The serpent moved smoothly and slowly through the water. Probably to increase the terror of the approach.
“Could you please hurry this up?” Conella muttered. One eye started to water and she gave a slight, whole-body, twitch followed by a slight groan.
Finally the serpent reared out of the water, glaring at her balefully through one red eye.
“Any lassst wordsss, hero…ine?” the serpent hissed, tilting its head from side to side. “Usssually you lot are all ‘I am sssuper hero so and so, defeater of…’ well, all sssorts of ssstuff.”
“Take your best shot, asshole,” Conella shouted defiantly, taking up a cat stance, sword up and behind her shoulder.
The serpent hissed again then its tongue flashed out.
Conella took a swipe but, as advertised, her fine Agatean blade slid right off the armored tongue of the beast. In a moment she was slurped into its mouth.
“Hmmm…” the serpent mused. “Sweet and tangy marin…?” He couldn’t quite finish the word ‘marinade’ as his mouth’s panicked nerve cells finally started communicating to his brain.
Two thousand years before had been the Wizard Wars when the glittering utopia of the Council Era had fallen into war and then devolution. For nearly four thousand years before that, however, a very specialized group of culinary enthusiasts had used careful cultivation, hybridization and often illegal gene splicing to improve upon nature in the development of certain spices. Some of the purists, even in the latter days before the Fall, still spoke for the value of such plants as Capsicum chinense. However, the development in 2683 of the new chemical variant of capsicum, cumngon, opened up whole new doors and orders of magnitude in pain such that the legendary “Scoville” scale was remanded to the dustbin of history. When the zeros get out of hand its time for a new scale. Named after the developer of the cumngon genus, the late and in most sane cases unlamented Dr. R. Franklin French, the RRRRRRR scale lumped all traditional peppers at 1.
By the time of Dr. French, there were already peppers, quite tasty and sweet as all such peppers are, rated in the thousands on the RRRRRR scale. By the time of the Fall, they were rated in the millions. In short, the ancient and well regarded jalapeno was a pallid and insipid apple compared to the lowliest of the cumngon peppers, so called because if you were so silly as to eat one straight you’d be gone.
The most lethal of the cumngon peppers was, unquestionably, the pepper generally referred to simply as Aaargh! (Cumngonus Arrrrghus) The evil wizard Anthangallagagna once tortured a hero who’d tried to assassinate him by forcing him to eat one Aaargh! pepper. The screams went on for years to the point where Anthangallagagna finally had him put down since the heartless sorcerer was tired of the noise.
Aaargh! peppers were never, ever, cultivated. They were rare even in the wild, as the quite small plant with lovely purple flowers were generally surrounded by a blasted heath some ten acres in size. Birds, quite immune to the effects of capsicum, did not approach. Those that did dropped from the sky to nourish the soil. Such heaths were often surrounded by rings of dead insects.
Conella, at great expense, had managed to obtain exactly one liter of concentrated Aaargh! juice. Which she had liberally applied to herself.
A one-eyed creature cannot cross its eyes and sea serpents do not shed tears. The gathered watchers for years afterwards swore that the serpent first crossed its eye then began to slowly cry.
What assuredly happened was a small burping sound as the serpent, which also had no gag reflex, attempted to evolve one in as brief a time as possible. This was followed by a series of exclamations generally described as a muted “Uh…uh…uh…”
The shriek started, very low at first and ascending in volume until the very walls of the palace started to sway to and fro.
“AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRGH!
“PLEASE KILLLLLL MEEEEEEEE!”
“Okee-dokily,” Conella said, striking upwards into the roof of the serpent’s mouth. “By the way, you need to brush… Oh, wait…”
#
“Oh, my hero…ine…” Isabella said, her hands fluttering in front of her chest.
“Don’t worry,” Conella said, an odd light in her eyes. “I really don’t think you could keep up with me and, no offense, I need a better masseuse.”
“Then there’s the kingdom,” the king said, sighing. “I hope we can agree, at least, on a comfortable room with a view.”
“Eh,” Conella said. “Been there, done that. Running a kingdom’s a lousy job. You’re not foisting it off on me. No, I’ll just take the head of the serpent and, oh, say nine thousand drachma. The Aaargh! sauce was expensive. But you’ll have to get the people together to take it’s head off for me. Pickled, please.”