Part V - If I Could Talk to the Animals (and I did)
You must excuse me if this account of our escapades in what has become known as "Odyssey to the Great Beyond" (I don't know, and don't want to know what the "Great Beyond" is, and I don't think I want to go there) is not up to the standards of the previous articles. Circumstances required that this was not written until well after the adventure, and I was just coming off the trip to Gordium in which I took several bad blows to the head, so I was not operating at my peak during the events.
After sneaking off from Alexander's camp to disappear, we appeared in a room of windows/mirrors. As usual, those who were not along in Gordium were again present in this transit room, with Brian Young still unconscious, as I recall. At this point, a new member entered to join the party, saying that his name was Jay, and that he had stepped through Chappell's door, and entered this room, with the door disappearing behind him. Having had experience with Chappell's door ourselves, we could sympathize with that, but we naturally didn't trust him, as we never trusted what Chappell was up too.
Jay too, had connections to David Chappell, which was how he got sucked in, and Chappell said that he was necessary to restore our complement to the magic number of seven, depleted after Michael Penn's departure. This indicated that Joe Supple was still counted among our number, and that we would be returning to retrieve him, as was previously suggested. Anyway, it seemed there were things Jay was not telling us, and that something was going on, as paranoia was our favorite recreational pasttime.
Anyhoo, we all got set to depart again, Jon and I were getting backup to strength after our battle with the giant, and Chappell made ready to depart. We all went up to one of the windows, showing a forest scene, and stepped through, one at a time, seeing the person before appearing on the other side, but not being able to see the person coming after, as the gateway was not visible from the other side.
So, Jon, Sakell, Jay, and I (along with the elf guy) found ourselves in what we determined to be a virgin forest (although we didn't see any cherry trees). We realized that we were back in a zippedee doodah land, not unlike the snow white adventure, when animals started talking to us. I forget exactly who we saw, and what we talked about, but we saw a fox, who left to go deal with a chipmunk. I think we also saw a talking wolf and rabbit. We ran into a satyr (goat-man) who apparently knew the elf. They talked for a bit, and then the satyr left. At some point in here, Fabio pulled his typical disappearing act, telling us that we needed to find a feather from the elder eagle, who we assumed was up in the mountains ahead. Also, he wanted us to pick up "courage" and "bravery", if we could. I suggested that maybe what we needed was a brain.
We walked along, and the next talking animal we saw was a large snake (maybe 6'), who we had a pleasant conversation with. He knew our fearless leader, and wanted us to take a present to him, a cherry, but we were not to tell him that it came from the snake. Knowing that anything someone wanted the elf to have probably had something wrong with it, we were very careful handling the cherry, putting in a jar. We also asked if we could get any directions to find the eagle, and he said he would tell us if we promised to join him for dinner. After making sure that he didn't intend to HAVE us for dinner, but have us TO dinner, we made vague promises that if Chappell went to dinner, so would we. He then told us how to go along the main path, and find a side path that branched off by a tree, but that wasn't readily visible.
We headed off that way, found the tree, went under one particular branch to find the path, and went up to the hills, heading towards the mountains. Up in the hills, we saw an eagle soaring in the distance, and when we got under it, we attracted his attention, and got him to land. He told us that he was not the elder eagle for whom we sought, but we were heading the right way. We just needed to get further into the mountains. We did keep going, and found the eagle aeryie on a cliff, and started talking to him. It was readily apparent that he was very old, mostly blind, and hadn't flown in quite some time, as he had something covering him that resembled cobwebs, or maybe mold. We told him that we would like a feather of his, and what would he take for it. He said that he would like a nice juicy fish, and pointed us in the general direction of the river.
We headed down to the river, where a bear was fishing, and being rather impatient when he didn't get his fish. We said hi, he said hi, and went on with his fishing. We were figuring out how we were going to catch anything, when the bear caught a large fish, and one person noted that we'd only seen one of each animal, and that there may only be one fish. It was decided that we should try to get the bear's fish, and asked him what he'd take for it. He said that he would like some honey, and we realized that this was rapidly turning into the MASH episode about Hawkeye's boot, but that there wasn't much we could do about it.
We went off into the woods along a trail in the direction the bear suggested, looking for bees, and found an old dead tree with an oversized Disney-esque bee with a helmet and spear guarding it. It was at this point that I realized that the fish would probably also talk (I should have thought of that sooner, but I'd recently been clubbed in the head), and I said that if he did, that I was leaving. We told the bee we were looking for honey, and asked if they had any to spare. He went inside to check with the king (yes, the king. I can just imagine a 3 foot tall bee with sideburns and a sequined jumpsuit), and came back and told us that the worker would like a bunch of flowers brought to the tree, so it wouldn't have to travel as far. If we did that for them, we could get some honey from them. It was at this point that the soldier bee displayed an amazing lack of knowledge about the making of honey.)
Resigned to our fate, we headed off toward the meadow we were told about, where the flowers were. We got to the meadow, and going through the woods, we felt like we were being watched (every time we went though the woods, we felt we were being watched, and then we ran into some kind of talking animal.) We started picking flowers, and it turned out that we were being watched by giggling dryads, who had never seen people like us out picking flowers, and wanted to know what we were doing. We explained, and they helped by picking flowers and making garlands for us. It seemed that these nymphs were nymphos and wanted us to leave the flowers and take to the trees. We had all heard the stories about being taken prisoner by dryads, so we just kept picking flowers and rebuffing their advances.
After a while, we'd picked a significant amount of the meadow bare, and not wanting to strip it, took the flowers we had back to see what the bees thought. The nymphs did not want us to leave, but we did, and they couldn't get too far from their trees, so we left them behind. We got the flowers back, and piled them around the tree, where the worker bee pronounced them good. He then got our honey, which I volunteered my helmet (that I picked up in Gordium) to carry it in. The manner of how we got the honey was rather disgusting, so naturally, I will go into detail on it. The worker made several trips into the tree, and each time came out and puked into my helmet.
With this honey, we now went back to the bear, gave him the honey, and he caught us the fish. Naturally, the fish talked and pleaded for his life. We explained the situation to him, and asked if he had any alternatives, but he wasn't too happy about it, in fact he was rather panicked. He wasn't a magic fish, so we couldn't get any wishes, and all his alternatives were pretty lamebrained.
We delivered the scared fish to the eagle, who ate him alive, so we could hear the fish scream as he died in agony. I wasn't too happy about all this, but I didn't think I had much choice. The eagle mumbled incoherently to himself, and beat his head against a rock, but gave us our feather, and we wandered off out of the mountains, to find Fabio and get the hell out of there. We found him, told him the story, gave him the feather and the cherry. As we suspected, the cherry was poisoned, telling us that we weren't alone in plotting against him, of course we hadn't tried anything yet. Fabio drew a circle in the dirt, we held hands, he said his words, and we zapped back to the in-between zone.
(The next paragraph is something I wrote immediately following this jaunt, I felt it belonged here, even if it still didn't apply when I wrote up the whole story. It will explain some of the next story though.)
At this point we left through the usual magical gateway, off to our next great adventure, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't get too excited about it, what with having the fish's blood on my hands. I'm a worthless murderer, my life is worth nothing, and I deserve to die. I don't plan on coming back from the next adventure, take this note to my family if you make it back, try to explain what happened.