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It was when Blabuel had led his party far past the mountains that they first discovered the strange flying object screaming through the pale pink sky; were shaken with dread when it made the thunder. The ground grumbled with anger after its disappearance behind nearby trees.
Blabuel's trainees began to immediately pester him about the nature of the truly spectacular phenomenon they had just witnessed. As if he knew any more than they did. As if this was something that always happened when one went to hunt. So he told them what he knew.
"How in hell should I know?" he asked defensively. "You think that something like this happen all time I go hunt? I know much as you do. It never happen before. You think Blabuel know everything? We go find out, then I know. Then you know too." Blabuel thought his words ingenious, as did those who followed him. Blabuel was the great hunter, and was very wise and intelligent in their eyes.
"Blabuel say good thing, so we do good thing with Blabuel. We go back home heroes. We go back home and Blabuel mate with any female he want. Kaveel go back home and mate with who he want, too," said Kaveel in hopes of impressing Blabuel. Whatever it was Blabuel did, Kaveel had decided to mimic so that he might be lucky enough to return to the community alive, and do as he'd boasted. There was this one girl, Raleela, Kaveel had had his mind on for a while. . .
"We go look now," said Blabuel simply, and as he began walking in the direction where the earth now smoked, the others obediently followed him. The party gaped at the long path the object had eaten through the skinny evergreens, and looked to where it had begun to eat a hole in the earth itself.
Blabuel's party approached the resting creature, cautiously and silent. Although it was apparent that the object wasn't moving, they still didn't know what to expect. For all they knew it was a demon playing dead, that would jump up and attack them whenever they got too close and eat them all, like it had already done to the trees.
Blabuel noticed a blue light flashing on the glowing red thing's side, and walked bravely, but not too closely -- the heat of the beast saw to that -- to where it emanated, looking for the source. The light was coming from a small square amidst a group of other squares that were blackened within their opaque surfaces.
Blabuel called one of the other hunters over to him, and ordered him to inspect a bit closer the square with the strange blue light.
"Why me?" snapped Kulnarb, a hunter about a foot shorter than Blabuel and missing one of his six legs. This was perhaps the reason he was included in the hunt.
"You do as I say," said Blabuel harshly, shoving Kulnarb and striking him with one of his duller talons, almost cutting him.
Kulnarb grudgingly crept closer to the flashing square, panting slightly from the heat, peering at it so close his wet nose almost smeared the slick surface. He noticed that there had once been something covering the small squares, and guessed it was something like the rest of the beast, and must have been torn loose. Kulnarb curiously touched the surface of the monster with the palm of his hand.
"Ahhhhhhhh!!! Ahhhhhhhh!!!," yelled Kulnarb, uttering several untranslatably perverse guttural clickings as he began licking rapidly at his burning hand, the pain and the heat causing his large, bulging black eyes to water profusely. His small tufted ears were lying flat on his furry head, in submission to the pain.
Kulnarb's comrades tried unsuccessfully to hold back their laughter, which lasted for minutes due to jokes thrust on him by Bu Gahk, one of the hunters that thought himself a good comedian.
"Kulnarb, your hand hurt?" asked Blabuel sarcastically after the jokes had ceased, his question sparking even more violent laughter.
"Go mate with your mother," said Kulnarb quite seriously, his mild voice sounding bitter and spiteful. After another round of unleashed laughter, Kulnarb angrily smashed his hand against the blue-lit square, in a vain effort to break it and stop its flashing. But his results were quite different from what he expected, sending him and everyone else running back as rapidly as their legs could carry them, stopping at the edge of the broken ring of trees surrounding the creature and its opening mouth. Apparently the beast was angry at being struck in its eye, Blabuel said. Kulnarb got struck by a few of his fellows as a result.
It took almost an hour for them to get up enough nerve to approach the beast again. It had slowly lost it red tint as the hour passed, and after throwing a few rocks without any response, they celebrated the kill. Kulnarb even got a few apologies and a bit of praise for being the one who had -- accidentally, they reminded him -- slain the great beast. When Blabuel felt it absolutely safe -- since the red and the heat was gone, they could cut a few steaks before they went back to the village, eh? -- they got out their carving knives and soon discovered that this beast would be inedible.
One of the party members noticed something flashing from inside the beast's mouth, and entered to investigate. When a few brief moments had passed and they heard nothing but ooohing and ahhhing from inside, the rest of the party followed him. After the brief moment of stunned looks and their own sounds of amazement had passed, they began rummaging about. They found the corpse of a two-legged creature-meal, a lot more of the flashing squares, and an object stranger, and far more interesting, than the debris and other unusual objects strewn violently about the creature's belly. Blabuel, of course, claimed this, the strangest of the objects -- after wrestling it away from another, weaker hunter -- for himself.
"It's pretty," said the hunter the object was taken from, in a childlike voice. Though he wished he could have what Blabuel had, since he had found it first, he didn't really mind all that much. His prime mate would love even more the other thing he'd discovered, and she would make him very happy after returning to the community and giving the pretty object to her. He quickly stashed it in his pack before Blabuel decided to take that from him as well.
Blabuel ignored the almost jealous hunter. He couldn't worry about him, for he couldn't take his eyes off of his prize. The object was about a meter in length and its end reminded him of one of the blow tubes used by a rival community, except that it was bigger and had only one hole in it instead of two, and was quite a bit heavier and bulky in its design. Blabuel had never used one of the blow tubes their enemies used when they killed his people in the yearly battle, but he knew that the little arrows that shot out of them always came out of the tube's hole, so he knew that if this object was a weapon he would know where not to point the small hole.
There was a larger tube on top of the object that almost looked like a small giant's blow tube, but strangely it had no hole, but was domed on both its ends. But he had plenty of time to discover its use later. Everything had a use, and Blabuel was smart. He expected to learn everything there was to know about his possible blow tube quickly.
After a few more minutes of inspection and experimentation Blabuel decided that the wedge at the end opposite the hole fitted comfortably against his upper shoulder, and was beginning to be even happier at his guess that the object was a weapon after all. But still, there was no second hole to put a dart into, and he'd found no darts in the beast's stomach that carried the undigested, ugly two-legged thing in its belly.
Blabuel searched around inside the ship again. Nope, no darts. He was about to think the object useless and give it back to Ralarg, the hunter he'd taken the object from, when he got an idea. He knew that it was a little square eye that made the thing he now stood in open its mouth, so maybe his thing would work if he found a square eye to hit.
On top of the object four squares grouped closely together beneath a hinged plate caught Blabuel's eye. They weren't glowing square eyes like the one outside was, but still, he thought, if he hit one of them something might happen. So he hit the top left one with a talon and it lit up, but did nothing but highlight the black squiggle marks visible there. He thought maybe the eye was now open, so if he hit it again it might do something. He tried that. The eye shut. So he hit it again, and it opened. He repeated this process m
any times until he eventually decided that he wasn't doing something right, and decided to at least leave it glowing. He tried some of the other eyes, but when one would open, another would close. He opened the one he'd tried first again, and decided to look over the rest of the object a bit more carefully.
If Blabuel could have read the strange alien script, if he had even known a concept such as reading existed, which it didn't, the squiggles would have said STUN, and he still wouldn't have understood its meaning. When he looked again at the bottom of his toy, he noticed something, a small, thin, curved stick. It looked like a claw. A claw. Smiling, he began to fumble with it and a bolt of pale pink light shot from the hole and hit Ralarg dead-center in his torso.
Ralarg fell down in convulsions, and after a moment laid as still as if he were dead.
Oh no! thought Blabuel. I kill Ralarg! Although his conscious could accept letting hunters die without help at the claws of a Klarng dragon, for the sake of the community, the idea of killing outside of battle was heinous. But. . .
Was Ralarg still breathing? Yes! For a moment there Blabuel thought he was going to have to go through the suicide ritual. He repeated, "Thank the gods!" over and over in his mind, almost oblivious to anything else. Finally one of the hunters backhanded him out of his slight daze, after failing to gain his attention otherwise.
After searching for and finding no wounds, and trying everything he could short of stomping Ralarg in his gut to wake him, Blabuel decided to have him carried on their trip back to the community. Along the way Blabuel decided to test the other three square eyes on his weapon, hoping they would do as much, or more, than the blast that knocked Ralarg helplessly unconscious.
Blabuel decided to hit the eye next to the one still lit, with the squiggles BLAST, and before pulling the gun's "little stick," he made certain no one was in its line of fire, and toppled a thick-bole ung tree, enabling him and the others to see the blue-green tree's splintered innards. The third eye, marked BEAM, cut a tree in half. The fourth, GRENADE, flipped the forward-facing end of the big tube up, to disgorge with a whoosh a tiny black sphere, loudly turning a tree into so many tiny, blackened embers.
Blabuel would finally solve the problem of his community's almost constant food shortage. With his "blow tube from the belly of the Beast," killing a Klarng dragon would be as easy and fun as mating. No more skimpy pickings from the river!
"With this," he told the other hunters, "we never hunger again!" All of the hunters cheered him on. They knew the truth in his words. No more hunger. No more violent death. No more losses in battle.
"With this," Blabuel went on to say, "we not have to have battle. With this, we have peace!" He held the gun high above his head as his fellow hunters pounded him on his back and roared with approval. The chief was sure to agree with him. The community would certainly prosper.
It was hours later before Ralarg awoke with a very painful, skull-fracturing headache. He was angry, but after he was told of the power of the weapon Blabuel found on the ship, and how it did different things with each eye when it was poked open, he immediately began to turn his thoughts toward a less angry direction.
"Uh, Blabuel, me want to see great weapon. Me find, let me see," asked Ralarg obsequiously, hoping Blabuel would be generous enough to let him hold the powerful weapon.
"You want to see, see?" Blabuel said as he stuck the weapon in Ralarg's face. The others laughed meanly, and Blabuel couldn't help but maintain a malicious grin.
The laughing caused Ralarg's headache to increase in its intensity. He almost passed out from the pain.
"No. Let me hold it, let me use it, see what it do." Ralarg wasn't being so obsequious anymore. Anger was glinting in his black eyes, and could be smelled in his scent.
"I don't know. . ." began Blabuel teasing, smelling Ralarg's anger and purposely fueling it.
Ralarg simply stood there and waited for Blabuel's gloating to cease. The hair on his head, the only hair on his leathery body, stood up straight and stiff. After taking a few minutes to notice that Ralarg wasn't going to beg or plead or do any other respect sucking deed, he handed the gun to Ralarg.
"How it work?" Ralarg asked simply, holding it up and inspecting it over his head. It was still on the GRENADE setting.
"You point hole at target and pull little stick. It amazing!" said the excited Blabuel. He was proud of his weapon. He was proud of what it represented.
Ralarg pointed the gun at his target, and before Blabuel could react he was blown into so many scorched chunks, and ceased to exist. His fellow hunters were appalled at what Ralarg had done, but before true shock set in and before they could react, the same thing that happened to Blabuel was systematically and effectively done to each of them. Ralarg had to chase his final victim, surprisingly the five-legged Kulnarb, before snuffing out his existence as well.
"Teach them laugh at me," he said under his breath, and continued on the trip back to the community, still feeling the powerful and painful side effects of the weapon's stun setting. I not laugh, he thought, so they not laugh at Ralarg and feel safe. Maybe I be lucky and kill dragon. I be hero. I. . . AHHH! Pain!!! Go 'way! Go 'way! Ohhhhhhh. . .
Ralarg fell to his side, the pain seemingly ceaseless, his ears twitching violently. An hour later he stood, and resumed his journey.