Rodentia Adventures

CHAPTER 13: A WORLD OF RUIN

The terrible beast ripped through roads and buildings, all efforts at defending against it, as feeble as they were, lain to waste. All was lost, or so it had seemed. Suddenly, with a flash of light and a surge or electricity, the defender appeared, floating down from the sky, it's three heads, one comprised entirely of metal, roaring. The final battle for the fate of the city, perhaps the very world, was about to begin. 

Dimitri watched closely, munching on some popcorn which had fallen beneath the seat. He had seen this film several times over the past month of staying in the theater, yet had only, at best, a basic grasp of the plot. Human lives were difficult enough to make sense of, and all the more so when you couldn't understand what anyone was saying, and more challenging still due to the added complication of time travel thrown into the mix. Still, he had learned a great deal. For one, he had learned that humans had multiple languages, something which had come as quite a shock. The fact that this movie was subtitled helped a little bit, as he could loosely associate some of the written words with the images onscreen, but the spoken language had proved to be entirely useless, as even from his limited understanding, it was clearly incompatible with the written words of the sacred text. 

He was the only mouse there. Sure, the place was easy enough to get into, and there was an abundance of food, but it was also quite far away, and there were usually far too many Makers around to feel comfortable. Movies themselves were also an acquired taste. At first they had all simply seemed loud and nonsensical, but after a while, they just seemed loud. 

The head researcher recognized that these movies were not like the town plays: there weren't people acting them out behind the screen, and they were recorded in some manner. This wasn't too surprising, after all the mice were familiar with drawings which could be made once and seen over and over again. This technology was clearly being an extension of that principle. A very impressive one, of course, but a concept still within reason. At no point did the mouse even consider that the events onscreen were fictional, however. They simply reinforced the notion that human life was somehow even more bizarre and complicated than he had previously assumed. 

The mouse wasn't even close to being able to understand human speech, let alone read human text. Still, hearing a lot of it, most movies were in English after all, did give him a little grasp of their grammar, how some of the words were used for people, places and things, whereas others were essentially connective. He also understood the concept of syllables a bit, and that while each letter didn't necessarily represent one, often the repeated sets of letting, which he had already well documented, did. Similarly, there were certain words which he could now put to text, such when characters read signs or other print onscreen. This didn't happen nearly as often as he would have liked, but it did offer a strong starting point. 

All things considered, his experience had been a very productive one, but it was time for the mouse to return to the city. Over the past few days he had found himself spending more time struggling to make sense of the story-lines than the language. A worthwhile pursuit, but his own field of study was already vast and complicated enough without trying to simultaneously become an expert on human societies and their conflicts. He would have to leave that work to a far more qualified variety of expert. 

<3~ <3~ <3~ <3~ 

The alarm shrieked on long after every man, woman and child were well aware of the danger. Citizens fled as the town guards rushed to the scene only to be forced to stop well out of range of the massive creatures attacks, and even further out of range to strike it with their own clubs, axes and small blades. Simply charging at an opponent with an aggressive expression was a tactic which historically worked quite well for the town guards, even when they found themselves outclassed, but the dark lord called their bluff, essentially ignoring their presence, continuing to walk through the city with slow, purposeful strides.