Lord of the Mountain

Lord of the Mountain is the third episode of the first series of The Zany Adventures of Ho-Ip, written by The Boy Who Cried Godzilla.

Synopsis
Ho-Ip is discovered by a herd of animals, and some outsiders, and Ba-Zen is faced with a great decision.

Story
Ho-Ip opened his mouth to accept the drops of liquid falling from the stalactite on the ceiling. In the time he had spent in the mountains, Ho-Ip had learned rudimentary patterns in how things affect the constant pain that he existed in, such as allowing wet things into his mouth tended to ease it a bit. He did not think as other Ohpinians might, but rather felt and experienced. This could easily be expected of one with no true form of communication ability. It was during his long, slow drink that Ho-Ip heard the noise. A series of short guttural cries drifting through the mists of the mountain range in the dewy morning hours.

Ho-Ip was not what one might call curious as to its origin, but all the same stumbled out of the cave and clumsily leapt up and around his cave’s entrance and into a valley between three mountain peaks. It was formed long ago by a meteor strike crushing the peak of one mountain and splitting it open before storms filled the crater with water and time and tide made it a truly rare natural beauty. A twisted, but not at all gnarled or tangled tree grew from the small island at the center of the lake, whose crystalline leaves shaded the damp grotto even in the nearly horizontal cast of the sun’s rays at that hour.

It was there that Ho-Ip came face to face with a herd of animals that had come to the small mountaintop valley for water. Their great curling horns bobbed as they drank, their six, sturdy legs planted firmly on the ground as a counterbalance. Ho-Ip saw this and hobbled into the pond and sat with his mouth open, allowing the liquid to seep in as his onlookers watched him bewilderedly. He was vaguely like them, so their natural suspicion didn’t really kick in, as he didn’t seem a threat, but even in their beastly minds he was absolutely strange. As Ho-Ip sat and drank the water in that beautiful and uncanny valley, the herd were discovering an uncanny valley all their own.

The matriarch of the herd, curious and cautious of this new creature as any leader would be, gently tapped it with her impressively broad and curled rack of horn. At the slightest touch the unresponsive Ho-Ip fell face first into the water. The herd watched with an odd sense of frantic shame, as if needing to console a child they had accidentally wronged. The matriarch waited for the lumpy thing to right itself, but the longer she waited, the fewer and smaller breaths bubbled to the surface. She tugged its ankle to get it out of the pond, but midway there she was blinded by a flash of light. The herd was running scared and disappearing over the side of the mountain as Ho-Ip stretched his muscular arms. Water dripped from his body as he gracefully spewed the water out of his lungs. He trotted out of the water on his four limber legs, his new form thoroughly horrifying the remaining herd members.

As they disappeared over the sides, Ho-Ip heard their terrified cries grow fainter and fainter. At that moment He heard a camera click and whipped his torso around to see an ape-like Ohpinian holding a camera. The new Ho-Ip calmly as ever raised his hand as a white mist formed around it and began to work its way into a spiral shape. He then launched the spear tip at the interloper, at the impeder of balance, and he was struck with a blast of sheer force. He awoke halfway down the mountain.

He reached to massage his throbbing forehead, and discovered his palm was covered in red fluid when he looked at it. He cursed softly and checked his camera, which, despite cushioning his fall, on multiple occasions he guessed by the look of it, the memory card seemed to be in tact. Now he could get somewhere.

Hours later, Ba-Zen stared at the grimy table through the bottom of his drink. The plum-amber liquid swam in his blurred vision and he heard something vaguely familiar on the news.

“A mystery mutant in the mountains, that’s right. You heard it here first folks!”

Ba-Zen clacked his pincers thoughtfully as he turned his inebriated head toward the screen. In the constant shift that was his vision for the moment he saw a shape he thought he had left behind him in a figurative and literal sense.

“Our eyewitness report claims that it was some kind of cross between an Ohpinian and an unidentified animal”

The rest of the news lady’s sentence was lost to Ba-zen as he shot up in his booth and stumbled out of the poorly lit pub. By some miracle he made his way to the Bragnoghn municipal library, where he drunkenly smacked at one of the statues out front until he finally managed to open the hidden door in the base. He slowly and carefully lowered himself into the damp descending stairway and shut the door behind him. He carefully made his first step and slipped down the long staircase. Luckily for Ba-Zen the mossy steps allowed him to slide through most of it, but he still hit the hard stone floor face first.

“Ba-Zen?” shouted a cloaked woman, “By the blood, are you okay?” She lowered her hood, and her long, thin, feelers touched the floor as she knelt to aide her friend. “Kar-Al! The Archdeacon! I’ve gotta speak to him, Kar-Al! Baphomet lives!” he slurred out his sentence before passing out. His exoskeleton had protected him, but the abuse he had gone through had pushed the limits of even that.

Kar-Al left him with some others in the main chamber and knocked on the Archdeacon’s door. An authoritative voice came from the other side: “What is it my child?” “Ba-Zen is ill in the chamber, sir. But he claims that Baphomet has been reborn!”

Locks clicked open and the door swung in to reveal the hooded face of Pi-Oh, his red eyes glimmering with intrigue.

“Well then, Ms. Kar. It seems that Mr. Ba and I have a lot to talk about. Show him in won’t you?” “Umm… well, sir… he’s unconscious.” “Ah.” Pi-Oh’s eyes came unfocused as he puzzled the situation. “Have you any idea why he thinks this?” “Well… no, he fell down stairs and said to tell you Baphomet had been reborned.” She shifted nervously in the scrutiny of the Archdeacon. Wanting desperately to break the silence, she threw her friend under the bus. “He smelled like he’d been drinking…”, she turned nervously away from the great red eyes that stared at her from the abyss of his hood. She had never regarded him as frightening in the past, but the sense of severity that seemed to seep from his being was enough to make the strongest person in the world feel uncomfortable.

Ba-Zen awoke on a worn leather couch in the Archdeacon’s office with a headache so painful he couldn’t have dreamed it if he was some kind of masochist who would dream about having a painful headache. The tick of the clock sounded to Ba-Zen at that time like gargantuan bells ringing in each ear. The squeak of Pi-Oh’s chair as he rocked softly back and forth on the spring joint connecting the seat to the wheelbase formed an endless cacophony.

“Ahh. Mr. Ba you’ve finally decided to join us, how fortunate. Now. Tell me about this… Baphomet.”

Twenty hours later it was nightfall on the fractured mountain. The moons floated in the sea of clouds while Ho-Ip munched a fruit that had fallen from the tree in the pond. His blank stare reflected the moons in his eyes while Ba-Zen and Kar-Al crept through the dewing foliage to get a look at the immaculate form of Baphomet.

Ba-Zen, who had led the way, let out an odd breath somewhere between a sigh and a gasp upon seeing the figure of Pi-Bes, who he had last seen in his rearview mirror.

“Well… take the news as you will, but it’s not Baphomet.” “That’s bad news, Ba-Zen.” She replied in a mildly condescending tone, “Not just for the Order, and the world, but particularly for you.”, she continued, her voice softening ever so slightly. “Oh it get’s worse. Remember Pi-Bes?” he asked, watching the thing in question shred a fruit’s pit with his many, frighteningly malformed teeth. “The abomination?” “The very same. It’s him.” “You’re mistaken, Pi-Bes is either sitting in a glue bottle or keeping macaroni art stuck on a plate. Some guy took it to the adhesive foundry years ago.” “Way to make a guy feel appreciated, Kar-Al, that guy was me, and I left him in a meadow.” “What? Why?”, the fear and disbelief was obvious in Kar-Al’s voice. “You had specific orders!” “Look at the thing? It didn’t do anything wrong! It was born from an interference with the natural balance. We were wrong to try to force Baphomet’s return. That mutant shouldn’t suffer for it.”

At that Ba-Zan turned around and began to walk down the mountain. “Wait! What do we tell Pi-Oh?” “We say there was just a herd of animals. I saw some crossing the plains when we were climbing, and that the photographer was mistaken, and so was I. We will not mention Pi-Bes. Agreed?” Kar-Al took a moment to think about the decision. “Fine.” “Great! Glad we sorted that out, now if you don’t mind, I need a drink.” And with that Ba-Zen and Kar-Al parted ways.

Pi-Oh sat with an ancient, peeling, volume open on his desk, and was deep in study when he heard the knock at his door. Kar-Al was back with her report.

Monsters

 * Ho-Ip
 * Pi-Oh
 * Ba-Zen
 * Kar-Al
 * Bapho-Ip