off here and I'm lost."

"We all got dropped off here, Max."

"Huh? You were dropped off too? Like, from a
4D slip? Do you know a Primulus?"

Jessica looked at him like she had no idea
what he was talking about.

"No, silly. The demons bring us here. They
drop us off and hunt us. They are nasty, those demons."

"Me hates demons. Hates hates hates!"
squelched Cassandra, as she hissed viscously and pounded her little
paw-hands on her thighs.

Max started to assemble some data in his
head. Vrol would drop off people and hunt them. It was obviously
Los Angeles of the past, but not the Los Angeles he ever read
about. He had his lycan abilities, and he had most of his magic.
But there were people, so the chances were that the Vrol amoeba was
never dropped on the world - or least where he was. He also
probably reeked of waste materials. Looking down, he fudged with
his leather battle jacket.

"You need a bath, Max. What were you doing,
rolling in poop? I know some guys who like to do that, but I gotta
tell ya - it's a real turn-off with the ladies."

Max snickered and blushed a bit.

"Um, I'm not worried about ladies. I'm
married, but my mate is somewhere far away and I need to get back
to her. My daughter is with her too. But yeah, I could use a bath.
However, I do have a question - what is this place called? This
city…this is Los Angeles, right?"

"Well," replied Jessica, "yeah, we're in
L.A., of course - Hollywood district. And I know where you can get
cleaned up. Hey! You wanna meet my clan? You seem nice enough."

"Thanks, and sure. What is your clan
called?"

"Feral Kids. We're the Feral Kids. Cassandra
is our newest recruit too!"

"Meowwwwwwsh. Yupsh. Me ish a Feral Kid!"

Cassandra started pawing out at the air as if
she were trying to play with an invisible piece of string dangled
in front of her face.

Max certainly welcomed the bath, but was
unaware of how long he would be able to tolerate the neko who was
brutally mangling his native tongue. Her scent was bad enough, but
like with anything else, one always needed to adjust, and for all
he knew that weird cat-girl could help him out.

Scanning the area and getting his bearings,
he looked at Jessica and said, "So, where is this bath you were
mentioning?"

"Oh, you wanna go? Cool! It's on Seven Sins
Avenue."

"Great! Let's go!" he said excitedly, and the
dropped off the retaining wall, landing on his boots with a thud.
The girls followed him down but made nary a sound when their feet
touched the street.

"Max Gunniesman ish noisies," giggled the
neko as they all started walking down the partially destroyed
street towards a place called Seven Sins.

After navigating (sometimes while
hidden in the shadows) westward for about an hour, they cut south
and arrived at a main thoroughfare that had signs identifying it as
Santa Monica Blvd, which the locals called
Seven
Sins
. Then, again going west the street
redirected to the left at a 45-degree angle. It wasn't much later
that they arrived at a large building that was amazingly still
intact, and had the word
Feral
Pride
spray-painted on the front in
big, red letters. Loud rock music pounded out the front door of the
windowless structure (the windows having been covered with
plywood), and various beings of different types - but mostly human
males - hung out front.

Entering the building, Max followed as
Jessica and Cassandra skipped inside like they didn't have a care
in their very weird world.

Once past the door, he looked around while
smelling everything he could. There were more of those nekos,
humans, lycans and even a vampire. The smell of ghoul alarmed him,
but he felt no fear, as the scent was very faint. After all, he had
easily dispatched a vampire king in hand-to-hand combat some months
before - along with the help of some very intelligent fresh-water
great white sharks. Max could have killed Vladros with his bare
hands, but instead chose a much more flamboyant method of
dispatching his rotting enemy.

Looking around at everyone in the poorly lit
room, he was witnessing his first post-apocalyptic party, and he
found it weird, to say the least. Couples lay around, making out on
beaten-up couches - mostly neko females with human males, while the
lycans gathered towards the bar area. The live rock band was
playing a thumping song the reverberated throughout the entire
room, and to his astonishment, the band's drummer was the vampire
that he had smelled upon entering the club. Focusing his enhanced
vision, he noticed that the vampire didn't have a rotting
appearance like his brothers in the world of the Rhönen Dominion.
He was just very pale.

"Jessica, this place is… kinda cool," he
yelled, attempting to be loud enough so she would hear him.

"Max, I can hear you. You don't need to
shout, silly!" the lycan girl exclaimed in a normal volume. "Come
with me. I'll intro you to the owner. His name is Dons."

He followed Jessica down a narrow corridor,
while Cassandra milled around near the dance floor, doing some sort
of weird cat-like dance by herself. Reaching the back of the
hallway, Jessica knocked on a door using a specific cadence. The
door opened and a short, human male wearing a patch over his left
eye stood there.

"Hey Jess. Who's the stray?" asked the short
man.

"Hiya Donsie! This is Max. He's lost. Max,
meet Dons, leader of our clan and owner of this club."

Taking care not to bare his teeth, he reached
his hand out and said, "Sir, it is my pleasure."

Dons gave Max a weird face and then looked at
the newcomer's hand with disdain.

"Um, what's with the hand? No, I don't have
any teeth for you, if that's what you want."

Max pulled his hand back.

Did he say teeth?

Jessica saw the awkwardness in their
greeting, so she jumped in, cheerful and happy, as that seemed to
be her nature.

"Dons, Max here is kinda passing through, and
sorta lost. Anyway, he needs a bath and a cot. Can we set him
up?"

"No teeth, no water, Jess. You know the
rules."

Teeth again?

"Well, what if he performed some sort of
task? Like - in place of payment?" Looking at Max, she asked, "You
don't have any teeth, do you?"

"What the Hell are teeth? I smiled and showed
my teeth to kittlylicious out there and she about shit herself.
Teeth! What's with teeth?"

Jessica gave him a blank, unbelieving stare
and said, "Demon teeth. We use them to pay for things."

Max hadn't really given any previous thought
to what form of currency was being used in his new post-apocalyptic
environment. On Azul he had pesos, dollars and francs, and in the
Rhönen Dominion everyone was paid in gold. In this new world they
used Vrol teeth as money. It was that simple, and he actually found
it to be ingenious. In order for currency to have value there had
to be scarcity; it was a major rule of economics. And teeth from
the mouth of a deadly alien would be plenty scarce.

Thinking for a moment, Max came up with a
plan. It would be dangerous for all he knew, but with his magical
skill he could knock a Vrol flyer out of the air and slaughter it,
taking its teeth and paying for whatever was he needed while stuck
in Los Angeles. It would work as long as Vrol weren't immune to the
effects of magic.

Dons looked Max over, up and down, and then
finally said, "Well, he could clean the kitchen for some teeth.
Then he can get a bath and I'll have one of the nekos clean up his
clothes. My nose isn't very strong, but I can easily say that he
smells like a garbage can."

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate it a great
deal. Show me the kitchen, please."

"Follow me," said the short normal, who
pushed past him and took a quick turn before exiting the
corridor.

Max and Jessica followed Dons to the club's
kitchen, which was basically a room with some dirty dishes and
countertops. Dons looked around, and then back at Max saying, "Ok,
this place needs to be cleaned up. The better you do it, the more
teeth you get. Do a really great job and not only do you get a bath
and a cot, but you get extra teeth for your pocket. Deal?

Max looked around, and then smiled. "Deal,
but I work alone, ok?"

Dons looked around and then shrugged his
shoulders.

"Ok, man. Whatever moves you. I'll be back
shortly. Jess, you're with me."

The two exited via the same door through
which they had entered, leaving Max all alone in what passed for a
kitchen those days.

Two hours later Dons and Jessica went back to
the kitchen to see how Max was doing. To their mutual astonishment,
not only had he completely cleaned the filthy room, but was
preparing some food. It even appeared as if there were more
utensils, hanging neatly on the walls and new cooking pots and
pans.

"Max! Wow! What did you…how did you…huh?"
Jessica blurted out in total surprise.

"Oh, I have a few tricks up my sleeve."

The reality was that Max used various
individual cantuses to clean up the room, and then used compound
cantuses to replicate some of the cooking utensils, but he didn't
want them to know he was a mage - quite yet.

"Well mate, it looks quite sharp. I'd say
you've earned your keep and quite a few teeth for the old pocket
too."

It was at that moment that Max realized Dons
had an odd accent with which he wasn't familiar. He made a mental
note to investigate that further at a later time.

Following Jessica up a stairwell, they got up
to the second floor where he was shown a room with a bathtub. Seven
Sins was a desired locale for locals as it was the only place in
the city that had hot water on demand. Dons earned a lot of teeth
there, and put them to good use, having installed solar panels on
the roof for electricity. Max ran the water into the tub, and after
he had undressed, a meek neko servant entered and took his leathers
for cleaning. She paid no notice to the fact that he was stark
naked - she just picked up his things and said, "Me be backs shoon,
shir."

Relaxing in the hot water, he started
going through his mental checklist. The one thing that was curious
was that there was electricity in that new world. Draagh had told
him that technology and magic didn't exist in the same place - but
he never said that they
couldn't
coexist. There was definitely something odd about where he
was, and he needed to find out as much as possible so he could find
a way home. Once he found a mage, if one existed, he would be one
step closer to getting back to Jennie and Liliana.

Right about the time he was preparing to jump
out of the tub, the meek little neko servant came back into the
bathroom with his leathers. Upon examination they were perfectly
clean. Looking at the furry little female, he asked, "These look
great. How did you clean them?"