Fabulous Beasts From Lands Unknown
=== Fabulous beasts of lands unknown, each a treasure beyond compare! ===\\ \\ Observe the panic monkey, easily identified by its large eyes and long, dextrous limbs! Rising Flood here is getting a little long in the tooth; most panic monkeys live only two or three years in the wild jungles of the Southeast, their home. Rising Flood, as you can see, is adept at mimicking human behavior, but he’d probably be better at it if he weren’t always in such a tizzy. Calm down, boy. \\ \\ In the next pen is a truly remarkable creature, a flying squirrel from the Haltan forests in the far northeast. Sliding Pebble doesn’t actually fly, however – instead, she glides about with the flaps of skin between her limbs, most impressive, you must agree. \\ \\ This little fellow is an umpus, from the bottom of the Inner Sea. It’s a little pink snail that sits in its shell and does nothing but worry. Its simple mind is overwhelmed with concern – are there any telepaths in the audience tonight? Anyone care to sense it? No? Well, we’ll move on. \\ \\ Behold now one of the stars of the show: a hellion bird from the uttermost south, where, it is said, the ground is fire and the sky is smoke. At first it may seem to be nothing more than a guttering torch we’ve placed in a glass cage, but when I throw a little fireseed into the lower half… yes! The hellion comes to life, spreads its smoky wings. What once seemed to be the wooden handle of the torch is in fact the creature’s body. See the smoke rise as it flits about! \\ \\ Also from the burning sands of the south is this strange creature. I must warn you all to stay well back from the pen, for Zophar spits when agitated. Now, Zophar is about four years old, just finished growing. He’s a quadruped, as you can see, and subsists on metal fillings. Whole herds of these graze down in the South, I’m told. That isn’t paint, now – Zophar is actually made of solid copper. He’s about three feet long, which is a little small for a teferit, but he weighs nearly a ton. As those of you in the front have already noticed, his natural temperature is just above the melting point of copper – feel that heat radiating off him? Don’t ask how we transport him… but let me say the Gull’s galley-fire never lacks for fuel. \\ \\ Well, the next exhibit is a little more prosaic. There’s an island in the far southwest – I won’t bore you with the exact location, but… the cattle that roam wild on this island differ from the norm. These cows produce seventeen times the usual amount of milk from the same amount of feed… using, as you can see plainly, seventeen times the usual number of udders. No crowding, please. \\ \\ Now, observe these two tanks. In this large tank are a pair of ophises, the flying serpents of the Marukani plains. The bat-wings join to the serpent body at the neck, but the remarkable thing is the size disparity – savants say there’s no way an ophis’s tiny wingspan could possibly lift the bulk of its body. To which one can say, well, it flies anyway. Sliding Rain and Brave Fang here are insectivores, by the way. \\ \\ They eat these things, the dustmotes. If I can get everyone to gather around, I’ll lower the tarp… yes. Now, as you can see, a dustmote is nothing more or less than a gnat which glows, colorfully, in the dark. The ones that are a primary color are the males, females are green, violet, or orange. Pretty, aren’t they? Why, yes, we do sell tubes of them, but I warn you, their lifespan is only four days, and for a self-sustaining population you need about half as many as we have in the tank. \\ \\ Slopewings are larger. This one – Eptor, we call it – has been known to fly up and slam against the top of its cage, lifting off into the air and flying several feet before coming to earth. Eptor’s pretty ill-tempered, that’s why we have him in the cage. Listen to the buzzing – very like a minor scale on a violin, no? \\ \\ This is a Hoob-on-Soochee, from the Black Forest of Sijan. Don’t worry; it is entirely harmless. Its fangs and claws have been pulled out, and its tongue can only suck your blood out through an open wound. No one with an open wound in the group, I hope? Let me draw to your attention first its remarkable coat. Shining, green, and yes, those are feathers along the spine. This is a male, of course… females have a khaki-colored coat and lack the feathers. Notice, secondly, notice the musculature. The massive rear legs and the huge shoulder muscles just behind the head. It’s not quite as large as a horse but, I assure you, a wild Hoob-on-Soochee can skeletonize a horse in less than seven minutes. \\ \\ They say the Hoob-on-Soochee feeds on the blood of the innocent. If that’s the case, these longwares are entirely innocent, for they are what we feed it. They’re native to the comically misnamed Garden Islands in the Northern Sea, where there’s ice on the ground fifty weeks of the year. Their bodies aren’t much bigger than a rabbit’s, but I doubt you’ve seen a rabbit with a foot-long nose or fur eight inches thick. Quite tame, quite mild, feel free to pet one. Believe it or not, this is their summer coat… Sorry, no, we do on occasion have longwares for available for sale but our stock is too low this trip. \\ \\ This is Quizzical Fern. Say hello, Quizzical Fern. \\ Yes, yes… Quizzical Fern is a myah bird. Not a spirit, but a bird that be taught to talk. She’s not intelligent, but she picks up scraps of conversation quickly. Beautiful plumage. \\ \\ Bloody Pearl here is one of our main attractions whenever we’re this far north. She’s a glaucous lion, native to the swamp Calam’s Loss in the far southwest. Please do not tease Bloody Pearl or rap on her cage… she has been declawed, but not defanged. The fangs are the larger part of her appeal, as I’m sure you’ll agree. The green-and-brown coat may look out of place here, but in Calam’s Loss it is (I’m told) highly effective camouflage. \\ \\ Now, if you compare Salmon-Spawning-Season to Rising Flood, our panic monkey, you might walk away thinking they’re similar creatures. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. Salmon-Spawning-Season is an ink monkey, smaller and much, much more vicious than poor Rising Flood. They say the ink monkeys were bred by the Solar Anathema in the First Age. I think they had them fight, for sport. I’m going to throw in a hunk of longware, and when Salmon-Spawning-Season eats it, you’ll be able to see that it has two rows of teeth. \\ \\ In this tank are several ash fish. These are drones, and they make excellent pets, very hardy. The queen is not being exhibited – the cold weather disagrees with her, so she’s back on the ship. Now, in addition to the iridescent scales, which frankly would be enough to recommend the ash fish to anyone… in addition, there is their prime virtue: they consume ashes. As you can see when I scoop a cupful into the tank, they gobble it right up. Now, these little fellas are only the size of my thumb, but they’re still growing. You can expect their size to double before they’re fully-grown. We do indeed have live ash fish drones available for sale. \\ \\ The little pebbles at the bottom of the tank aren’t just pebbles. I don’t know if we’ll get to see them come out, but they’re actually the shells of nepots, little green bipedal people without bones. Sometimes they come out of their shells and you can see them, ambling around on the bottom of the tank, meeting up with each other, forming little circles and looking for all the world like they’re talking to each other. Which, incidentally, they’re not. None of the beasts in the exhibit are sapient. \\ \\ In this pen is a pair of shalks. They’re just what they look like – very large black beetles. There’s a fire-breathing variety, and a subspecies that is chameleonic to the point of invisible, but this is just a breeding pair of common black shalks. They are, in fact, full-grown, which I’m sure comes as a relief – a four-foot wide scarab beetle is quite big enough, no? \\ \\ Speedy Orca is in this cage. It’s probably the strangest beast in the exhibition. A trapper captured it in the banyan jungle west of the Lap. I’ve looked at it, our veterinarian has looked at it, our ship’s surgeon has looked at it, everyone has looked at it. And we all agree it doesn’t have a nose or mouth, or ears, or (pardon my vulgarity) an anus, or genitalia. Speedy Orca is a little sexless humaniform body the color of a candleflame, nine inches high, with a single large red eyeball instead of a head. It doesn’t eat, as near as we can tell. Our surgeon suspects it draws nourishment from the air, like a mold. It can see out of that eye, and if it looks like it’s staring right back at you, well, it is. We’re assuming it’s come out of the Wild. \\ \\
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