Stroke: 01 : Avielle Wakes

Shaik / STROKE / 1

Stroke

By Kareem
Shaik,
 A
fellow
not
pompous
enough
to
have
his
name
bigger
than
 the
actual
title.



Shaik / STROKE / 2 Kareemullah Shaik 10922 Poblado Road, Apt.2411 San Diego, CA (858) 521-8443 [email protected]

STROKE By Kareem Shaik

about x words

Shaik / STROKE / 3

For My Mom, Oda Eiichirō And The Internet, along with Al Gore, For inventing it.

Shaik / STROKE / 4

Chapter one Avielle wakes

Setting: at ICP, on Thanatim Isle,

upon Mistil, round

Patrick, Universe 53, at approximately(I question that.) 11:34:26 a.m., on the day of 9/12/1336.

Characters:

Avielle Bewt of the 23rd, a slightly(very slightly) pink girl with a fiery sort of mud colored hair, standing at a respectable height of 5'9", and although she probably would not want you to know, with a weight 129 pounds. 17 years old.

Mister Black, a chubby(very chubby) man. I kid not here.

Shaik / STROKE / 5 2 stickholders, named Jim(Pronounced Yim) and Yam(Pronounced Eeam)



The magician woke to snow(and a bit of immaterial

drizzle).

Instantly, her body froze up, muscles shuddering

with numb bitterness.

Eyes flew open, and fingers brushed the

nippy snow off her leather trousers.

Her mind instantly

imploded in a flurry of pain and numbness, oddly at the same time.

She had been drunk last night.

She could remember

nothing of it, and neither did she bother to.

Who could

afford any time these days thinking about their shameless actions under the all too familiar influence of the firewater? And so, she rushed. jewelry buyers. over.

Past the basket sellers and the false

Through monkey-slave auctions and men hung

Beyond the preachers of love, and the repudiators of

the law.

Indeed, it was time.

At this point she was utterly

awake, and her senses tingled with excitement.

This, of

course, caused her to realize that she actually had no idea where the hell she was and that she was also probably going the wrong way. “Nyah!”(Her actual words were rather smutty, and so much so that it gathered the confused attention of a nearby peddler.) “Whah?”

Shaik / STROKE / 6 “Sir!’, she said, as if he hadn’t quite addressed her well enough, “The docks, where are they?” The peddler was quite illiterate, so he simply pointed to the south and to the ocean, where in fact most docks are located, smiled, and said “Dock”. “Thanks”, and the girl was gone. The peddler chuckled quietly to himself, and thought that the girl was quite illiterate to the subtle nuances of nature. Simply by looking at the various frozen pools of water, one could see it was too cold for any sort of fish, and that the docks had obviously flown south for the winter. And so the peddler went on peddling. A few moments later, after the jumping of various fences, stone walls, and old sleeping hobos, Avielle hit the outer wall of people of what was the Iniquitous Cymbalic (or, in some awkward circles, Kumbalic) Port. The ICP stood true to its officially-christened name, standing as the largest harbor on the seas to pirates, thieves and the like. The docks were shabbily built, broken granite covered with glinting sand the roads, and heavy log posts draped with old palm fronds the buildings.

The horizon lent itself to the

sea, an endless mirror of the sky and the domain of the pirates.

Shaik / STROKE / 7 She broke through the endless stream, elbows slicing through the crowd behind her.

And thusly before her stood the Central

Tent, in all its magnificent glory.

Gold and blue stripes

shone as the sun and the sky, the bottom half overtaken by wet moss, giving the effect of a creeping, lively canopy.

Now,

the Central Tent was often called so because it was in the vague center of the Port, and also because it was (usually) a tent.

Not too many people know what else exactly the Central

Tent could be, and Avielle certainly did not. So, entirely ignoring the certain centric tentfullness of the place, Avielle heeded the time and hurried in.

The inside was

wonderfully lit, the shiny gold reflecting a certain wheel-offortune-esque shape upon the floor, which looked rather nonmenacing, considering the startling effect the rest of the tent-room had. Tables, hurriedly constructed from various large pieces of flotsam arranged themselves around the center, forming a haphazard spiral to the entrance.

Businesspeople, captains of

various vessels, and a few more businesspeople lined the tables in search of crew, money, and grog, while others looked for captains, prostitutes, and anyone who was up for a good time. three.

A few others looked for people renowned for being all

Shaik / STROKE / 8

Now if they could all find each other and leave off, Avielle’s work would be done, and she could go on her merry way. they couldn’t, and so neither could she. through the throng of people, that man.

Avielle rushed

looking for the man.

That horrible pig-bodied man! Ugh.

heart skipped.

But

Oh, god,

But then her

There, a few dozen feet from her sat the

spherical lardbucket of a man, his head adorned with lenses of quite a wealthy demeanor, turned down at a stack of rather boring looking papers which I do not care to explain about, for it would be mind-numbingly boring.

Avielle frolicked over

to what was left of this man, ecstatic that she had finally been at the right place at the right time. she’d still be able to make it.

If she hurried,

Oh, Joy.

“Aylo!”

This man, who had absolutely no conceivable neck, regardless turned it upwards at this simple interjection. “Yes?” “I, sir, d’like to rent a boat. “Rent, as if.

”

Get yer scummy littol face out of mine before I

gotta threw yea out.”

Shaik / STROKE / 9 She had entirely expected this.

She slipped her hand down the

bosom of her dress, clutching the rough leather bag with utter confidence.

It fell upon the wood with a certain divine

clang, gold upon lovely gold, at which point the man’s eyes swelled with the quaint idea of making his fat little wallet a little bit fatter.

The sack was black leather, tied with an

exquisitely olive ribbon which Avielle had picked up from a rather affluent looking girl at a party in old Scaints. man.

Oh,

Those were the days.

By now, pig man, who before was doing something almost certainly uninteresting but on a deep level comforting, I’m sure, was a bit confused.

Here stood a girl who was almost a

total idiot, staring off into space and grinning oddly as if she’d done something that most in society would consider unacceptable, but she considered a proud event. Piggy was immediately reminded of an old friend of his, a tightrope walker who tripped, fell, and died while walking on a sidewalk.

After mourning his loss, he quickly distanced

himself from the man, because that whole incident stuck of unacceptable-ness.

When Avielle turned back, Hogster had a

glazed look over his eyes, staring off into the distance, ultimately pondering how he had made friends with a tightrope walker.

Shaik / STROKE / 10 Avielle fist rose and flickered for a moment, before charging into Swinoe’s face, displacing a healthy amount of fat from one side of his face to the other, as his round glasses flew off his face and he flew off his chair.

An eye purple and

swollen, his oily hair-covered face pointed down, with blood trickling down his eye, wiped his face with his jacket-sleeve and jumped over the table, surprisingly light for his unexaggeratable girth, fists promptly thrust into the air. This singular moment of chaos sparked the Tent into a flurry of table-jumping and scabbard-throwing, whereupon Avielle burst into real life, her head and arms on the table, sweating slightly, to the disgusted recoil of porknugget.

She popped

herself back up, spine erecting fast, smooth and quick as mercury.

The general area’s attention was planted on her, a

few tables coming to a suspenseful standstill among the great spiral. Hardly oblivious of the lard-thick tension around her, Avielle’s heart raced.

How often had she descended into this?

Was her life just that blatantly uninteresting? The strange girl, who was now sweating profusely, placed her hand upon the table, head hung, breath shallow, in an attempt to calm down.

It worked, for the most part. Grudgingly, the

big man turned back to his work, his triple chin folding back

Shaik / STROKE / 11 again, trapping his throat in perpetual suffocation. It were these nutcases that gave any sort of spark to his life, although he despised them.

Sufficiently chilled out by then,

Avielle inclined her head upwards, just enough to notice what the balloon was actually doing.

Laid across his desk were

several papers, probably in some primeval form of organization too complicated for most people on -and off- Mistle.

But the

top one was the one that caught her attention, which was albeit easy to acquire anyways.

Requist of foreign Portage

As Marcus Nistum, High and Nobel Iniquitor of the Royale Sconnish State and Captain of the vessel Golden Sheath, I request hasty portage at the ICP,

so my men can rest and shut

eyes, for it is but a while til the Great Tug and Ug defers our voyage until a later time. The battle raft Iron Blade rests with your shipwright at the moment, where it shall remain until you allow us to sail in.

As an escort, money is

plenty among us, for we have few men to feed and little work to do, and a healthy bit might be in for you, if you hear the notes.

I truly and humbly apologize for my tone of speaking,

but I am foreign.

Shaik / STROKE / 12

Marcus A. Nistum,

Stupid foreigners, the overweight gentleman thought. What with their stupid ship names and bad grammar. He'd hated bad grammar since he had learned good grammar. The edges of his sight had to wriggle a bit and some light hippie refrain play in the background for a few seconds before he got hold of himself again. With a reluctant and timeworn hand, he lifted and stamped out a large green APPROVED, tossed the paper into the messenger boy's box, which was nothing more than a squat wooden box, for the messenger boy, if you expected me to say something pleasantly droll, and moved on.

Avielle, due to my incredibly long unbroken sentence, could not but interrupt on the sequence of events at this convenient pause. Realizing that being an official privateer of Scones meant that he was probably also going back to Scaints, to report on the fact that he now was able to report on affairs at speeds that he was previously unable to utilize, now having a battleship. Well, it was a good chance he'd do it.

Avielle,

if you haven't realized by now, wasn't one to miss chances. She snatched the box, and it flew up to her shoulder, almost

Shaik / STROKE / 13 dislocating the joint. It was lighter than she'd thought. As she left, she made sure not to care much for the centric tentfulness again, and did a marvelous job. There were a few funny things about this. First off was the box. If you've been reading carefully, you know what's wrong with the box.

Second off, was the man. Although he had acted almost completely emotionless at the time, he would discover in his bath around two weeks from now that over the decades of stubbing his toe, cursing and subsequently threatening to burn it some day, he had fallen in love with that box, and jump out of the tub, naked, for purposes that he'd thought well of at the time. He would continue to trip, fall, break and send a piece of his nose into his brain, ultimately killing him, thus being the first person in the world to die of a stubbed nose. All in all, it was a very sad business, considering he'd gotten into the tub because, for the fourteenth time in around two weeks, his toe had not been mercilessly stubbed. And so Avielle caused his completely indirect but entirely sad death.

Her legs lightly glazed the vague trodden path as she walked, eyes sifting among the stack of papers in the box. Once in a while she'd glance at the plain, iron, spiked fence blocking

Shaik / STROKE / 14 her from the ocean, longing for its spanning blue depths. Hurrr. She hurried. Among a healthy stack of papers plastered with large red 'NUPE's followed by several of what seemed like hand-drawn exclamation marks, she found the green APPROVED, and chucked the rest of the papers over the fence, where they blew down the hill, nicking several large, burly men, who eventually would have discovered the Great Isle of Coinci, had they not been infected with the first traces of the Inq Fever, the disease which would eventually wipe Mistil of their species, which apparently was not limited to just large burly men, but also the rest of the human population, who, up to this point, had been cheerfully excluding large burly men from their definition of human, barring any chance for them to get medical treatments or invitations to affluent parties in Scaints. Avielle picked up speed. About a hundred yards ahead of her, she saw the gate to the Main Docks, a surprisingly well guarded place, considering the incompetent sort of work the government did otherwise, which is in fact the only singular fact that all 332 universes of the third dimension have in common. In around 13

seconds (Or so I think, I doubt

anyone has kept a record of this for posterity), the gate flourished in front of her, a black uninteresting thing, rectangular in size,

iron rusted and crumbled from the inside

Shaik / STROKE / 15 leaving hardened pillars of paint. Two men (large and burly, if you were curious) solemnly guarded the gate, mouths open and eyes flickering towards the slightest movement in their immediate proximity with a particular quickness. Their minds actively played out a colorful, if not bloody, series of scenarios where every passing beggar, merchant, pirate, and grain of sand could, and would attack the port and exactly how they'd come to the rescue, being proclaimed kings of the land and perhaps even the heavens. Avielle, after pitying them for a few seconds, stepped cautiously forward. Their eyes firmly affixed on her by then, the men grunted slightly, crossed their sharp pointy sticks, and said "Identefacation, ma'am" , in a rather unoriginal fashion. Avielle stuck out her arm, all the while mesmerized by how pointy their sticks were. Wow. So...pointy. God, this man knows how to make a stick pointy. Wow. The men stared blankly at the papers, and came to realize that this girl actually had permission to get into their domain. This made them cross.

Like two extremely large and muscular pieces of identical clockwork, they simultaneously pursed their lips and crossed their eyes. What was strange was that one eye from from either of them looked her straight on, while the other looked over

Shaik / STROKE / 16 the crowded crowd. Avielle shivered. It was as if they'd been practicing for the chance.

"You may passs", the one on the left said.

So Avielle passsed them, and she was amazed at how easy it was to do so. She'd never attempted it before, and she considered herself to be done with new things for the day.

Once out of their sticks' range, Avielle picked up her sprint again. If the papers allowing them to anchor at the port had been signed a few minutes ago...She did some calculations in her mind, which mostly consisted of taking how many days had passed, and adding two. The ship would have ported around 2 days ago! She felt mildly proud of herself. Certainly enough time to sleep and collect Lime-biscuit(©), the ascorbick slab for scurvy-caused drab(™), which she thought were just dry lime juice puddles.

Then, she heard a voice.

"Hey, lady!"

Shaik / STROKE / 17 It came from the gate.

"Hey , Hey Lady!"

It being evident from the tone that it was the pair at the gate, the girl spun on her heels.

"So, didya like that eye thing we...", said one.

"That eye..."

"Um, yes, that eye thi..."

"Ah, right. Yes. That...that eye... thing."

"Yes, that."

"It was pretty!", she lied back.

"Yes, well, thanks!", said the first.

"Right!", said the second.

Shaik / STROKE / 18 "We've been practicing!"

"Uh huh", replied Avielle, smiled, turned, somewhat muddled, and shuffled off over the sand to the docks. She then promptly grabbed a dinghy that probably belonged to someone else(A fact which she knew but could not give a damn about, although she tried very hard to), and sailed noisily(very noisily) off the festering brown wooden mess that were the docks.

Her eyes(one black, one green, colors which seemed to switch eyes every time she blinked) blinked with the hot mist of seawater, frothing like clouds over the green sea. She blinked a few more times and looked around. There they were, the Golden Sheath, a large galleon,

and the Iron Blade, drifting

slowly and without direction, about 20 yards from her. She oared faster; she just had to make it.

About a minute later, she made it. Hair and clothes soaked and flat, she jumped on the ship with right around no sense of intelligence, but rather a sort of raw will to grab wooden things.

Her nails dug into the hard wood of the port side,

and her cheek seemed to be hugging a barnacle, but she'd made

Shaik / STROKE / 19 it. Crawling for minute cracks, she slowly made her way to the edge of the deck, which seemed to be currently empty.

Strange. Mus' be checking the work or such.

She jumped onto the deck with the slight of a slipper made out of squirrel fur, which is to say, very lightly. Careful to avoid the stare of the candle from the brig, she crawled around the edge of the ship, looking for the battleship (previously mentioned).

It was chained to the stern, but had drifted to the starboard. At the other side of the ship, she slid down the frayed yellow rope, which seemed to be able to hold her weight, onto the 10 yard long gray gleam that was the Iron Blade. It was a strange ship, like nothing she'd seen before. It was the shape of a long teardrop, with the normally trailing edge(in a teardrop, you see) the apparent bow. The entire vessel sat low in the water, stick ing out 5 feet at the highest. The top was painted a dull grey-blue, invisible from most directions. She first turned the large tap shaped knob she presumed to open the door(it was attached to the door) sharply to the right. It stayed closed.

Shaik / STROKE / 20 Righty ti...Ah, right. She turned it to the left, and it slipped open smoothly. The sky moaned slightly, gray as cold metal but not nearly as sharp. Avielle thrust her feet into the hole, and sat pondering life for a few seconds. Why was she doing this? She looked up at the moist sky, still halfheartedly spewing raindrops. Her nose scrunched. At approximately 12 thousand yards per hour, a raindrop collided with her left(currently green) eyeball. “OW”, she said, and slid

inside.

”Bloody rain” Marcus(I’ll wait for you to look back) heard that. “What in the w…?”, he said. “I’ll look”, said one of his powder monkeys. “Yes, I know”, said Marcus, his eyes back on the map. The boy crawled out of the belly of the ship, and with feet bare, wet and sickly, walked over to the edge of the ship, watching closely for stowaways that might have(rather stupidly) climbed on. He marveled for a second at the deathly machine that floated silently to the side. Nothing. The men were climbing out by now. The captain climbed up the stairs of the brig and then to the helmsman.

Shaik / STROKE / 21 “20 degrees starboard, man.” The helmsman nodded and swung the wheel. The captain, fr some reason solemn now, looked up. His long gray hair shuffled slightly. At approximately 13 thousand yards per hour, a raindrop collided with his eye. “OW”