Idyll, with Tentacles

Jasper and Pynn are relaxing on a hot summer's day. What could go wrong? Oh right, Pynn is there. Anything could go wrong.

The sunlight filtering through the oak tree’s canopy dappled the coats of the two figures lying on their backs on the grass, bright patches wandering in idle circles as the spring breeze stirred the branches above. The far-off drone from Jenny Blueriver’s beehives hung in the air, mingling with the splash of the river over the rocks at the bottom of the hill. Motionless except for the slight rise and fall of their chests, Pynn and Jasper stared lazily up at the green leaves and the gently swaying tatters of decades worth of worn-out rope swings. Quietly, as though reluctant to disturb the peace of the afternoon, Jasper finally spoke up. “How many heads did you say it had?”

Pynn paused for a moment, also hesitant to break the silence. “Umm... I believe I counted six. I can’t be entirely sure that they were what you would call actual heads as such. I did get the distinct impression they were looking at me.” He lapsed back into silence, worn out from the effort of such a lengthy speech.

“Oh,” came the eventual reply. It was just that kind of day. The lingering noon heat had sapped everyone’s strength, and the peaceful beauty of the cloudless spring day had sapped their will. From the village in the distance came no sound. The residents of Otterton had all managed to find an excuse to put off their responsibilities for the day. Some dozed in their beds, some picnicked by the river, many just reclined on their porches and let the afternoon wash over them like a warm bath. The two mustelids lying beneath the gnarled oak had managed to summon the strength to climb all the way to the top of Potter’s Hill before apathy overtook them in their tracks and dropped them in the tall grass like abandoned marionettes. Perhaps they would gather their strength soon and finish their trek to the river, where the cool water slid glassily over the smooth stone that led in a series of gentle slopes toward the village. It was the perfect spot for belly-sliding. Jasper took to such activity with the natural skill of an otter, but Pynn had become almost as proficient, his sleek ferret’s body slipping and twisting downstream like quicksilver. Or perhaps they would remain where they lay until the coolness of evening had descended, easing the inertia of the afternoon at last.

Pynn stretched mightily, eyes squeezed shut, sharp teeth bared in a jaw-cracking yawn, limbs stretched straight and long as a martyr on the rack, fingers and toes splayed wide as if they wanted nothing to do with each other. His long neck and longer back arched until only his head and the base of his tail touched the ground before he finally collapsed back onto the grass with a deep sigh. Jasper rolled his head to one side, looking at him with half-closed eyes. “That was truly an amazing display.”

Pynn again took his time answering, perhaps trying to formulate the perfect reply, more likely just lazy. “Thank you, kind otter. I do my best.”

Jasper continued to look at him, a faint smile playing around his muzzle. “Are you sure you weren’t just dreaming it?” he finally said.

The look he got in response perfectly combined outraged indignation with smug self-assurance, something Pynn had been working on in his spare time. “Of course I’m sure! I think I can tell the difference between a mere dream and a manifestation of the unspeakable entities that lurk and gibber madly in the cracks between time and space, fer Weott’s sake! I do have some experience with these matters, after all,” he concluded proudly.

Jasper suppressed a snort. He couldn’t deny that Pynn had great enthusiasm (not to mention the vocabulary) for the subject, which he’d latched onto some months ago after a trip to the great library at Jurst. They’d ended up wandering lost through the basement--Pynn had been leading, of course--where they at last came across a store of rare and mysterious tomes, shrouded in years’ worth of dust and cobwebs. But despite his best efforts, Pynn had never managed to actually do anything with whatever presumably arcane knowledge he was gleaning from his studies. It helped that he had a surprisingly long attention span for a ferret (Jasper wasn’t sure whether this was a cause of his love of reading or a result of it). He would often would stay up into the wee hours of the morning, peering intently at the crabbed handwriting of some long-dead wizard in a crumbling manuscript, taking meticulous notes that he would carefully index, cross-reference, and then spill root beer on or knock into the fireplace. In the end, though, whatever talent it took to put these secrets to use was something Pynn sadly lacked.

Jasper sometimes suspected he just liked to look at the pictures, insane scribblings in faintly fragrant inks depicting the Dwellers From Outside or the Lurkers From Beyond or the Giant Time Beavers From Between or some such creatures, but he wasn’t about to say anything. Pynn enjoyed feeling as though he had inside knowledge of the workings of the universe, and at least their occasional trips to the eldritch corridors of abandoned libraries in the shadow-haunted ruins that littered the Blasted Plains (as Pynn, eyes glinting, would phrase it) got him out of the house once in a while. Granted, the trip was a royal pain in the tail �" a three-day carriage ride over roads that would have broken the will of the most masochistic of travelers, followed by a two- or three-day trek over the world’s bleakest terrain to the remains of cities that had thrived and died when the world was still young �" but he always managed to guilt-trip Pynn into an extended stopover in Chryspeth, the capital of the province, a sparkling wonder of a city that lay at the edge of the sprawling wasteland of the Plains like a pearl thrown up onto a barren beach. There they would play 21 until dawn, attend the symphony or a play, mingle in the crowds that filled the city in a variety never seen in a provincial place like Otterton, and generally do their best to shake off the air of gloom that always tangled around them after a visit to the ruins. After a few days, they’d return to their home village, Jasper ready to get back to his duties as local magistrate, Pynn eager to hole up and pore over his new finds.

Pynn stared at the pensive otter curiously as he gazed dreamily into the air. Probably thinking about his toes again, he thought. He loved Jasper dearly, but sometimes he did seem to wander off to some mental vacation spot from which it was difficult to coax him back. Not quite as difficult as waking him up in the morning, of course, an undertaking that usually required thirty minutes and a level of patience that would have inspired base envy in the greatest of saints, but difficult nonetheless. Finally he propped himself up on one elbow and started gently scratching the hollow of Jasper’s throat, the otter’s whiskers spreading wide as he grinned. Pynn leaned over a kissed him gently on the nose. “Penny for your thoughts.”

“Oh, I was just remembering our last trip to Chryspeth.”

Pynn’s eyes gleamed, and his ears twitched as he matched Jasper’s grin. “Yeah, I remember that. I can’t believe that copy of the B’harne Fragments was just sitting in that cellar waiting for me! Did you know that the author of that manuscript was said to have been able to coax the secrets of the Earth from the very living stones of the cavern in which he dwelled? I’m not exactly sure what sort of secrets a cavern would have, and they’d probably all be about the guy living in it anyway, but it sounds really neat. And when he disappeared, leaving behind just the few tattered fragments of his memoirs and a couple of wet bones that looked like they’d been bent, there was a crash of thunder that shook homes a hundred miles away, and his house was found crushed flat in the middle of a big depression in the ground that no one could figure out until an owl who was passing through the area flew overhead and asked what had made that giant footprint in the woods! And years later they were still finding little bits of urmph!”

Pynn’s excited rant was cut off as Jasper pounced upon him and began tickling him just below his ribcage. Pynn, who took great pride in his ability to withstand such assaults, had been horrified when Jasper’s weeks of patient testing had finally revealed this one vulnerable spot. Now he twitched and writhed desperately under Jasper’s evil paws, the legends of past wizards forgotten. “All right, all right! I also remember that you took me to the latest Halffoot play and it was really quite enjoyable and you were right when you resorted to threats of bodily harm to encourage me to accompany you so you can quitticklingmenow!”

Jasper relented, leaving Pynn gasping for breath. “There, was that so hard?” he asked, grinning wickedly.

After a few deep breaths, Pynn had recovered enough to attempt an evil glare in return, but it dissolved into giggles. “Ack. You otters, no sense of humor.”

They both sat up cross-legged in the grass, the apathy of the day starting to fade. Jasper leaned against the base of the oak and regarded Pynn curiously. “So, you actually managed to do something with those books of yours?”

“Yes! I told you, I set up the proper components of the ritual, which for once didn’t include a splinter from the gibbet where hung a half-breed highwayman or a vial of blood wept from the statue of a false martyr or any of that stuff you can’t exactly run out and buy a carton of down at the general store, and I recited the incantation, and a window was opened into another world! It was completely amazing. I’m thinking of trying it at the proper time next time, to see if it’ll work even better!”

Jasper’s look darkened. “You mean you didn’t try it at the proper time? What exactly was improper about the time you tried it?”

“Well, there was something in that fragment of the Necromonomiconi...moninom....” He trailed off into awkward silence, wondering if it was worth the struggle to try to pronounce the title right. He decided against it. “Um, anyway, that fragment I found last year mentioned the light of the full moon being necessary to keep the dwellers of the other world from gazing back at the caster, but I couldn’t wait another three weeks. I just went ahead and tried to be inconspicuous.”

Jasper spoke slowly and carefully. “You tried to be inconspicuous. You ripped open a portal into another dimension inconspicuously. What precisely would that entail?”

“Well, you know, I kind of crouched down and peeked over the edge.” He demonstrated, hunching over sneakily. “There was an obvious border to it, like a sort of hole in the air with a glowy aura around it. I kept quiet and low and just looked over the edge. I’m sure nothing noticed me.”

“Except the six-headed thing that you said looked at you.”

“Well, it looked in my general direction. I don’t know that it was actually looking specifically at me as such. Besides, I’m not even sure those were heads. Maybe they were just some kind of supernatural extradimensional, uh, lumps or something. Or maybe toes are just verrry different over there in the other world.” This last statement was accompanied by a peculiar finger-waggling gesture intended to convey otherworldliness.

Jasper sighed. Pynn loved to throw himself into his hobbies, but didn’t often devote much thought to the matter of consequences. He was just lucky his previous hobby of home-made pyrotechnics had ended in nothing more destructive than clouds of acrid smoke and the reek of mildly scorched fur. Well, that and the large hole burned through the kitchen floor. And the roof.

Pynn in turn looked with disappointment at Jasper. His otter, beloved though he might be, had no sense of adventure whatsoever. Well, not much, anyway. All right, so perhaps he tended to get a bit carried away with his various hobbies, and changed them on a regular basis. But better to be eclectic than stagnant, as his father had always said. He was quite sure that nothing on the other side (the Other Side? The other Side? the Ooootherrr Siiiiide? hmmmm...) had seen him. Relatively sure. It had been an amazing sight--a desert world where the sand gleamed like embers and the scattered plants writhed where they stood as if trying to rip themselves from the ground. Something had been wrong about the perspective, but he got a terrible headache every time he tried to determine exactly what it was. Then that creature had come shambling into view, appearing to move in all directions at once, but definitely making progress somehow. He wasn’t even sure whether it was a single creature or several different ones close together. He had gotten the impression that it had turned in his direction and was somehow seeing him, but its form was so hard to comprehend that he couldn’t say for sure what made him think that. Oh well. Next time he’d wait until the full moon, and he’d be able to take a good long gawk at it. Either that or he’d try it again tomorrow night, but hide better. Maybe there was something in a later section of the book about hiding spells or some kind of invisibility potion. Hmmm....

Their reflections were interrupted by a piercing, ragged screech that seemed to come from everywhere at once. They both sat up straight, looking around curiously. It didn’t sound like anything they’d ever heard, but made them both think of something huge being torn apart. The air above the hill began to ripple and twist. Jasper scrambled away as Pynn backed quickly down the hill, both of them looking fearfully at the growing, wavering disturbance. “Pynn, this wouldn’t have anything to do with your little experiment last night, would it?”

“Why do you automatically assume that everything that goes wrong around here is my fault? How do I know this isn’t some kind of divine retribution against you for being cruel to ferrets all the time?”

Jasper quickly joined him where he cowered downslope, the better to deliver a close-range glower. “Is this what your little window looked like?”

“Well, now that you mention it, there is a sort of similarity, which I’m sure is purely coincidental. Purely.” He tried to meet Jasper’s gaze, and failed, dropping his eyes. “All right, so that’s what it looked like. I confess. Are you happy now?”

“Actually, no, I’m not at all happy now, and I suspect I’m going to be even less happy very soon.” They both turned abruptly back as the harsh clamor intensified, and the edges of the blue sky in the middle of the turbulent patch started to peel back like a theatrical backdrop slashed from behind. Their eyes watered as they tried to fix their focus on the edges, unable to tell how near or far from them the phenomenon was. In the widening gap was a penetrating blackness that drew their eyes irresistibly to it. They could almost feel a physical tugging as they stared into the dark. With an effort, Jasper managed to say, “You do know what to do about this, right?”

Pynn, ever mindful of his carefully tended image as all-knowing master of the secrets of the universe, tried to pause knowingly. After what seemed to him to be a proper interval, he said, “Sure. It’s, ah, really quite simple. I believe I’ve got the relevant page right here.” He began rummaging through the pockets of his faintly purple vest, his favorite article of clothing. He’d outfitted it with a number of handy pockets of various sizes, as he was convinced he would someday need more or less everything that he came across during the course of a day. The vest wasn’t quite enough to carry it all, but it was a start. He checked all the outer pockets, and had moved on to the third inner pocket before pulling out a crumpled sheet of paper with a triumphant “A-ha!” Jasper glanced uneasily at the rift. He nudged Pynn as something stirred far back in the blackness.

“Pynn? I think there’s something in there....”

“What? Nonsense!” He looked up, and tore his eyes away again with an effort. “You may be right. Just a sec.” He hastily flattened out the paper, making an awkward effort to smooth it on the grass. “OK, here we go.” Holding the paper before him like a shield, he began to read aloud in his best orator’s voice. “In a large bowl combine three cups of grub flour with two... wait, what?” He peered intently at the paper. “Oh. This is a recipe for banana grub biscuits. That’s biscuits with bananas and grubs, not banana grubs, you know. I don’t know if there’s even such a thing as--”

Jasper elbowed him sharply in the ribs. “Right now, dear, I don’t really care. Find the right paper!”

“Oh, right.” Pynn resumed his search, checking pocket after pocket. Finally, in the second-to-last one, perfect for holding small books to be whipped out at a moment’s notice should his environment be rude enough to grow dull, he found what he was looking for. He laid a yellowed sheet of paper densely covered with black threads of handwriting on the grass and leaned over it, reading carefully. “Hmmm... okay, I believe I’ve got it. Here we go.”

Jasper, gaze locked on the dark that hovered before them, maybe yards away, maybe half a mile, said “It’s about time!” Deep within the blackness, he was sure he could see the glint of an eye. A very big eye. A very big, very angry eye.

Pynn cracked his knuckles a few times, settled back on his haunches, and held the paper down with a paw. A freezing wind began to blow from the tear in the sky, ruffling their fur and slipping icy needles into their joints. “Hurry up!” Jasper urged the ferret. He could definitely see an amorphous shape coalescing out of the void.

Pynn looked up from the paper. “Hrachach gwrach Cthulhu ftaghn!” he intoned, the guttural sounds spilling thickly from his lips and echoing flatly in the air. Jasper winced at the harsh sounds, like a terminally ill lung patient coughing his life away, and wondered what manner of creature would speak such a language. Desperate not to look at the bizarre shape that was resolving itself into something he knew he would rather not see, he turned to Pynn, who was doubled over, hacking and spitting.

“Iä! Ftaghn! Blech! Agh, I think I swallowed a bug! Yuck! Anyway, here we go.” Holding the paper down with both paws against the wind that picked insistently at the edges, he coughed one last cough, spit out a tiny leg, and began to recite. Jasper listened amazed as Pynn began wringing sounds out of his throat that had no business coming from a ferret. Forming the ancient syllables with uncanny ease, he seemed to grow larger as the fever of the moment carried him away. His voice rose to a mad crescendo as he slashed at the thickening air with the last few words of the incantation, hurling them into the void like missiles. Finished, he collapsed onto the rippling grass, panting.

The border of the rift flared with a dead grey-blue glow, the color of graveyard mists. Slowly the edges began drawing together, the wound in the sky healing. From the gap came a shuddering roar that grated like sandpaper on their bones. The blast of frigid air knifing out of the blackness doubled in strength. Now they could see the figure almost clearly, a huge writhing blob, skin crawling and heaving like a swarm of roaches, tentacles that became arms that became ragged spikes lashing furiously. They could feel the raw hatred pouring off of it, a profound and utterly impersonal loathing for them and their world that was as natural to this being as breathing was to them. It would destroy them and everything around them, not out of malice or jealousy or fear but simply because that’s what it did. This raging but passionless hate was so disheartening that they almost welcomed the thing’s horrible appearance as a distraction.

As the gap shrank, the beast flew even faster, racing toward their world, awful mouths opening and closing across its surface, teeth and spines and daggers gnashing. The rift was mending with painful slowness, the lifeless glow of the aura flickering feebly. “I don’t think it’s going to be closed when that thing gets here,” said Jasper, nervously backing away.

“Ummm... well, it was supposed to work. Maybe I needed to start it earlier. These old texts are so vague most of the time. Why can’t they be more like cookbooks, with nice clear instructions that spell everything out for you? Why does it all have to be allusions and allegories and symbols and... and STUFF!” He crumpled the ancient paper in frustration, yellowed flakes drifting to the ground undisturbed somehow by the wind that was close to knocking him over.

Jasper almost brought up the fact that Pynn had never successfully produced anything but a huge mess from even the simplest of recipes; kitchens frankly baffled him. Unpleasant as the prospect of having his head bitten off by this impossible beast might be, though, the thought of being eaten while listening to Pynn lecture him on the disgracefully confusing layout of kitchens--I mean really, what kind of cruel, mad fiend designs these things, anyway?--was even worse.

Pynn cocked his head at the gap and said with patently false cheer, “Well, maybe it’s an optical illusion, and that creature is only like an inch tall. Maybe that rift-thing is acting like a giant magnifying glass and, you know... magnifying it bigger?”

Jasper sighed. As an otter, he was all in favor of optimism in principle, but this was neither the time nor the place. Closing his eyes against the sight of the writhing monstrosity that now almost completely filled the gap, he uttered a quick prayer to Weott. Pynn, the gravity of the situation finally beginning to penetrate, quavered, “I don’t suppose running really fast would help at this point....” He considered comforting Jasper with a reminder that ferrets tend to be very fast runners, unlike, say, otters, but didn’t like where that train of thought was going. Instead he said, “Maybe it’s a vegetarian? We could run and get some carrots from the garden for it?”

As Jasper crouched against the arctic blast, now tinged with an indefinable stench that brought to mind old tombs and new corpses, an image came to him. Weott, dressed in flowing black robes, gavel clenched in one gleaming white paw, sat behind an enormous marble judicial bench. He brought the gavel down with a thunderous crash, smashing the gruesome creature that squirmed before him into a slimy black paste.

Jasper’s eyes snapped open, and he struggled to his feet, fighting to keep his balance. The beast was rushing toward them, a vast horror that gaped hungrily. Despite its size, it still seemed somehow to be fairly distant. Jasper tried not to think about how large it would be when it tore its way into their world.

Jasper braced himself, took a deep breath, and shouted into the gale. “Res ipsa loquitur corpus delicti!” The aura brightened for a moment, and... had the beast flinched? Encouraged by this sign, however slight, he pressed on. Drawing himself up to his full height, whiskers twitching dramatically, Jasper unleashed a torrent of legalese in his best judicial Voice of Doom, the one he saved for slapping down smart-assed rookie lawyers who tried to get cute with him. The shattered fragments of many a young ego littered the floor of his courtroom.

“Habeas corpus flagrante delicto ipse dixit prima facie!” The aura flared, the once-dull glow pulsing with the harsh dead white of a full moon. Pynn, cowering behind the otter, wished he would stop bringing up corpses, but kept it to himself. “Nolo contendere a fortiori ab extra ex parte in camera!” The pace of the rift’s closure picked up significantly. “Mutatis mutandis mandamus mirabile dictu!” The enraged beast, looming impossibly large, tore open immense wet mouths and unleashed a piercing roar that shook off the frost that was forming on their fur and sent curious heads peeking from the doors and windows of distant Otterton. For the next week, the local cows would give only sour milk. “Prior tempore potior iure pro bono!” Jasper felt like a mosquito staring into the face of a giant, a giant who very much enjoyed eating mosquitoes, but the familiar incantations of his profession kept rolling off his tongue. “Nolle prosequi non liquet per annum!” He could feel the power flowing through him; his fur felt like it was standing on end. “Stare decisis de facto de minimis non curat lex!” The glow became almost blinding, though not enough to hide the gibbering mountain that threw itself forward in the screaming wind. “Pro forma cui bono per diem de novo! Onus probandi a mensa et toro!” Raw oozing gashes burst open across it as Jasper’s words struck home. “Obiter dictum amicus judiciæ semper ubi sub ubi nil nisi bonum!” His voice straining, sensing that it was almost over, he hurled the final syllables at the beast with all the force he could muster. “Non compos mentis in loco parentis justitia omnibus ceteris paribus rebus sic stantibus lex talionis!”

He sank to his knees, drained of strength. Pynn grabbed him from behind, frantically trying to drag him down the hill. The creature hurtled forward, the tip of one massive tentacle bursting from the gap, almost directly over their heads. Their ears popped as they were staggered by a pressure wave that washed over them, as if their world was recoiling from its touch. A fraction of a second later they were bowled over by a resounding crash of thunder that nearly sent them tumbling down to the river as the rift snapped shut, clipping off the grasping limb as neatly as a headsman’s axe, and about as gruesomely. It dropped to the ground halfway down the hill, spurting a thick purple ichor that made the grass beneath it shrivel and blacken as if in a furnace. For a moment, neither of them dared to move. Cautiously, their ears ringing in the sudden silence, they approached the severed limb as it gave a final shuddering spasm and lay still in a haze of foul smoke.

Pynn let out an admiring whistle, looking at Jasper with undisguised awe. “Have you been reading my books behind my back?”

Jasper, appearing to strut even though standing still, looked haughtily at him. “What meager knowledge did the ancients possess that could rival the mighty power of our judicial system to confound and dismay?”

Pynn looked doubtful. “Oh. Okay.” He had to admit, he’d always had his reservations about lawyers. There was just something not right about them. Jasper, having given up lawyering for judging, seemed all right, but there was always a hint of suspicion lurking at the back of his mind.

He turned his attention to the thick goop, already drying into a crusty film. “So that’s what ichor looks like. Those books are always going on about it.” A pensive pause followed. “I always thought it would be green.” With a tentative kick at the lifeless chunk of alien flesh, he added, “You have to admit, though, that was spectacular. Those mysterious ancients sure knew how to have fun.” He paused again, gazing thoughtfully into space--always a sign of impending catastrophe. “I bet I could find a better version of that closing incantation in the B’harne Fragments. Maybe that thing would give us some kind of generous reward if we returned his, er, part.”

Jasper could only stare at him, wondering how much their relationship would suffer if he made Pynn eat the tentacle. Finally relenting under the force of such a glare, Pynn slumped in defeat. “All right, so maybe not. It was just a thought.” He perked up as he looked down the hill at the river, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. “You wanna go sliding?”

Jasper sighed and closed his eyes, searching for some way to penetrate Pynn’s cheer and make it clear to him just how close they’d come to being messily devoured. He took a deep, calming breath, drinking in the wafting scents of the spring meadow, twice as sweet after that malodorous wind. He opened his eyes again, gazing out at the green valley sprawled before them. What was the point? “Sure.”

 

*    *    *

Later that night, as they snuggled cozily before a bonfire that set the shadows around their garden to dancing, Pynn was pouting. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to collect all those books? Any idea of all that I went through?”

Jasper hugged him closer. “Well, dear, considering that I went with you on all those expeditions to the wastelands, and spent all those hours trying to make conversation with grizzled little bookshop owners who talked in riddles when they talked at all while you rooted through stacks of books that hadn’t been dusted since dust was invented... Oh, and speaking of which, if you take me to one more obscure little hole-in-the-wall antiquities shop that isn’t there anymore when we walk out and turn around to look for it--”

“Hey, it’s not my fault you left your wallet on the counter!” interrupted Pynn indignantly.

“Anyway, to sum up, yes, I know exactly how long you spent collecting all those books. Now hand me another one.”

Pynn wearily reached over to the stack and handed the otter a musty volume bound in faded crimson something-he’d-rather-not-know. Jasper took it from him with an extravagantly polite “Thank you, my dear,” and tossed it onto the fire.

Pynn watched as the flames slowly gnawed away at it, the firelight flickering in his inky eyes. “I suppose it’s for the best. Maybe I’m just not cut out for wizardry.” He sighed again. He’d have to cancel his order at the tailor’s. That robe would have been so great. So many pockets.... He snuggled closer to Jasper and tossed another book on the pile, sending a flurry of sparks whirling upward into the night to join the stars that glittered overhead. “Boy, for books containing such great and mighty secrets, they sure do reek.”

“That’s probably the tentacle. Good thing we didn’t burn it in the fireplace.” Jasper considered pointing out that Pynn’s cooking style should have accustomed him to the odor of indeterminate substances on fire, but abandoned the effort as requiring too many words. Instead he settled for laying his head on Pynn’s shoulder and drifting off to sleep.

Author's Note

This takes place in a world of talking animals, without being cartoony. I haven't worked out the details yet. I'm kind of hoping they'll work themselves out as I write more with these characters. Right now I'm too busy in their next story wondering where the potstickers are coming from to worry too much about how their world works.