It's another Fri-sunday special! This one is another Navigator story, previously The Navigator hit a dead end at the river Styx, unable to cross it due to its enormous width he has to resort to engineering his own methods of crossing, one that involves a long rope and a rock along with the discovery of a mysterious tentacle creature.
The line thrashed violently back-and-forth, like a pissed off anaconda with its head caught in a mousetrap or hole too small for the rest of its body. The shaking rocked the tiny iceberg like a house on top of a fault line, no matter how many times this happened he always tipping into the frozen depths below. On cue The Navigator pulled the line, his feet anchored against a small ledge of ice carved crudely to the contours of his boots. He made sure to not pull too strongly, or the ice might betray him, sending him straight off the ice raft into the freezing water where he would most likely die from the wild life, and if not hypothermia. He hoped it was the latter. Slowly he pulled the rope, counting to three between each tug. One, two, three. Pull. One, two, three. Pull, and so on.
Many pulls and approximately eighteen meters of rope later The Navigator finally came up on top. The end of the line fought back one final time before giving in to the tug of war match, the tendrils always went limp before giving in, he just hoped this one didn’t get smart and let go. The last thing his growling stomach needed was an empty line, which would only be possible if a tendril discovered that the air was more lethal to them than bugspray is to mosquitoes. He drew in the rest of the line and observed his catch.
Dangling from the bitter end of the rope was a smooth black featureless conical creature no wider than The Navigator’s arm at the thickest, the creature looked like a disembodied tentacle with all its suction cups allocated to the thickest end. Slivers of blue-white light ran down the length of the creature’s body, the strands looked like moonlight, if the moon was out that was. Like a good explorer The Navigator gave the tentacles a name, he called them simply tendrils, for obvious reasons. He unwinded the tendril from the rope, tossed the rock its body was wrapped around into a pile of other rocks, pulled out his knife and dug into the tendril’s meaty body.
It was lunch time.
*****
Like all most discoveries the tendrils were discovered on accident. Using his rope and an assortment of rocks he would stand at the shoreline of Styx tossing the rocks tied to the end of the rope at the drifting icebergs, the plan was to have the rocks function as a grappling hook of some sorts and reel the ice inwards. Most of the time he was remind with each throw why he never played sports throughout grade school; he was beginning to regret not having the foresight of the extremely improbable possibility that one day he would have to use the arc of a basketball combined with the accuracy and speed of a pitcher to save his life. Who knew?
Hours he spent tossing at the drifting ice, only taking breaks if he didn’t see any ice drifting downstream or when a rock came loose and left him for the river. When the moon was high in the air, what he now called noon, his arms were completely exhausted and he was down to his last rock.
They say save the best for last, but that doesn’t really apply in survival situations. Unlike the first rock he used it had no sharp edges for catching the ice nor rough texture to grip the rope with. Each rock between the two digressed downwards until it was smooth and mossy like this one. With no other choice but to walk up the hillside to collect more rocks or try one more time with this runt and call it a lunch when it failed he decided to toss the runt of the pile.
Rock wound up in his hand, rope tied about it like some sort of poorly knotted gift box, and iceberg in sight he pitched the rock slightly ahead of the drifting glacier. The stone soared straight threw the air, up and up it went just like the past few hundred throws; and just like the past few hundred throws he knew what was going to happen next, he could hear it in his mind’s ears: splash, except his ears heard something different: Thud!
He did it, he made contact. GOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLL! Or whatever they say in basketball, he didn’t care, after hours of pitching he finally made contact with the ice. Navigator: one, dying-on-the-edge-of-the-river: zero. He quickly grabbed the line and pulled inwards with full force.
Shhh, Tap, Spash. The three sounds he didn’t want to hear, the sound of sliding across the ice, hitting the edge then falling. Physics just called a penalty upon his goal, for what reasons he didn’t know but he assumed it was for a faulty choice in a rock, not up to regulation for makeshift grappling hooks. Navigator: zero, dying-on-the-edge-of-the-river: one. The line dropped from his hands and he fell to the ground in defeat. Maybe he’ll give it another shot after halftime.
Halftime was a lunch, another dry cardboard meal of rations, one of four left. As he hesitantly placed the brick into his mouth he couldn’t help but to think how happy he was that he was almost out of them. It meant a lighter load, and no disgusting after-taste (or taste in general for that matter). Though he was a bit concerned, after he ran out he’d be stuck with only half a box of chocolate; which although tasted much better, didn’t contain nearly enough nutrients or energy to sustain a fully grown man over the course of several days, he could probably make the box last a two meals if he stretched it long enough.
The ration was a quarter devoured when he saw the rope shake violently back-and-forth across the shoreline, he spat out a piece of the brick spraying its brown substance onto the equally brown dirt. Instincts kicked in all the way from deen down in brainstem, his brain had to chose between fight or flight, and it chose fight. His brainstem flung his body towards the rope, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to fight the rope or pull it back, so he did both.
His hands made contact with the rope’s end as if he were grabbing the head of a snake, at the same time he pulled it inwards wrapping it around his arms as he was trained to do back in the Academy, the rope was your lifeline never-ever let it go. In survival situations the rope was more essential than a Q-tool and the antenna pack combined. A rope could be used for any tasks from simply tying things to your backpack and functioning as a belt, to restraining a crew member to a pipe or chair if they got off the deep end and decided to declare a mutiny, it could be used to climb or repel down ledges, function as a pulley or ladder, it could be tied to make a snare to catch prey, fishing, and too many more reasons to count. The only thing it couldn’t do was push. Compared to a Q-tool a rope had way more practical survival purposes, the Q-tool could only tell you what to do it could never do anything for you.
The tug-of-war match continued for what felt like forever, several times the rope nearly slipped from his grasp or worse pulled him into Styx. The haze made it difficult to see what his opponent was, he would have dismissed it as a boulder if it wasn’t for the violent shaking of the rope. His hidden opponent made a crucial mistake: it subsided its shaking, that’s when he took the upper hand. He pulled with his whole body, letting gravity and the muscles of his legs work in unison to pull his weight back and down the contender gave in. Like a loaded spring with the tension just released her flew straight up and back through the air. His back his the ground first chased by the rope and a black extension that hung by its end. He may have one but not without his opponent making one more strike, the black object’s trajectory was aimed directly at his face.
Crack! The object hit him directly on his jaw.
“AHHHHHHH!” He cried out, “fuck that hurt!” He tried to say, but it sounded more like “thuck, that hurth!” The impact had caused his mouth to slam shut with his tongue directly in the middle.
He spat out a few ounces of blood before looking at the attacker: a black snake like creatures coiled up in a messy knot that glistened under the midday moon. With his knife he uncoiled the organic knot, the texture was as smooth as the creature was glossy it could easily wiggle right out of his hands slipping back into Styx if it chose too but it chose to remain limp and motionless. The tendril was soft, almost mushy like a sausage, he couldn’t feel a single trace of bone within the creature, it was pure muscle, which didn’t explain his now swollen tongue. When he finished uncoiling the tendril from the rope he found the culprit, his own rock. The creature was stuck to it using a suction cup, it had used his own weapon against him.
He looked at the slimy body, then at his ration, and back again. It would be nice to have meat again.
To be continued....
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