Something tells me to stop where I am. You might think that I mean some instinct or intuition gets triggered, and I stop where I am, but that's not what I mean at all. I mean I'm walking along, completely oblivious to the world around me, when suddenly I hear something say, “Stop where you are, please.” So I do.

I look around and don't see anything, and hope really, really hard that my mind is just playing tricks on me. It's never played tricks like this before, but I did just fall off of an airship, and I probably hit my head at least once on the way down. Careful not to actually move, I turn in place, taking in my surroundings. Now, I consider myself to generally be a pretty observant guy. When you live on the streets and steal for a living, you tend to hone your instincts and your senses to a razor edge. Even so, I'm caught completely flat-footed when a creature that's got to be at least nine feet tall steps out from behind a tree that can't possibly have been hiding it.

The creature is, like I said, about nine feet tall. It's covered in hair and it kind of stoops a little, and while its arms and legs look thickly muscled, its abdomen looks kind of soft and pudgy and it seems to have a pot belly. The hands are truly massive, disproportionate to the rest of the gigantic body, and they've only got two fingers and a thumb each. The face is what really grabs my attention, though. The creature's head is kind of small—again, not in proportion to the rest of its body—with huge, tufted ears, a long, thin nose, and enormous, saucer-like eyes that reflect the dying light like huge pools of water. And, as inhuman as this thing looks, there's something very human about it.

“Uh,” I say, stupidly.

“Thank you,” it says back, not blinking.

“Uh?” I repeat, though more as a question than a statement of general cluelessness.

“I asked you to stop, and you did. Thank you.” The creature cocks its head at me, as if it's not really sure what to make of this short, skinny creature with tattered, blood-crusted clothes. “Are you of the blood?”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 8:14 pm and is filed under NaNoWriMo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.