“Wow. You really did it, man.”
“Yup. I decided that if I’m gonna get into historical re-creation as a hobby, I shouldn’t mess around. No expense spared. It was even kind of fun, since I had to forge a couple of things by hand. There just wasn’t any other way.”
“So it really runs on gasoline?”
“Yeah. I had to build my own mini-refinery. The permits were a pain in the ass, and I thought Cindy was going to divorce me, but…syntheline just isn’t period, you know?”
Krawk stumbled drunkenly out of the stable, blinking nearsightedly, dazzled by the sun. The last thing he could really remember was getting married to the Goblin-King’s daughter and celebrating the marriage in the usual fashion of the goblins, by drinking every ounce of liquor in sight. Which from previous experience would indicate that it was many, many weeks later. Looking around, Krawk dimly saw many great buildings, built of stone, painted red and many many statues. The statues were often missing arms, sometimes heads. Good idea, thought Krawk. If you’re bad at sculpting hands, don’t sculpt hands. It was a very clever idea.
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When Jack came to town, he’d already gotten used to their fleshy feel and weird smells. The fact that they passed by and faded at what seemed to him an incredible rate. They were so excited, so very quick to do this or that and so very quick to abandon whatever it was. And it wasn’t falling in love with one of them that surprised him. He’d done it a number of times, over and over again.
He thought it might be the way that those among them that had pets felt, getting similar animals. Sometimes there were weird moments of familiarity and deja vu, but he realized that was probably just coincidence. Centuries of experience had taught him that coincidence came easier with age, simply as a matter of statistical probability. But he could see why some of them believed in reincarnation.
Jack had met her in the BookHaus. He’d been glancing through a dictionary of hypothetical Indo-European words and grammar. (It seemed mostly correct, thought some words were just wildly off. But not a bad effort, from what he could remember of those early days when the men in the wheeled carts had first swept into his people’s lands.) She was sorting throught the new arrivals, a book junkie for sure. She’d spotted what he was looking at, and he could she was tell she was waiting for him to put it down so she could get a look at it.
He smiled and handed it to her.
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