Ol Blu was used to feeling helpless. That’s just how life is when you’re a kicken. You’re tiny. Weak. Possessing neither hands nor tentacles. You rely on others to survive; living at the mercy of a big world populated by powerful giants. And yet, in all his centuries of life, he had never felt more helpless than he did in that moment, when he watched Lefty sink into a towering pile of muck.

  For half a moment the shock of what happened froze him in place. He stood there in the darkness, mouth agape, his one good eye wide with fear. And then urgency hit him like a sack of bricks. Lefty needed his help! He had to do something! And fast! Without thinking he leapt from the stone he was standing on, flying as quickly as his little wings would carry him. He could barely see in the darkness, but his perfect memory gave him a clear picture of the hub, with all its stone pillars. He hopped from one to the other, fluttering frantically to make the jumps, his muscles straining as he raced towards the massive monster, determined to save his friend!...

  He only made a few leaps before reality sunk in, hitting him like an even bigger sack of bricks. He landed on a pillar and stopped, breathing heavily as he stared in the direction of the living waste…

  There was nothing he could do…

  Ol Blu was less than a hand tall and his bones were hollow. Even if he had a weapon and limbs with which to wield it… there was no way he'd be able to harm this creature. If a strong young human like Lefty had fallen to it… what hope did he possibly have?

  Tears began to fill the old kicken's remaining eye. Lefty was his only living friend; the only person who had shown him true respect in decades… and now he was dying… might already be dead. The creature had stopped moving. It was the one thing he could see. Lefty’s pointlights glowed from inside it, its radiance dim but visible… and also eerily still. There was no struggle happening within the creature. Lefty was frozen, being slowly digested or crushed or drowned… perhaps all three at once… and Ol Blu could do nothing to stop it.

  He was worthless.

  (Slowly morph to Ol Blu voice) Once again he had failed to stop a tragedy. Once again, he could do nothing but stand there… and witness it from afar. That’s all he was good for. Watching and remembering. Every memory captured in perfect clarity, forming stories in his mind that would never leave or fade with time. The other races treated it as a gift. (Haunted Sigh) If only they knew what it was like. To never forget. To constantly re-live your past over and over. His memory was a curse… but it was the only thing he was good at. The only thing that made him useful enough to keep around. He could not fight, or lift, or run, or even lend a helping hand… he could only remember… and talk… and those skill were useless here.

  ...

  Or were they?

  Ol Blu stared at the lumbering monster once more. The terrible brownish mass lacked a clearly defined head, much less eyes or ears… but it had sensed them somehow. It knew they were here, it had moved towards Lefty… Could it hear them? Did it understand language? Even if it did, would it care what he had to say? Could it be reasoned with?

  Ol Blu didn't know… it seemed like a long shot… but he had to try something.

  And so, with tears running down his furry cheek, the kicken began to plead with the living sludge. He begged it to spare his friend's life, trying to explain just how important Lefty was to him. He apologized profusely for both of their actions, hoping beyond hope that this monster wasn’t mindless, that it would understand his words and take pity on such a lowly creature as him... but it didn't budge.

  Redoubling his efforts, Ol Blu tried again, making the same rambling plea, but this time in the old tongue. It had been the language of the early humans; those people who had once inhabited this city-turned-sewer. If this monster was a relic of those times, perhaps that was what it understood.

  As he spoke, the kicken found himself rambling passionately, letting down the wall around his guarded emotions in the hope that this creature had a heart he could appeal to.

  “Please!” He said in the old tongue. “He’s my friend! The only true friend I have in this whole world. I know he’s not perfect, I know he needs work, but don’t take him from me. He’s like a brother to me. A student. A guardian! Please Let him go!… I’ve lost them all before, I can’t lose them again…”

  Ol Blu bared his soul. He spoke with every fiber of his being, trying to compel the monster in every way he could, desperately pleading his case… but nothing happened…

  He could not stand the sorrow that washed over him. Ol Blu fell onto his side, his eye closed tight as his pleading turned into shouting. His words became rushed to the point of incoherence, as anguish overtook him completely. He was certain that this was a useless effort. It had been several minutes, and Lefty was surely dead. The kicken was just shouting into the abyss now, ranting at a beast that couldn't hear or understand his words… but he kept on talking. It was all he could do, and so he continued to do it, until his tiny lungs ached from the strain.

  He started to make a third attempt, in the language he knew best, that strange whistling speech of pentoids that he had been raised to learn… but before he could… he was interrupted by a bright light flashing across his face.

  At once Ol Blu's eye shot open. The pointlights were brighter, and wiggling wildly. He stopped speaking and righted himself, just in time to hear a loud gasp. Looking out he saw, to his complete and utter surprise, that the sludge monster was slowly ejecting Lefty from its greasy mass. The living waste was sliding backwards, creeping along at the same slow pace that it had approached… and as it did so, it deposited the wheezing young man onto the damp sewer floor.

  The lad looked awful. He was gasping deeply, each breath ragged and desperate. His limbs were quivering with exhaustion, barely able to support himself as he crawled feebly away like an injured animal. His eyes were closed, his hair was a complete mess, and his entire body was covered head-to-toe in the worst kind of filth imaginable. He was so eager to escape… that he had even abandoned his feathers.

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  The monster would expel his weapons a few seconds later, though neither he nor Blu would notice this for quite some time. Lefty was focused on simply suriving, while Ol Blu was so overjoyed that his thoughts ran together. He started hopping towards his friend once more, shouting the whole way in an unintelligible mix of common, the old tongue, and pentoid. Needless to say, this flood of unrecognizable languages did little to help the lad recover from his extreme bewilderment.

  It would end up taking him quite a while to regain his senses. He spent his first few moments simply kneeling on the floor, alternating between bouts of coughing and bouts of retching. He tried to simultaneously catch his breath and stave off vomiting; a task he only half succeeded in. After that messy affair he attempted to clean himself… with limited results. Sitting in sewage, and working with hands coated in sewage, he only managed to spread the mess around. It wasn’t until his airtorch kicked back on that he was finally able to remove some of the gunk.

  The device had bought him precious seconds after he was engulfed, creating a small pocket of air that gave him one last breath before its mechanisms succumbed to the goop. That, and Pedra’s breath training, are the only reasons he survived. Now that the device was running again he used the breeze to slowly make progress, removing as much of the thick slime from his body as he could, while trying not to think about what exactly it was that coated him. He was aided in the latter task by Ol Blu, who distracted Lefty by telling him what had happened. The old kicken spoke in an uncharacteristically rambly and excitable way, but Lefty didn’t mind. Simply hearing Ol Blu’s voice was a comfort, and he seemed genuinely moved by what his friend had said while he was trapped.

  “Was all that stuff you said… really true?” Lefty asked once he had regained most of his senses.

  “Every word of it! Why else do you think I’ve stuck by your side? I wouldn’t travel into a place like this for just anyone.” Ol Blu was still riding high on the triumph of their survival, his words and tone glowing with praise for his companion.

  The corner of Lefty’s mouth raised slightly at the compliment… but that wasn’t what he was asking about.

  “So I’m really your… only true friend.”

  “Of course lad! The one true friend I have in this whole world!”

  Lefty frowned, his lower lip quivering slightly. “Dang… I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about! You made a mistake but you’re alive! That’s what matters!”

  “No… not that… I.. (sad sigh)” Lefty looked up at Ol Blu, his face tight with concern. “You’ve been alive for hundreds of years buddy…. Has no one else been nice to you in all that time? I can’t be the only one… can I?”

  Ol Blu smiled softly. Lefty really did have a kind heart back then.

  “No, you’re not the only one lad. Just the only one left.”

  “Dang… still…”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ve lived a long life, and it hasn’t been all sad. I’ve had friends before. Friends as good as you even. But time has claimed them all. That’s… the curse of living I suppose: the longer you stick around, the more things change. Eventually everyone dies, or turns into something new, that’s just the nature of life. The important thing is that we’re friends now, and as long as we are friends, I’m going to do my best to help ya.”

  Lefty lip quivered again, as he stood up slowly on shaky legs. His lower body was soaked from laying in the sewer water, and even his upper body was still streaked with muck from the monster, but his face was determined. He stared down at Ol Blu, his eyes glistening ever so slightly. He sniffed, choking back his emotions as he nodded in agreement. “Thanks Blu. You’re the best.”

  This tearful moment was interrupted by a wet bubbling pop from the poop monster, which was still standing there, less than a dozen hands behind Lefty.

  The young man turned around… and saw that the thing which had almost killed him… was just looming there… ominously… The sight made him shout in surprise and stumble back. He tripped over a piece of debris, and plopped back into the ankle high water, letting out a string of curses as he tried to scoot away through the sewage.

  “Woah, woah! It's ok lad! It hasn’t moved in a while. Like I said, it let you go. If it wanted to hurt you... well... you'd still be inside it.” The kicken said, trying to alleviate his friend's fears.

  For a moment Lefty just sat there, looking at the thing while his breathing returned to normal. He studied the living waste, seeing it for the first time as a thinking creature, and not just a monster to be killed. As his eyes looked it up and down he finally noticed his feathers, sitting on the floor in front of the creature, their silver luster dulled by the thick sludge that covered them.

  Slowly, he rose to his feet again, looking back and forth between the monster and his precious weapons. Ol Blu saw what his friend was thinking, and was about to advise against it, but Lefty hushed him with a hand motion. The kicken sighed, and then nodded, frowning as Lefty cautiously approached the towering sludge. The young man never took his eyes off its lumbering form, watching for any sign of movement as he walked carefully towards it. Eventually he stood in the thing's shadow once again, his hands shaking with fear as he crouched down to pick up his feathers. The living waste remained stoic and unmoving, standing its ground, but making no attempt to stop Lefty from retrieving his weapons. The young man grabbed them and rose once more, his hands now still as he stared up at the monster with grim respect.

  For a moment the three of them stood in relative silence, listening to the sounds of bubbling sludge and dripping water as it echoed off the stone walls of this city turned sewer. Lefty looked down at his feathers and then back up at the monster, before turning his head towards Ol Blu.

  “Hey… can you tell the sludge monster I'm... sorry… for attacking it?” He asked, taking his companion by surprise.

  “Yes. Of course.” Ol Blu said after a few seconds, before proudly repeating his friend's words in the old tongue.

  The sludge creature… didn't react.

  “Also... thank it for not eating my feathers.” Added Lefty, keeping his eyes on the spot where he thought the sludge monster's eyes might be. As Ol Blu's words echoed around him once more, the young man bowed a little bit, trying to show humble appreciation for the thing that had bested him and then showed mercy. Once again… the sludge creature remained unmoved, simply standing there like a statue as they talked to it.

  The trio stood there for another silent moment, before Lefty turned around to face his companion once more.

  “Alright... let's get out of here then. (sigh) At least for now.” He said, much to Ol Blu's relief.

  The kicken smiled, eager to get off this old dirty stone and back onto Lefty's head, even if the human's hair was just as filthy now. With the two of them reunited, they started walking back towards the tunnel they had entered through. They had nearly left the hub behind, when suddenly Lefty came to a stop.

  “What's wrong?” Asked Ol Blu

  The young man slowly turned back around, staring at the distant figure once more. It still stood exactly where they had left it.

  “Hey... Blu... Ask if it can take us to where the Clavis Imperium is.” Lefty said.

  “I... guess it couldn't hurt to ask.” The kicken said after a moment of indecision.

  Clearing his throat, Ol Blu shouted back at the creature, his tiny voice filling the stone room with the old tongue once more.

  A few seconds later… the sludge monster finally reacted.

  With the same slowness it had used before, the creature raised its left arm, extending it to point down one of the many tunnels that filled the grand chamber.

  Lefty and Ol Blu stared in astonishment, which only grew as the creature shifted, turning to face in the direction it was pointing, before creeping forward, seeming to lead the way further into the ruins of Old Perfectum.