#realitysphere

[ruteuf]

When it Rains, it Pours

Greetings, denizens of the Reality Sphere.  Thou mayest call me Pascheon, Guardian of the Past.  The Maker hath given unto me the duty of telling thee another of the tales of the beast Shadur.  Listen well, denizens of the Reality Sphere.

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It was a spring night when I found myself in a situation that shouldn’t have been as familiar to me as it was.  I was surrounded by muscular men without shirts, fists raised, and another man was in front of me.  Both our shirts were off and there was a lot of yelling.  The man had obviously been drinking quite a bit as he could barely stand up straight.

“Come on, guys, this is hardly fair.  How much has he had?” I asked.

“Jest get ta fightin’!” my opponent yelled as he clumsily lurched forward to throw a punch.  I sighed and took a step to the side.  “Where’d ya go, ya rodent!?”

I rolled my eyes and pushed him with a single finger.  Of course, he toppled and didn’t get back up.  Barely audible were his snores.  “Not quite what I expected, but it’ll do,” I said as the men laughed.  “Like I said, hardly fair.  Why did you guys even let him fight?”

“ ‘Cause it were funny!” was the reply.  I shook my head, tired of the fighting competition and glad it was over.  After collecting my winnings and gear, I left the bar.

“Sixty bucks, eh?  Not a whole lot, but it’ll get me a night, I guess.”  I had hardly made it down the block when some men in black clothing walked out from the shadows.  My fur stood on end.

“Hold it right there, you flea bitten furball,” the leader said.

“Okay, first off, really?”  I protested.  “I barely got into town two hours ago and the racists are already out.  Secondly, ‘furball?’  I don’t go around calling the lot of you ‘furless apes,’ do I?  Oh, that’s just perfect.”  One of the men had reached behind him and pulled out a rope.  “This is one of those types of groups?”  Then something hit the back of my head and everything went dark.

I woke up to the feeling of rain pouring down my back and a drenched tail.  Not pleasant if you’re not expecting it, let me tell you.  It wasn’t long before I noticed that my hands were tied behind my back and I had a noose around my neck.  “Lovely,” I muttered.  “They never let me just move on, just jump straight to the hanging.”  Then I heard the yelling.

“These freaks have been the cause of our troubles for years!  Hell, they’re the cause of the Ruin!  Has it escaped your notice that none of them were around before everything went to shit!?”

“Excuse me,” I spoke up, “if we’re going to accuse me of something, can it be something I haven’t heard recently?”

“Shut up!” one of the nearby men said before slugging me in the stomach.

I gasped for a second, then kept right on going.  “I mean, I’ve been called a demon before, but that was years ago.  Why do you guys always have to bring up the Ruin?”

“I said shut up!”  Another slug to the stomach.  It didn’t stop me.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, the Ruin affected us, too.  Hell, we were worse off before.  The stories say we were kept in cages and experimented on.  Maybe someone finally got tired of it and pressed the big reset button!”

“That’s it!”  The man with aggression issues slugged me again as another drew his sword.  The punch knocked me off of the perch I had been put on and I used that to swing myself forward as the guy with the sword swung it at me.  The swing was timed just perfectly to cut the rope binding my hands and by the time I would have been swinging backward again, I had the noose off and was up in the tree.

“You see what happens when you get upset, boys?” a voice said from the crowd that had gathered.  The town’s sheriff stepped out of the crowd and shook his head.  “Now you’ve let the rat escape.  You should’ve shot him first chance you got.”

“Hey!  I’m not a rat!  Didn’t you see the mask?  I’m a raccoon, asshole!”  What can I say?  I’m proud of what I am.  Unfortunately, that got me in trouble, once again as they all drew their guns and started firing into the tree I was hiding in.  I won’t say I dodged all of them but I have gotten pretty good at surviving this sort of thing.  As soon as they were all reloading, I dropped from the tree, ignoring the pain from the bullet wounds in my leg, and darted forward. 

The first guy didn’t even know what hit him.  Before he could look up, I was up close, personal, and kicking him in the gut.  Later, I’d find that he was the guy who loved punching me.  Talk about turning the tables, right?  The second guy saw me coming, but I didn’t give him a chance to react.  I simple grabbed him by the collar, picked him up and used both hands to launch him into the tree.  The leader went down next.  He put up his hands in the defensive pose after dropping his gun, so I just pushed him aside and walked right up to the sheriff.  By this point, the rain was coming down hard and thunder was the constant drumroll to my actions.

“You know, I have a habit of just moving on after being in a town for a while, but never have I gotten a ‘beat it’ like I’ve gotten here.  Hanging is nothing new to me, but usually the law man is a pretty understanding guy.  You might want to rethink your policies regarding other species.”  I turned toward the crowd who had gone silent and said, “Sorry to have made such a ruckus, folks.  I’ll be heading out now.”

With that, I left town, another stop gone awry on the long road I’ve been traveling for what seems like a lifetime.  Someone once asked me why I travel.  Don’t I have a family or something to be getting home to?  All I said was that that was the reason I travel and I don’t know if I’ll ever stop.

[ruteuf]

After the Ruin

Hello, everyone.  The watcher of the future Ruteuf is here.  The story you are about to read is one of a series happening in a reality where the world was changed drastically.  It follows the adventures of a young man who goes by the name Shadur and has to deal with a lot of personal changes.

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 I don’t know specifically what happened.  I know that months after it happened, they called the event The Ruin.  It affected everyone differently.  Most weren’t affected themselves; some became extremely aggressive; some became hungry for anything they could get their hands on, even human flesh; for me, The Ruin brought me mutation.  There are stories as to where my kind come into it.  Some say that we were imprisoned before The Ruin, made into lab experiments.  Personally, I just woke up like this on that day.

The first thing I remember was waking up feeling hotter than ever before.  After getting out of bed and stumbling to the bathroom, still unsure of why it was so hard to walk, I was greeted by a shock from my mirror.  There stood a raccoon-man, my height, with my brown hair and green eyes.  It echoed my every movement, but I still couldn’t accept that it was me that I was seeing in the glass.  That’s when I heard movement in the living room.  I grabbed my two knives and quietly made my way to where the noise was.  I had hardly turned the corner when I was jumped on by a growling man with bloody teeth.  In a panic, I twisted and somehow managed to throw my attacker off.  I spun around and planted a knife in his chest before plunging the other into the head of the next guy.  I was in a panicked frenzy and soon they were all dead.  I took a moment to catch my breath, then I realized just how sticky my fur was.  Still needed to get used to having fur.  I tried as best I could to wipe the blood from it, not having much effect, but I had bigger priorities at that point.

I threw on my trench coat and tried as hard as I could to get my tail under it with no luck.  As soon as I left my apartment, I was shocked at what I saw.  All around me was chaos.  People were feasting on flesh as they were being beaten to death while others were looting the stores.  “Figures,” I said as I moved to my car, “as soon as the shit hits the fan, the stores get broken into.”  I pulled out and drove, not caring about who got in my way.  I was focused on my one goal.  As I drove down the street, I kept speeding up and with each passing house my heart sunk in despair.  Each house was filled with the infected.  It wasn’t long before I made it to my destination and ran from the still-running car.  “Mom!  Dad!” I yelled in desperation, but as soon as I looked in the windows, I felt I was too late.  The house was swarming with more infected than I’d seen yet.  Not questioning and refusing to accept what my mind already knew, I dove right in, my knives swinging in wide arcs of death and yelling curses at the top of my lungs.  I can honestly say I didn’t get bitten, but I did get beaten within an inch of my life.  I soon found myself barely standing while I faced down a couple more.  The first staggered toward me, the hunger in his eyes focused entirely on me.  When he lunged, I spun around him and slit his throat, only to have my other knife knocked from my hand by the other one.  I turned around, brandishing my remaining knife defensively.

The remaining infected had grabbed the other knife and was swinging it wildly with a crazy look in her eye.  I was gasping for breath and missed when she lunged for me.  I tried to dodge backward, but she still caught me across the face, leaving me with a scar across my right eye.  I cringed, covered the cut, and stabbed her in the chest repeatedly.  When it was all over, I had to drag myself upstairs to find that my fears were true.  There were my parents, torn apart, but still looking human.  With that, whatever strength I had gave out and I blacked out.

When I woke up, the infected had disappeared miraculously.  My bleeding had stopped, and I felt disgusting from all the blood that coated my fur.  I dragged myself to my feet and went to work burying my parents.  When I made it outside, the sky blazed red and there was no sign of anyone around.  Not that I noticed that first.  I had one goal at this time and that was to give my parents the burial they deserved.  It was hours later before I had the graves filled in and marked.  I stood there a moment, lost for words.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say before turning and going back into the house.  What I decided to do next was instantaneous.  I was numb as I walked back up the stairs to where my parent’s room was.  After I took a quick shower, I shook off whatever water was still on and looked at the clothing I had to work with. There in my dad’s closet was his black duster.  I don’t remember where he got it; any time I asked he said he’d tell me when I was older.  I guess that time would never come.  I took off my trench coat and put the duster on, letting it cover my new body.  For the plan I had, I would need as much protection from the elements as possible.  I took a backpack and went down to the kitchen to fill it with as much food as I could.  Once everything was packed and I had my knives, I left the house and the town, never to return.  I made myself a promise that day that I wouldn’t ever let that happen to anyone I cared about again.  That would be the last day anyone would see me cry.

No one quite knows how The Ruin happened.  It’s a mystery that the proposed solutions just keep getting more and more off the wall with each one you hear.  Some said that one of the aggressive ones got into a missile silo and fired wildly, knocking a bunch of satellites out of their orbit.  Others said that someone managed to hit the world with a giant EMP wave.  Still others claimed it was aliens behind it all.  I don’t know myself.  All I know is that technology from that point on didn’t work.  I ended up walking as I traveled, not knowing what I was looking for.  One thing’s for sure, I wasn’t the only one who got turned into an animal.  All things considered, I’m happy I became what I am.  I mean, look at the alternative.  I could have been turned into one of those mindless creatures that to this day still pop up here and there.