Probably Sort-of Safe

The story so far:

Chapter 1: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-126ea5d30926#.adn6rnua1

Chapter 2: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-953fdf006e2b#.8ajf8763d

Chapter 3: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-beba9889c810#.8h84bodwq

Chapter 4: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-f650f93955c5#.4toslzdxn

Chapter 5: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-38f373218b40#.i332clgw0

Chapter 6: https://medium.com/@TheTrueBrendanF/probably-sort-of-safe-1c985512552d#.ivgspvn6i

And now…Chapter 7

Up

The door opened.

The world was silent.

Lim gaped.

The gang leaned in for a better look.

Through the door was the rest of the forest.

The door frame stood empty.

None of them had the stomach to say “That’s it?” The disappointment was too fresh.

Lim wanted to apologize.

To crack a joke.

To say something.

Anything.

He sighed. He could not bear to turn around and see the angry sadness which he could feel on his back and sense in his own gut.

‘Maybe’ he wondered, and took a step.

And was gone.

He was up.

Up high.

Up way too high.

‘This is wrong’ Lim thought.

Physics, quite agreeing with him, began to remedy this in the manner with which it had dealt with such problems for millions of years.

Lim began to fall.

Began to fall fast.

Began to fall way too fast.

The world was a bright white blur, scattered with bits of darkness. The darkness was quickly coming into focus. Lim was aware enough to know that this was a problem.

The whistle of the wind became a roar. The blur of his vision was all-encompassing. He was blind and deaf and the ground was rushing up to gobble him down.

“No!” he yelled.

Great black wings sprang out of his back. With a wrenching sensation, his body was ripped to the side. He tumbled end-over-end. Bits of coal-black skin, taloned feet and clawed hands flashed before his whirling view.

“Enough!” he cried.

His wings sprang out once more. Unconscious instincts angled them. The fall stopped.

He was gliding now. He wobbled quite a bit at first, but bit by bit he steadied himself. The slightest dip of a wing-blade and his entire balance was shot.

But when moved in unison, the wings would turn, would make him rise and fall and pivot and circle. With a flap, he rose even higher. He did not stop climbing until he crested a hill a clouds.

Lim climbed higher than where he had begun. He shrugged his shoulders and his wings angled above his heat to form a batwing-umbrella. He felt the updraft tickling the underside of his wings. Soft fuzz met brutish fingers.

The air current shifted and Lim’s body began to rotate. Feet dangling, Lim twirled in the air. Bits of cloud wrapped around him and broke apart, spreading into thin mist that drifted further apart until it was as though they had never been.

What was he?

He was big, he could tell that much. Bigger, he felt, than even his father. Stronger, too. His skin was the color of twilight under the new moon on a deepest winter evening. His tongue could feel rows of shark-teeth in his mouth.

‘I’m a monster,’ he realized.

“Awesome!” he yelled.

The sky, generally speaking, is higher up than the ground. As such, there is more room to navigate and fewer objects to interfere with said navigation. As such, it is possible to move that much quicker when you are high above the ground.

Lim zoomed over the treetops, angling his wings to veer and then straighten his course. He reached out one hand as he flew.

Slap!

Slap!

Slap!

The tip-tops of trees whipped against his palm. The trees rattled off cascades of snow and pine needles.

After a while he grew bored with aerial somersaults and loops, and decided that it was time to get back to the door and to the friends that he had left manning it.

He did not know how he knew exactly which direction to go in. Some new, deeper instinct understood the course of the flight and Lim trusted to it.

From not too far away, there came a scream.

Lim flapped twice, hard, picking up speed. He came to the location of the scream and hovered in the air, surveying the battleground.

Beneath a wreath of branches he could see the door and the other children. They were wrestling with some small figure. With strength disproportionate to its size, the figure was hurling them across the forest floor.

‘I’ve got to get down there,’ Lim thought.

His wings folded.

Branches, needles and pinecones all leapt forward to ease him down with great bashes across the face and every other exposed inch of his body. For the second time that day, Lim tumbled end-over-end. It seemed to go on for hours. He wished that the trees would just stop already.

They did. Lim fell the remaining ten feet to land face-first into the snow.

‘Ow,’ he thought.

He lay there for a few moments, letting all the faint simmers of pain grow into raging boils. Only the nearby sounds of a struggle prompted him to raise his head.

Lim had raised Grub up over his head, and with a roar he threw Grub a good fifteen feet.

Lim, lying in the snow after being ganged up on by a pack of trees, was perplexed by this sight.

He rose up and, with only two quick flaps to give him just enough height and speed to lift off the ground and maneuver around trees, he reached the battlefield.

He dropped down next to his normal self and seized the boy that was him by the scruff of the neck. Lim lifted Lim with ease.

The boy struggled, swiping and biting at the air. He twirled on his shirt until the pair was face to face.

It was hard to say who was more surprised.

The boy gaped at the monster holding him up. The rage and aggression sagged out of him.

The monster was so stunned that he dropped the boy face-first into the snow. He had not been prepared for the sight of glowing green eyes, slit like a snake’s, to be peering out of his human self’s head.

The boy scurried away, making mewling noises. Lim hurried after and picked him up once more. Slinging his former-form over his shoulder, he re-joined the others.

They had risen and re-gathered. The group stood in awe of the hulking, winged creature that had rescued them from the psychotic child. All wore scrapes and minor wounds from where Not-Lim had belted and struck.

Lim gently placed the boy onto the ground. The kid moved as if to run, but a heavy foot that ended with great talons did wonders for his attitude.

“So…hi guys,” Lim said.

It took a moment to sink in.

“Lim?” said Melissa.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Lim…is…you?” said Clark.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“You…are…Lim?” said Derek.

“Seems so, yeah,” Lim replied.

“The door…does…that?” asked The Grub.

He shrugged. “Looks like.”

Another moment was required to process this and let the information find its official place. It clicked in. Brains whirred. And then all were sprinting towards the door.

“Wait!” Lim yelled.

His new voice could’ve halted the snow of an avalanche as it rolled off of Everest. All animals within a one mile radius forgot the cold and stopped shaking in their burrows, paralyzed with fear. The group froze.

He raised up his drooling, gurgling old self.

“It seems like it would be smart to learn how to reverse this before, you know, we get going with doing it as much as we possibly can.”

The kids muttered agreement and dragged their feet back.

“Well,” Derek began, “what happened to you after you went through?”

Lim gestured to the massive form he now wore.

“This. One second I was here, I was me, and then the next I was falling out of the sky and I was this.” He scratched his head. “What about you guys? What happened here?”

The group explained that from their point of view, Lim had simply collapsed to the ground after crossing the threshold of the door. They had rushed to his side (taking mind to go around the door) only to find him already climbing to his feet. When he had turned around and fixed those beast-eyes on them, they had quaked.

“After that,” Derek confessed, “things kinda got away from us. They went in a sorta punchy direction. Heck, Chowdah’s still up the tree you launched her into.”

“Don’t mind me!” the little girl called. “I’m taller than all of you now!”

Lim thought about the two halves of the story. He could feel the boy squirming from underneath his toes.

“I wonder,” he murmured.

He stooped low and took up his old self. He marched to the door, the group trailing his steps.

The door stood, still ajar.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, and tossed the boy through the door.

Lim landed face-down in the snow. There was a burst of new information, all built around reminding him that he was cold and wet and small.

For the second time that day, sounds of excitement pulled him from the snow.

The group was darting away from the angry and stunned monstrosity whom Lim had recently been. It spun in an irritated circle.

‘That was me,’ Lim thought. ‘That was me.’

The beast caught sight of Lim and froze. Swamp gas eyes widened with recognition.

It gave a single, awful shriek. The wings unfolded and with a powerful flap, the creature shot into the sky.

Lim sat in the snow and tried to remind himself that all of that had just happened. The others stared up into the sky, watching the monster become a smaller and smaller speck until it had vanished into the pink and purple depths of the sunset sky.

“I call dibs on next,” said Grub.

It was just as the group had described it.

Grub approached the door, clenching and unclenching his fists as he neared it. He stepped through. He collapsed to the ground.

As they watched, he shook his head and reared up. Clamoring across the ground on all fours, Grub began to paw at the snow. He burrowed until he hit earth, whereupon he began to shovel fistfuls into his mouth.

“I thought it was supposed to change how you acted,” said Melissa. Derek and Clark chuckled at that.

Grub stopped.

The eyes that turned to regard the group were pure black.

“Oh,” said Derek.

“Dear,” said Clarke.

The ground began to tremble.

“Oh man, what now?” cried Lim.

Hands the size of shovel blades burst out of the earth. They were followed by a wide-set face and snout, tipped by long whiskers. The strands swayed in the air, reminding Lim of seaweed strips that he would see underwater, back in the days when Mom and Dad would take him to the beach.

“Don’t just stand there!” Grub’s new mouth yelled. “I’m getting away!”

The ex-Grub was speeding away, still on all fours.

Before the day was out, everyone had a turn. Derek’s normal self nearly got away, and a newly-dragonified Chowdah very nearly burned Clark to a crisp. As a test, Lim went through a second time and found himself inhabiting a completely new monster.

“It must be totally random,” he said once he’d been restored. “That’s a shame. I really liked flying.”

Night was very nearly upon them as the group moved towards the warm glow of home.

“So…what are we going to do with it?” Clark asked.

It took a moment for Lim to realize they were asking him. He looked at the faces: Grub practically jumping up and down with excitement, Melissa’s eyes twinkling, Chowdah beaming, Clark’s nervous curiosity and Derek’s dazed, lost expression.

“I…I think…” he began, “that for now we oughta just enjoy it. Tomorrow’s Friday after all, so we’ll have the whole weekend to goof around and try stuff. Once we’ve done that and had our fun, then we can start in on the important, I guess more adult, stuff.”

The group agreed with this.

Clark was the last one to be picked up by his parents. While waiting for his Dad, he and Lim sat and drank cocoa and ate apple slices with peanut butter.

Lim voiced a concern by phrasing it as a question. He said, “Are you worried about Grub or Chowdah or somebody saying something?”

Clark shook his head. “Nah, as a rule, Grub doesn’t tell his parents what he does. They insist on it. The toilets could only stand so much.”

“And Chowdah?”

“No worries. She will absolutely tell her Mom, but her Mom’ll just assume she’s joking.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Chowdah tells her parents everything and then tells us everything that she told them.”

A car was approaching. It was Clark’s Dad, officially ending the first night of the first encounter with the magic door.

Before leaving, Clark drained his cup and tipped a wink at Lim.

“No worries, Lim,” he said. “You’ll figure us out pretty soon.”

Lim did his homework and ate dinner. He did not trust himself to speak. An alien sensation of contentment had been draped over him.

He fell asleep with moments, a smile playing on his lips as he passed from the waking world to the other.

“Have you ever,” said The Gutwrangler, “seen anything quite so rude as this?”

The assembled monsters grumbled assent.