Dawn on Jefferson (scifi story): Chapter Twenty-Six - A Rain of Blobs Pulled the Church Down
Chapter One: Getting Up
Chapter Two: Where I Live
Chapter Three: The Walk
Chapter Four: School
Chapter Five: Introducing my Friends, the Merry Pranksters!
Chapter Six: Walking to Mom's
Chapter Seven: Mom’s House
Chapter Eight: It Began on Constitution Hill
Chapter Nine: Attack of the Awknerds!
Chapter Ten: No Awknerds Were Harmed
Chapter Eleven: The Breaking Shadstorm
Chapter Twelve: Where I Envy Grilled Cheese
Chapter Thirteen: Doom! Doom! Doom! Where I Want to go to School! The End Must be Nigh!
Chapter Fourteen: The Game is a Foot
Chapter Fifteen: Uncomfortable Revelations!
Chapter Sixteen: WAITAMINUTE!
Chapter Seventeen: The Healing Power of Popcorn
Chapter Eighteen: The Lessons Learned Before Maven
Chapter Nineteen: No Haven From Maven
Chapter Twenty: Meeting Maven
Chapter Twenty-One: And Then I was Roasted Alive and Served Up With a Worm
Chapter Twenty-Two: That Which has Been Set in Motion…
Chapter Twenty-Three: Shall Stay in Motion...
Chapter Twenty-Four: Until Acted Upon by Something Absolutely Annoying
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Veena Swarm Circus!
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Rain of Blobs Pulled the Church Down
We stopped in a stand of creepy bushes.
Creepy bushes are really creepy - dur, captain obvious! - and live in a symbiotic relationship with a weird critter we called the spiny creeper. It looks a lot like if a turtle replaced its shell with a spines like a hedgehog. The fruit of the creepy bushes is full of baby spiny creepers. The fruit keeps the spiny creepers warm and protected: the fruit is poisonous to most Jefflife critters. The spiny creepers then 'hatch' by eating their way out of the fruit. Up to this point, spiny creepers sound a bit like the Earthlife wasps that reproduce in figs. Other than the spiny creepers are more like vertebrates. And don't reproduce in the fig. Fun fact! If you've eaten a fig, you've likely eaten some baby wasps. Glad you talked to me, huh?
However, the cycle is different on Jefferson. The spiny creepers don't really pollinate the creepy bushes, unlike the wasps on Earth. Rather each spiny creeper had a seed they carry inside themselves. They grow up, breed and the seed sprouts: hormones in the spiny creeper's reproductive system were what trigger the germination. The creepy bush wrapped its tendrils around each of the unborn spiny creepers and forms a fruit around them. Sometimes there's only one fruit. Sometimes there were several. If a spiny creeper was strong, it would have lasted several mating seasons and there were definitely be multiple fruit. However, after a while, the spiny creeper was overwhelmed by the creepy bush growing inside the spiny creeper and died.
Most of the time, predators kill the spiny creeper before it reached old age and the creepy bush kills the spiny creeper. The fruit is deadly to eat for anyone other than the spiny creeper. This means the babies were protected when a predator attacks and ate the spiny creeper. If a spiny creeper was eaten, a single fruit in the spiny creeper rapidly matured and a new plant sprouted in the droppings of the predator. A plant sprouted then, wrapped itself around the other fruit that had not matured, and then grows to normal size. The spiny creepers babies later ate their way out and the cycle repeats. The plant won because the seeds were dispersed around the entire habitat of the spiny creeper and stay protected until the spiny creeper dies.
The whole thing was just creepy though: you had a plant that's in you and waiting for you to die or killed you if you don't have the decency to be killed soon enough. Evil plant. Alien world.
The reason we hid inside the stand of creepy bushes was NOT to creep us out. Rather, the fruit of the plant with all those baby spiny creepers in them gave off heat to keep the babies warm. That heat might be, we hoped, enough to hide us while we rested. We hoped.
As we rested and panted, we looked at one another. It would be dark soon. Being out in the dark was bad for multiple reasons.
Our parents would have flipped out. Really flipped out. Sneaking out at night was a big no-no and we had JUST been trusted to stay out of town on our own. We were completely and utterly destroying their trust.
Yoats would be out. And we would have looked like so much lunch. or late night snack as it was. Or at least something to mangle for fun and profit.
Our parents would have flipped out.
If we went back, we might have not been caught (ha!) and could have at least pretended we were not doing dastardly things in the wild of Jefferson. Ok, a bit overly dramatic, but the situation called for it: we were hunting for someone in chameleon camo in powered armor when we're 12. deal. Or if we did get caught, at least then we could have claimed we were just curious and please don't hurt us innocent little kids! bats eyeslooks cute and helpless*
An aside, I don't think that would have worked, but, hey, it might have been worth a try.
- Our parents would have flipped out.
Well, what do you think we did?
Yup.
As we debated what to do, it occurred to me exactly where to look for our stealthy prey and I shared the idea.
The best place to hide on Jefferson near Shadwell was at the old Church of the Sky Father Christ.
Wait?! Why would there be an OLD church on a planet only settled a few decades ago?! Well, therein lied a story.
When Jefferson was first settled, when Monticello was a new settlement, a church on Earther America wanted to find a world where they could build a community based on their religion and beliefs. Its a story as old as time. America had some roots in that sort of story for that matter. The church fathers and mothers led an expedition to Jefferson. They were brave and smart. They were bold. Shadwell didn't exist yet and they found a place that seemed to be a good idea for a safe place for a settlement. They found an island in a small cove that was deep on one side and when the tides were low, would allow for a causeway to crossed to the mainland. The Church mothers and fathers returned to Earth while they left bots to build the settlement and especially the Church. Build they did. In the center of the now decaying town, is the Church. The Church of the Sky Father Christ was amazing. Dad had taken me once and we walked through and gawked. It was based on a church in Berkeley, California near the university. The tidal island seemed the safest place...but while they did know taxitos were dangerous, they didn't know they were building in the middle of a breeding ground for one of their primary predators: the loogie hockers.
Loogers, as we liked to call them, were small amphibious critters that have some parallels with our frogs. They didn't hop like a frog does. What made them dangerous though was they spat. Yes, spat. They spat very poisonous globs. These flew through the air very fast to shoot bugs right out of the air. The looger would have then waddled over and ate the glob. They used small sprays of globs for taxitos and could do larger ones for other Jefflife bugs. They could even kill small animals. During mating season, loogers swarmed and often got so hungry as to hunt larger animals. Yoats and other larger animals can be killed by a hail of unintentionally cooperating loogers spitting their globs of poison. And, yes, the desperately hungry loogers then ate the large animal. It was anything but pretty. If I were to tell you there were frogs that eat like piranhas when starving and kill by spitting on you, you might have laughed, Earther, but believe me, it's not nearly as funny as you think.
The first settlers for the Church of the Sky Father Christ came and moved into their already built houses with lots of fountains and...the settlers were swarmed. This was the loogers' breeding grounds and the church members' robots had built lots and lots of places with clean water. The settlers showed up and that very night, the loogers thought the settlers were yummy looking. So they spit allllll over the settlers since the settlers had the decency to have delivered themselves like very rare steaks for the looger breeding party! The settlers all died. Their fellow parishioners came and collected their bodies and left...and left the first ruins on Jefferson.
In a way, the settlers did get their revenge: eating human is very poisonous for most Jefflife critters. Most of the loogers there ended up dying.
The church and its environs, with its slowly decaying glory were sad, but very, very beautiful.
It was also the perfect place to hide.
If you can handle the taxitos.
And, even more importantly, the loogers.
It was only a ten kilometer hike, too.
So, what do you think we did?
Yup.
We did.