* * *
Ralarg's community was average in size compared to its neighbors, consisting of roughly five hundred inhabitants. Half of the people, as they always did after a hunt, swarmed around those who'd survived, in hopes a kill had been made. So when the swarm came to him, more that day than usual because no one had eaten in a long time and almost no one was in hibernation, Ralarg had no time to hear their stream of insults upon hearing that there wasn't a kill, and that only one hunter, who didn't happen to be the great hunter Blabuel, returned. He made them stand back a bit and take notice, after a few well placed, deadly explosions had captured their attention -- since the weak yell he'd given beforehand had failed to. Many lay dead. Many more stood shocked dumb.
He didn't know it, although he would have if there wasn't so much pain blocking the natural communion his people shared, but if he didn't soon do what was expected of him, he would be remembered with hatred for as long as the community existed. Ralarg had just committed acts that would usually cause one to instantly commence with the suicide ritual, but he'd never been one for customs and quite frankly didn't give a shit about them, especially not now. They had all laughed at him at one time or another, or so he believed, and laughter caused pain, so their beliefs and such didn't matter to him in the least, although just earlier that day they had.
Somewhere along his journey back to the community, Ralarg had gotten the idea in his head to become chief. Not only of his community, but of all communities, and he knew that his weapon would be all there was to say in the matter. Thoughts drifted in his agonized mind about how he thought his prime mate would adore him, and perform for him even more since he would be, as he thought, the first of the Grand Chiefs, and she would be the Grand Chief's prime mate.
Ralarg's head continued to throb painfully, although not as badly as it had earlier, and his old, peaceful thoughts no longer existed. How could they, when all he could feel was pain? After a few more showful blasts in front of and on a few of his people to gain their attention, he began to speak.
"We make no kills today, but as you see, something more important happen." He let his words sink in, judging their reactions to decide what to say next.
"Instead, Great Beast fell from heaven, to deliver us to bigness. We went to look at great Beast, after I killed him, and his belly open. Inside his belly was a dead thing, very ugly, but inside with ugly thing was this!" On his last word he raised the gun high into the air, and quickly lowered it when his people, still quite angry at his actions and his lack of committing the suicide ritual, began to ease closer to him. They knew enough already of the gun's destructive potential to back off.
"Spirit of Great Beast kill hunting party. I was sad. Great God come and make Great Beast go away. Make me great hunter. He say I be Grand Chief. Great God from sky tell me to kill any who try to stop Ralarg from being Grand Chief." Ralarg smiled at his supposed cunning.
"But you kill!" said one of the bystanders, "Great God not kill. He give life, not take life away." The unseen bystander said this last with pure certainty.
"Do you doubt what you see? Do you doubt Great God? Blasphemy! Send unbeliever to me or Great God say kill you all. Kill you all!"
Obviously Ralarg was no longer sane. He was acting as no one in the history of his people had ever acted before. The people before him sensed that something was wrong, but wrong or not, Ralarg had committed the ultimate sin. He'd killed out of battle, and he did it with cruelty, and without provocation. Surely a demon or the spirit of the "Great Beast" be babbled about must possess him!
"Send him to me now, or I do as I say!"
No one listened to him. Instead, they began to steadily advance on him once more, slowly gaining confidence and speed. And so Ralarg again began to open fire, and was stunned when, after only a few more shots, his weapon ran out of its supply of boom balls.
But that wouldn't be all, for Ralarg remembered the square eyes. He hit one at random, the one marked BEAM. An inch round ray of solid red, laced with threads of pure yellow, spewed forth from the gun's barrel, and Ralarg began to cut in half, or the equivalent, everyone who was brave enough to come too near him and his ray of death. Eventually everyone assumed a safe distance from him again and he ceased firing. His headache felt as if it were crushing his brain, pulsing, pulsing. . . He wondered dimly if it had anything to do with his being knocked unconscious earlier, but that thought was also smashed by his pain. . .
"Listen to me!" yelled Ralarg at the top of his weak lungs, waiving his four arms wildly in the air with a mad flailing abandonment of his senses. "You not hear? Great GOD tell me to do these things, what else strange voice in my head be? It say kill hunting party, I kill hunting party. It say be Great Grand Chief, I be Grand Chief. No?"
Again the same voice from the crowd taunted, "I thought you say Great Beast kill hunting party, now you say you kill hunting party. You crazy. You never be Grand Chief. Crazy people don't do chief stuff."
"Great God do, I do, what difference it make? I got mighty blow tube, you want challenge me?" Ralarg knew what the answer would be. It was his people's way never to turn down an invitation to battle. Never.
"I challenge you, without blow tube," said whoever it was still hidden in the crowd. "You decline, you be Klarba snot!" The Klarbas, whose wide heads were constantly covered with a filmy goo of pale-green phlegm, were not the least bit good to eat, or even look at. The Klarba was a disgustingly wimpy little creature, and ran from anything and everything, regardless of size. Ralarg had just been called a coward.
"I accept," said Ralarg simply, and pulled a long, wide strip of leather from the hunting gear in his backpack, and strapped his gun to his back-upper torso, quite prepared to grab it again at a moment's notice.
What remained of the crowd had been added to earlier by the rest of the community, and it parted to allow the chief to step forward. The chief was larger than anyone else in the community, smarter, and a darker shade of brown. His four fingered/taloned hands were the largest and sharpest, his useless wings the most bright and colorful.
And he'd never been beaten in battle, for if he had been, he would be dead. All battles were always, for as long as their history remembered, to the death.
When it was the chief who stepped forward, a moment of confusion crept into Ralarg's already befuddled mind. He misunderstood or wanted to misinterpret what was happening.
He said, "Where is challenger? He will not have chief for his fight. He challenge, he fight."
"I am challenger," said the chief simply, his powerfully thundering, clicking voice quite different from the one he'd used earlier in the crowd, and towered over the much smaller and weaker Ralarg.
Ralarg knew he couldn't defeat the chief by himself in a fair fight. He also knew that he wanted, more than anything, to be chief, because they never had headaches or pain, or other such common things, so his next action was decidedly quick and simple.
Ralarg unslung his gun and cut the chief in half where he stood. His gun made a strange beeping noise, but since he did not know its meaning, he ignored it.
"I defeat chief in fair fight, now I chief. I will lead you all to victory as Tribe of the Grand Chief. You will be best. You will bow down to Ralarg, and make others do same. You will tell my prime mate of my triumph. I chief. I. Ralarg. Go get prime mate of Ralarg."
No one moved. No one bowed. No one went to get his prime mate. They all simply stood and stared menacingly at him, as if he were the thing they hated most in all the world. And at that moment, and for time evermore, that was all that he was and would ever be, for as long as such memories tend to last. Most likely he would be remembered as the foulest of demons and nothing more.
"Get Jaceeta! Get my woman! Now! I give her other thing I find in belly of god. She love me more. . ."
As he was speaking, his eyes roamed, and he noticed someone pointing to the ground, and stopped suddenly when his eyes rested upon the decapitated head of his prime mate. Now h
e had no more hopes, and his head felt like it was about to explode. Ralarg pulled the gun's trigger and began to pour red-yellow death upon everyone, and as suddenly as he began, his gun ceased to function.
He had exhausted its power supply.
Ralarg began to madly punch, and smack, and slash the other eyes of his gun, and pulled the little stick numerous times, but to no avail. It took almost no time at all for the others to notice Ralarg's predicament, and once again they began their advance upon him, this time with a bit more speed.
Ralarg then began to beat the spent gun wildly upon the ground, trying to break it for failing him. He finally gave up his desperate attempts, and flung the gun at the angry crowd eager to put him out of his misery. Before the horde was upon him, he tore out his own crying eyes for his dear departed Jaceeta, whom he had slain by his own hand.
The horde raced against one another to be the first to dig their talons into the throat of the vile Ralarg, to be the one to kill he who had killed so many.
Before they could reach him, Ralarg quickly and without ceremony committed the suicide ritual, hoping that one act alone would let him be with his Jaceeta in the afterworld. Too bad, he thought to himself, before his blue/green blood had gushed completely from the thick vein in his thin neck. He had so much wanted to give the pretty thing in his pack to his darling Jaceeta. . .
Almost as soon as he'd completed his last thought he crumpled forward and died, his snout landing hard and snapping his lifeless jaw, his blood mixing with the sand to make a thick puddle beneath his head.
After a few of his people had paid their respects by kicking dirt into the pulpy sockets where his eyes had been, and lacerating his corpse a few times in various locations, and spitting on him just the same, the crowd hovering about him soon dispersed.
It wasn't until later in the evening that someone came to dispose of his remains, scooping them into a bag to be thrown to the Klarbas crawling about in the bushes. Ralarg didn't deserve to be cremated. That same someone claimed Ralarg's backpack as his own, as well as the unbreakable gun that somebody had lain beside his fly-ridden corpse.
* * *
Parng arrived late to his small, thatch-domed stone domicile. He was the only person in the community unafraid of the dead, their spirits, the deadly flame, and the least disgusted by the stench of cremation. It was his responsibility to take care of the dead, except for those killed far away from home on a hunt, that hadn't been brought back for his care. He opened the backpack he'd lifted, as he always did from the dead that carried possessions about, and began discarding the hunting gear. His only interest was the object Ralarg said he'd gotten from his so-called Belly of the Great Beast. The gods only knew what foul demon from the underworld had crawled up from its black sulfurous pit and given the things to him. But that supposed fact didn't scare Parng. Not too much.
When he found the object, he didn't think it was as pretty as the magic death thing he'd thrown in the river (he thought the gun to be the incarnation of evil and wanted to have no part of it), but it was still a nice, pretty thing. Perhaps he would give such a strange and beautiful thing to his favorite. Perhaps giving it to her would make her want to be his prime mate.
She would like the round pretty thing with the ten pretty little squares, each with their own distinct black squiggly marks under the clear covering. And she would gasp with delight when -- with the clear cover removed -- they lit up at his touch. She would like the way the lighted yellow squiggles moved around and changed shape, and the blue squiggles, that stayed the same, flashed in and out of existence. She would like the red-on-white squiggles at the top of the round object, too. The red ones didn't move or flash or glow or make strange 'beep' sounds or anything, but Parng still found it, along with the other things, quite fascinating.
Since he'd begun pushing the little squares with the black squiggles, the round thing looked a lot prettier than the death thing that had killed so many of his friends, the chief, the hunters, the great hunter. . .
Parng wondered why the squares with the black squiggles ceased to light up after the yellow and blue squiggles appeared and began to move and blink, but it wasn't important to him, and was actually quite trivial. It was pretty, and was sure to make his favorite, Peethple, want to be his prime mate, for as long as they both did live.
Parng decided he would go and give his gift to the beautiful Peethple right away! Maybe she would mate with him tonight! Maybe she would. . .
Parng's thoughts continued to drift happily as he left his home to go calling on his favorite, but if he possessed the knowledge to know what he was carrying, he wouldn't have been so happy. The ten pretty squares with the black squiggles were numbers, Galactic Standard zero through nine; the yellow flashing squiggles the numbers 63:09:33, moving backwards second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour; the flashing blue squiggles the words DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED, and the red on white squiggles atop the 'round, pretty thing' a lengthy warning label, that would do no one within a 160-mile radius any good.
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