The Monkey and the Butterfly - A Tale of the smallest ASB Ever Known

MAlexMatt

Banned
Hey guys, this is something of an impromptu story, so forgive me if it seems a bit rough around the edges. It literally came to me in a dream, and the dream happens to have woken me up with the conviction that this had to be written. I realize this involves what is technically an 'impossible' or 'fantastic' factor, which usually means the ASB forum, but I feel like it deserves to be here for two reasons:

1. The bulk of the TL will take place in what I feel are normal enough circumstances to not need to be on the ASB forum and;

2. The 'ASB' in question is so small that it's little more than shooting a butterfly straight through the heart of Late Antique Europe. The man representing the ASB element ends up playing a role as much as just yet another free radical in a wild and crazy time, so ultimately the actual ASB factor is kept to a minimum and the TL should, in the long term, just look like an experiment in chaos theory.

I apologize ahead of time for any troubles with tense: like I think I've mentioned, I wrote this after waking up at 2AM. It's hard to concentrate on grammar when tired and driven. Feel free to point out any mistakes you notice.

So, without further ado (or, Abu :p), here is the very rough rough rough draft of the very first chapter of The Monkey and the Butterfly.

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Sometime around the year 600, somewhere in the East of the Isle of Britannia

My name is Yusuf abd al-Ilaah ibn al-Aziz, or just Joe for short with my Western friends. I'm a college student in the Damascus University School of Medicine. Or at least I was, once, a lifetime ago.

A lifetime that, as far as I knew, was coming to an end.

The stockade I was holed up in was under vicious assault. The cacophony of battle and fire and death echoed in my ears and, presumably, all around me. My shoulder bled from a gruesome wound I had received in the dense forest outside and was now trying to patch, so I had other things to concentrate on. I desperately tried to sanitize the wound, to the degree it was possible, with the questionable vintage of wine that passed for alcohol on this God forsaken island, making use of what little comforting knowledge I still held over the inhabitants of this equally God forsaken time.

I hadn't noticed at the time, but the wine mixed with the tears that flowed freely from my eyes. I was definitely a changed man from the weak, fearful university student I had been over a decade past, but somewhere deep inside me the fear of death that comes natural to all 21st century peoples welled up and refused to be put down. I had watched men charge into the jaws of the reaper without so much as blinking more times than I cared to count since my arrival here, in this new now, but I could never quite understand the feeling that could drive someone to such courage.

Perhaps you had to be born into it. I was raised by a well-to-do middle class family in Damascus in the 1990's, so I had no idea what kind of childhood anyone here had had. I had just been forced to get used to the result, as my encounters with thousands of this type of person over the years of my temporal exile and flight from the forces of the Empire had driven me to range far and wide across a Europe that did not resemble in the slightest the Europe I had cavorted across over holiday several times in my younger years.

The journey had been long and intense in a way I could not begin to subscribe in a few words, lonely except for my one constant companion, the one who had been there from the moment I was cast back in time to this alien era, the same one who stood above me now, ensuring with his inhuman strength that no one bothered the man that I'm sure he felt of as a mix between friend and brother at this point: The chimpanzee, Solon.

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The deserts east of Damascus, in the Imperial Province of Phoenice Libanensis, about a decade earlier

The sun hangs heavy above another scorching day in one of the hottest places known to the Roman mind. What little life disturbs the subtle peace of the open desert scurries too and forth without much concern for the wider vagaries of human affairs, only becoming agitated at all when a sudden white flash fills the parching air.

Into this flash comes a man. Or out of the flash. It's really impossible to tell. Wearing the tight fit t-shirt and jeans of a university student, he is very obviously out of place. He realizes this himself, as he recovers from his sudden temporal transport and raises himself to his elbows. Looking around for a moment, the most confused look imaginable crosses his well-defined features. As far as he knows, he should be at school, studying for an upcoming exam. One minute he had been wandering through a courtyard, headed to the library relevant to his chosen professional track, the next he's...here. Wherever here is supposed to be.

Shaking himself off he has to assume he's delusional. Maybe he was mis-remembering the last day. Maybe he had had a little bit too much at the night before. He was told constantly by his parents not to drink, but he couldn't be bothered to listen. Unlike many of his friends, he could afford to live outside of his home, so it wasn't unusual for them to come to him when they wanted alcohol. Combined with his Christian heritage he sometimes felt like a superman, able to do whatever he wanted while his friends languished under what their parents took Sharia to mean.

Well, apparently he had done a little too much of what he wanted and, as was increasingly obvious, his friends were playing a prank on him, driving him out to the desert to stew for a while. Still, what an odd dream to have, imagining himself waking up for a normal day and heading off to study. Alcohol certainly did do weird things to the mind.

He should be pretty scared, he supposes. The desert could be a dangerous place, but he trusts his friends. They wouldn't have dropped him too far from at town or village. They probably just want to throw him off his feet for a little while, perhaps in payback for some of the jokes he had participated in himself. Who knew? He shrugs and heads off, looking for the first road he can come across. Damascus is surrounded by a spoke and wheel pattern of major highways and a panalopoly of smaller roads, so it wouldn't be long before he came across one.

Or so he thinks.

A few hours later he is becoming significantly hotter and significantly less sure of his friends. He has yet to run across a single dirt road, or any other sign of humanity. He has barely seen any animals, although, to his great fear, he was sure he'd seen a viper slither away from him at high speed. He is getting tired and, more immediately scary, very thirsty. He'd had what was left of a water bottle on him when he woke up (which, when he started paying attention to anything else but the heat, would start to put to the lie the idea that he had simply dreamed the morning and early afternoon up, as he would be able to remember getting the water bottle from his fridge earlier), and that had disappeared very quickly.

Eventually he stumbled. At first it was just once. Then he stumbles again. There isn't anything obvious for him to be stumbling on, the entire area just being dry rock and the occasional patch of sand, but stumble he does. Eventually he falls. He pulls himself up, but just falls again. He's used to heat, but not this kind of scorching, unrelenting sunlight and dehydration. He's used to being able to go inside and get a drink of water when he starts to feel a little under the weather. Out here, he doesn't have that choice, and the lack of options is starting to take its toll.

Before long, he has passed out, becoming just another body in the middle of the Great Syrian Desert.

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Out of no where, it seems, Yusuf jerks into consciousness. Something has disturbed what would have been his last, long sleep. The hooves of a camel clop down nearby to him. Taking a moment for him to register the sound, he barely recognizes what is going on, stuck in the depths of thirst induced delirium as he is. However, when the clop of hooves is matched by the thump of a body he cannot help but pay attention. To the best of his significantly decreased ability, he struggles off his back to look at the source of the sound.

A magnificently, totally anachronistically dressed man lays sprawled out about a dozen feet from him. Yusuf had seen men dressed similarly in history books as a younger man, but had never actually seen such dress in real life. Something deep inside his shuddered. Nearby to the man stands a camel and, attached to the camel by a wooden collar, was a small cart with what looks like the remains of a cage.

Yusuf blinks and rubs his eyes as something climbs out of the broken remains of the cage. He stares for a full ten seconds before he believes he's not just gone insane in the desert. Standing astride the cart is what can only be a chimpanzee. Yusuf has seen monkeys and apes before, at the zoo, but never has he seen one outside a carefully maintained, caged habitat. The monkey quickly jumps down from the cart and knuckle-walks to the body, which Yusuf can now start to smell is not going to be going anywhere any time soon.

Obviously distressed, the monkey starts to poke at the body, eventually pushing and rolling what is now obviously the man's corpse over in a futile attempt to wake him up. In a single moment of despair, the chimp strikes the corpse with his fists and turns his attention elsewhere.

To Yusuf.

Yusuf knows what chimpanzees can do. He saw one lift another clear above its head without trying at the zoo, once. After a day full of terror, Yusuf is still filled with a new kind of dread, seeing what has to be a very emotional great ape suddenly shifting its gaze to him. He quickly realizes that he might not have to be so afraid, though, because the chimp is obviously more distraught than angry. Yusuf isn't sure if apes can cry, but ,whether they can or cannot, it looks like this chimp wants to.

It starts wandering over to him, causing the man to back away from the ape a bit, but it moves fast even at its casual knuckley gait, and Yusuf quickly finds himself looking the animal in the eye. Before he can do anything about it, it's hugging him. Tightly, but with obvious previous experience embracing human beings, so not tightly enough to cause any kind of damage. Yusuf isn't sure what to do, he wasn't even aware before that chimps did this kind of thing. Out of instinct, he wants to try to say something but his totally parched throat won't let him. All that comes out is a kind of rasp and wheeze that the monkey has seemingly heard before, because it detaches from him and heads over to the body.

Pulling something from the shoulder of the magnificently attired corpse, it drags it over to Yusuf and hauls it right into his lap. Looking at the leather sack for a moment, it slowly convalesces in his mind that he's staring at a water satchel. Practically tearing the stopper from the leather flask's nozzle, Yusuf greedily drains it of a significant portion of its contents. After drinking his fill, Yusuf realizes the absurdity of what is happening to him. He looks at the chimp, which is still staring at him as it had done for the entire time he drank, and then over at the body. Yusuf struggles to his feet and wanders in the direction of the horse and the corpse.

The man's face is absolutely black. Yusuf tears back some of what appears to be the silk clothe covering the man's torso and sees the corruption must have spread from the two little holes on his upper chest. Yusuf shudders for the umpteenth time that day: This man he obviously not been so lucky as Yusuf in his close encounter with a Syrian viper. The skin all over his left side is blackened by tissue destruction from what Yusuf can only guess was a hemotoxic venom. It spreads from his chest all the way up to his face and down to his flank.

As Yusuf disturbs the man's clothing a bit more he hears the jingle of something metal from around the corpse's hip. Before he can do anything more, the chimp, who had similarly wandered over to see what Yusuf was doing, darts its hand to the source of the jingle and pulls a pouch off of what must have passed for the man's belt. Flashing a very toothy smile, the chimp presents the pouch to Yusuf, obviously proud of having done something right. Not wanting to upset the animal, Yusuf takes the pouch, which he immediately finds to be a lot heavier than he thought it was going to be.

It spills over and out of it slips something very shiny. Yusuf reaches down to where the object had fallen to the ground and recovers it. Holding it before his face, he truly marvels for the first time since waking up in the desert.

Gold....!

A very crude coin, it has an icon of what looks like some kind of saint or other Christian image on it. There is also some text that appears to be Latin, although Yusuf's skills with that language are not good enough to decode what the coin might say. Pulling at the pouch's string to loosen it a little more, Yusuf sticks his fingers inside of it to feel a whole host of other coins, some of which are also golden but others which appear to be silver and what might be copper.

Suddenly very excited, Yusuf slips the gold coin back into the pouch, pulls the drawstring, and sticks it into his pocket. He's not sure what this strangely attired man was doing in the desert with so many old coins, but his misfortune is Yusuf's saving grace. Between the water pouch, the coin purse, and the camel, which has been standing patiently in its spot this whole time, his life is saved. Yusuf quickly retrieves the pouch, followed all the time by the chimp, and makes to mount the camel. He's never ridden one before, but he's seen it done and is desperate enough to not care.

After a few false starts, he manages to get on the beast's back. Taking a moment to get himself used to the reins of the camel, he emulates what he has seen done at riding shows before, snapping them like the Bedouin riders he watched as a child. At first it does nothing. He tries again, this time cursing loudly. This time it has the desired effect: The camel jerks into motion, the cart with it. As the cart begins to trundle along, the chimp leaps clear from the ground onto the moving vehicle, seemingly ready to wait patiently for the ride to be over.

Boy will Yusuf have stories to tell and things to show to his friends whenever he does get back.
 
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