“Now look! Bluphsplunger stoop! You big humpus maker, you!” she shouted, standing up and stomping her feet.
Gus sat on a rock, trying to ignore his empty stomach and the barrage of creative insults that emerged from Slooshy’s mouth. She knew a number of interesting words, enhancing most with the “bluphsplunger” modifier as she called him a “doofa,” a “goopar,” and a “burfhoofing lumpus.”
But he couldn’t focus on her tirade and, inevitably, was distracted by other things, watching the ooze and the ravine and the barricade of rocks. Many random facts flitted, unbidden and mostly unannounced, through his little brain. He thought of the rat, the tempting morsel flying through the air, the plop in the sludge. The sludge…
The sludge was trying to go down, but it couldn’t because of the dam.
This sludge was just like the stuff that dripped through the ceiling of his house.
All of his neighbors had sludge dripping through their ceilings as well.
The sludge was trying to go down, but it couldn’t because of the dam.
A clatter of rock distracted him. He looked up just as Slooshy threw a small rock, one that had broken loose from high on the cliff. Her aim was good, and she stood right in front of him, so the jagged missile smacked him square in the right eye.
“Ow!” he cried, clapping a hand to his face. Through his other eye, he saw the stone had continued to roll, bouncing over the uneven ground and finally landing in the sludge pond with a smacking splash.
“Stoopy humpus bluphsplunger!” she cried, kneeling to look for another missile.
Still, Gus paid her no attention. He was thinking. The stone, like the sludge, was trying to go down. That idea, for some reason, struck Gus as vaguely important. He watched the ripples from the splash disappear as the rock finally vanished beneath the scummy surface. He didn’t see Slooshy charging him until he felt the punch in his chest, which she landed with both fists. As the blow struck, his muddy boots slipped from the slick ledge he stood upon.
“Ow!” The pain came from his rump as he came down hard on the solid, slippery stone. His stubby fingers clutched for a handhold, but there was nothing to grab. Instead, he skidded off the ledge, bounced painfully off of a few boulders, and tumbled after the stone that she had flung against his face.
“Here! Grab me!” Slooshy demanded, holding out her hand. At the last moment, Gus did, and she yanked him to a stop, his feet and other hand braced against the slime-coated surfaces of the jagged rocks just above the edge of the pool.
Just like the stone, like the sludge, like everything, the gully dwarf had nearly tumbled down.
Everything goes down.
Then Slooshy let him go and squealed with delight as he did a face plant on the scummy rocks. He looked up at her, grinning in excitement.
“Everything falls!” he shouted.
The truth hit him as hard as the rock had, and he gaped at the amazing reality that was made even more obvious by the inexorable force tugging him down the slick stone surface. The girl laughed so hard, she had to sit down, even as Gus felt stunned by the universal truth of his realization. He clawed to hold his position until his nose started to itch. When he released his grip to scratch himself, his other hand lost purchase, and he skidded down again, down and down, bouncing and tumbling over the lip of the drop to splash heavily into the thick, scummy ooze of the drainage pond.
Gully dwarves tend to be natural swimmers, and Gus was no exception. He instantly popped to the surface and paddled over to the edge of the pond without really thinking about what was happening. Instead, he was still trying to grasp the intricacies, the beauty of the brainstorm that had dawned on him.
Everything goes down.
His hand brushed against something in the ooze, something limp and furry. In triumph he pulled it out to reveal the rat! Clutching his treasure, Gus climbed out of the sludge to find that he had unwittingly crossed the small pool and was perched on the loosely piled rubble left by the rockslide-the rubble that formed the dam that held back the sludge. To one side was the pond, the murky liquid lapping against the rim of the makeshift barrier. To the other side, Gus could see that the rocky slope tumbled steeply away. He recoiled from the edge, realizing that if he lost his balance, he would tumble all the way down to the dark hole where the sludgy stream disappeared into the ancient sewer extending under the Urkhan Sea.
Everything goes down, he knew, and that would include himself.
“Look! Got rat!” he crowed, hoisting the gamey morsel. Unfortunately his movement was too abrupt, and the slippery thing slid from his fingers, through the air, and back into the pond.
“You one funny bluphsplunger gully dwarf, you are!” Slooshy cried, still sitting on the ground, holding her sides from the force of her laughter.
Glumly, Gus looked at the place where the rat had vanished. He saw that more of the liquid, churned by his fall and subsequent swim, had spilled over the lip of the dam, running in gooey rivulets down the surface of tumbled stone.
Even as the thought possessed him, the loose pile of rocks underneath him shifted slightly. Gus scrambled to the side, kicking frantically to climb higher. He made it to safety with a single lunge, but his efforts knocked a couple of stones off the pile. They clattered downward, chased by a small spill of sludgy liquid as a bit of the pond scum trickled through the notch in the dam created by the falling rocks.
And in that instant, everything became really, really clear to the startled gully dwarf.
The sludge in the pond, like everything else in the world, wanted to go down. But the dam was stopping it from following the course of the stream. Instead, it sat there in the bowl of rock, and tried to go down a different way-the way that led through the ceilings of all the Aghar houses that happened to lie directly beneath.
“Hey!” he cried, hopping to his feet, quickly circling the small pond. Slooshy looked at him in confusion. “Hey! The sludge wants to go down!”
“That not so funny,” she replied. “You fall in again?” she added hopefully.
“Everything falls down!” he shouted, throwing back his head.
A few Aghar were higher up on the sides of the ravine, climbing or descending within his view. They stared at him in surprise, startled by the outburst. Most of them simply ignored him, though one hefty, young fellow tossed a sharp rock in Gus’s direction. He ducked, then shouted out in glee as the stone hit the liquid and, naturally, vanished.
“See! Everything goes down!”
“What? You crazy bluphsplunger now, you are!” Slooshy said, backing away. “Go away!”
She started climbing up the sloping ground, stopping to throw a rock at him every few feet. He gleefully skipped out of the path of each missile. “See! Goes down!” he cried when each errant stone vanished into the pond.
“That crazy talk! Stoop humpus bluphsplunger Aghar, leave me alone!” Slooshy shouted back. She threw one more rock-another he easily avoided-from the top of the ridge before vanishing from his view.
He didn’t care. He raced back up the ravine floor to the tunnel leading down to his neighborhood, skidding and sliding down the steep shaft. He almost couldn’t control his momentum until he caught a flash of movement on the ground, something slithering along at the base of the wall.
It was a cavebug!
Gus stopped the only way that he could: he sat down on the hard stone ground. Ignoring the pain in his bruised rump, he reached down and grabbed the bug with his stubby thumb and forefinger. Hoisting it, feeling the hunger gnawing at his belly, he almost popped it right into his mouth.
Then he remembered: sting thumb, not tongue!
That axiom of cavebug dining had been passed down through generations of gully dwarves, and Gus remembered it just in time. The little, wormlike bug wriggled in his grasp, the numerous legs-at least two on each side-flailing for purchase. At the tail he spotted the sharp stinger, erect and thrashing. Squinting, carefully concentrating, Gus held up his thumb and let the wicked-looking barb plunge into the pad of flesh.