Enter the dragon... Muahahahah-<i>uck</i>. **slumps over with an arrow in her back, rightfully slain for use of such a pun** -- The Newbies Board

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Date Posted: 22:39:44 06/22/02 Sat
Author: Zosimus Vly
Subject: Enter the dragon... Muahahahah-uck. **slumps over with an arrow in her back, rightfully slain for use of such a pun**

The main street of Gladsheim isn't particularly busy. It's usually empty (if not dusted with a few trapped, unaccustomed souls broken and drifting like specters) unless somebody (or thing) decides to be particularly cruel and dump a small handful of the denizens of somewhere else into it. A few of the old-timers will tell you of the summer a few handfuls of years back, when several creatures with spindle-legs ran through the town for a month, snapping at everything with mouths that more than anything resembled bear-traps nested like Russian dolls.

"Y'know, Agnes, back when Junie Fell had her first liddle 'un."
"Ooooh, yes." The meditative creaking might be wooden chair-rockers, or the joints in the planks of the porch, or the joints in Agnes' legs. "An' Bobby."
(Robert Fell has reached his thirty-ninth year in Gladsheim, and with Junie has raised no less than five children. But to Agnes and her kind, he will always be little Bobby Fell, who caught bullfrogs as big as his head in the creek behind Eastman's butcher shop.)
"Bobby sure was worked up over it."
"Jes' married and jumpy like a jackrabbit. Ooh, yes, went out and shot one of the things single handed. Old Eastman took the meat, near died eatin' it."
"Lost a damn good milk good cow to them things..."

This is all that the young man walking down the street hears, as he passes a storefront. He does not see Agnes and Harold, but already knows them well enough, and instead prefers to inspect the leaf in his gloved hands. It's from some sort of new tree that began appearing sparely a few years ago, in the shade of buildings growing spindly and large-leaved like saplings even when approaching five and six feet. It's growing near autumn, and each tree's three leaves are turning now, each one at least a foot wide and a rich burgundy-red not quite like anything he's ever seen before. Nobody knows quite where the seeds came from.
"Zipper's gived," an average townsperson will reply, with the perfectly confounding nature with which people speak familiar but completely nonsensical slang.
Visitors have pondered this. Some interpret it as an acceptance that the walls between boundaries have given, being of their nature able to open and close like a zipper on clothing. A more common interpretation is that it is a mutation of a phrase amounting to "Zephyr's gift," an allusion to the fickle wind warped by careless repetition until rendered indecipherable.

The man pondering the leaf comes back to reality as the cooling breeze picks up again, nudging the long braid between his shoulders and tugging the wide leaf like a sail, and he smiles absently as he lets go. It flies for a few yards, then skitters past hooves and fetlocks, bringing to the his attention a figure and horse, neither of which he can remember seeing in Gladsheim in the year he's been there.
"Hey."
He pauses maybe a yard in front of both, giving a casual half-wave. His skin is lightly tanned after the summer, not the dark brown of the better part of the young men (and a good half of the young women) of the town, who've spent their summer in the fields and pastures and gardens. He wears simple clothing, long dingy-gray shirtsleeves and darker suspenders and trousers. His coat is slung over his shoulder and held there by the collar, of thick cloth and a shade that, despite wear, still makes a good pass at being white. Oddly, a fedora roughly the same shade as his coat lies perched at a slight angle atop his gold-streaked black hair, that alone incongruous about him in the rather unremarkable locale.
He smiles, though the motion is mostly with eyes that pass for light-brown at a distance, unless inspected not obviously gold and reptilian.
"I can't recall seeing you around. You know where the stable is?" he inquires, cocking his head slightly as he questions.

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