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I really am not looking forward to being human again.

Daniel lay on his right side, panting. His left paw lay beside him, gnawed clean off by his strong jaws. The bone had been the worst part, but he had broken it clearly, desire to be free stronger than the maelstrom of pain that engulfed his leg.

The animal had almost completely taken over, ignoring the pain to heave himself to three legs. He held the left leg high, blood still dripping. He took his paw in his jaws and flung it through the bars. It soared through them without touching and landed with a wet plot about six feet beyond the cage, slightly behind a wine vat. He lay down again, not minding the tacky blood on the floor of the cage that got in his thick coat. He could only hope now.

He was licking his wound when Sam finally came to visit him.

“One god is lost, one god is gained. I am not sure I made out good on that,” the big man said conversationally, not looking at Daniel. He checked on the vat closest to the door and adjusted a knob. “And I got the weak cripple. Do you know what we did with cripples in TK CITY?”

Daniel didn’t pay attention to him, just kept licking. The wound had stopped bleeding, and it was more of a comfort rather than cleaning.

“We tossed them out the airlock and watched them drown,” Sam continued, checking a figure on a clipboard. “You need strength to live under the sea, and the weak could have caused problems. It’s why my parents were exiled, see. I wanted three gods, and I’m stuck with the worst one. And you can’t even talk – by Ishmael’s lost foreskin, what happened here?”

He had finally looked in the cage and seen Daniel lying in a pool of his own blood, licking his stump. Daniel regarded him calmly, then went back to licking.

“You idiot!” Sam raged, bringing both hands down on the cage in a mighty thump. “I really did get the worst god. You don’t even know enough to realize that chewing off a leg doesn’t get you anything in a cage like this! You’re thinking a bear trap! Oh you fool!
Now my god is even more of a cripple! What am I going to do with you now?”

Daniel’s heart leaped. Weak? Worst? Stupid? Words that once would have hurt him now bolstered him. If Sam thought he was these things, he would underestimate Daniel. And that’s what Daniel wanted.

He opened his mouth and panted, giving a doggy smile with blood coating his muzzle.

Sam groaned and turned his back, holding his head in his hands. “I’ve lost Prosper, my vines are dead, what am I going to do?”

He stopped groaning and turned, his eyes narrowing as he regarded the cage. “You may be an idiot, but you’re still made of godstuff.”

Daniel forced himself to keep casually licking, but he didn’t like the new focus in Sam’s voice. “And there is godstuff all over the floor of that cage.”

Daniel looked down at the blood that still coated the wooden floor of the cage. He realized Sam was right. His paw, his blood, maybe even his piss were all divine, and would have power outside this divine-stultifying cage.

Sam ran from the room and returned with a wooden board. Blue wires ran around the board and connected to what looked like a battery case on one end, and the whole thing glowed. Daniel bared his teeth and backed into the corner of the cage.

“At least you know enough to stay away from this,” Sam said, opening the door to the cage and inserting the board in first. Daniel would have to push against the board to get out, now, and he obediently held back.

With his left hand, he held Daniel at bay with the board, and with his right he carefully mopped up Daniel’s blood with a rag. “Got a scientist, James Melzer, who will know what to do with this,” he said. “Powerful stuff, I’m sure.”

He pulled the rag and the board out of the cage, slamming the door quickly, and sat back on his heels. His eyes narrowed again.

“Wait a moment. If you gnawed your foot off, where did it end up? Did you swallow it?”

Crap, thought Daniel.

The big man dropped the board and stood, stashing the rag in his back pocket. He looked on the floor around the cage and then further into the room. Daniel held his breath as Sam went behind the barrel where he’d thrown the paw.

Sam got to his hands and knees and pulled out the rag. Daniel whined low in his throat. Sam did something with the rag and put it back in his pocket.

“Well, broken god, I will see what I can do with this. But I will find that paw before I’m done. At worst, it looks like I might be able to cut you up and sell the parts to a tinker. You’ve got to be as powerful as chaos energy.”

With that he slammed the door, and Daniel heard a key turn in the lock.

Now what?

“What” turned out to be a movement that caught his eye. A shadow danced on the wall beyond the wine vats, the dark sibling to a sunbeam peeking through the trees. It took a humanoid form and skipped around the wall, playing with light, hiding, teasing, having a grand time leaping in and out of shadows. It twisted and contorted, actually making a series of shadow puppets that had Daniel amused even as he was annoyed.

Yeah. That’s definitely part of me.

Daniel barked once, relieved, and wagged his tail. Let Sam think he was an idiot. His plan was working.

As the shadow cavorted, Daniel realized he had no control over it. It hadn’t been his idea for a piece of him to turn into a playful shadow; he hadn’t known what would happen.

Odin knew there was power in the loss of a body part, he reflected. This has got to work.

The shadow danced around the room until it got to the heavy wooden door. There it paused, then collapsed into a circle. It quivered for a moment as if gathering energy, then it burst from the wall and landed on the floor, a three-dimensional shadow, a dark imp that stood about six inches high.

Daniel limped to the door of his cage and stood expectantly. But the imp paid him no attention and instead pranced forward, still leaping and dancing, until it stood in front of the wine vat in the back corner of the room.

It paused briefly, then leaped up and slid udnerneath a seam as if it were a wide doorway. The vat shuddered on its stand and then rocked back and forth once. The faucet then flew off with incredible force and the green, bubbly wine spewed into the room.

The wine gushed toward Daniel’s cage, but had turned into a slow trickle by the time it lapped at the edge.

What is it doing?

The shadow imp had ridden the torrent out gleefully like a kid at a water park. It hit the floor, stood a bit carefully, then skipped to the next vat, and then the next, forcing each to belch out its contents onto the floor. The hundreds of gallons of wine were creating a green, bubbly lake on the floor that rose steadily, getting into Daniel’s cage at last and coating his paws in the wine.

The blood that still stained the wood floor mixed in with the wine, causing little black rivulets to swirl around Daniel’s paws. It spread out like a spiderweb, instead of dissipating in the wine, it seemed to get stronger. It stretched out to the bars of the cage where it wrapped around, sliding up and out of the wine. Like the shadow imp, it sank into the wood and Daniel heard the distinct BZZT of an electrical short.

The effect was instantaneous. Daniel could feel his divine power returning to him, the dampening power of the weird blue wires no longer holding him back. He walked through the bars as if they were made of smoke and shook himself. With a thought, he reclaimed his human form and staggered back as the pain of his bloody stump hit him. He stumbled back and fell into the wine.

The shadow that had been his severed paw was finishing draining the last of the Cmar wine. It staggered toward him, and through his red pain haze Daniel thought, the thing is drunk!

He stared at it dumbly as it leaned briefly against his knee. His ruined arm rested on his thigh. The imp waved feebly at him and then flowed into his arm.

The pain ended immediately, and daniel stared in wonder as his hand reformed, fingers flexing. After a moment, he couldn’t even see the scar where he’d gnawed.

“Goddamn,” he murmured, as the waves of pain were replaced by waves of drunkenness. “How much did my hand drink?”

With a bit of effort, as he was still treating his new hand gingerly, he managed to get to his feet just as the door flew open, shoving a wave of green wine toward Daniel, which rebounded quickly and rushed out to soak Sam’s boots.

The big man’s face had time to register shock and fury at the draining of his last supply of wine, and then the escaped god, before Daniel narrowed his eye and flexed his divine, drunken will once again.[/private]

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Previously, in Heaven…

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The group of Kate, Daniel, their airship crew, and the new gods Barris, Fabrique and Gamma, had survived a battle with airship pirates. During the battle in the wasteland, known locally as the Dark, they discovered that their divine powers don’t work as well in the raw chaos energy that is the Wasteland, but also that the Wasteland is a path they can take to return to Heaven and Hell to free the places from the otherworldly beast’s siege.

They return to the temples in the floating city of Meridian (that floats above the mad city of Lathe) in order to make a battle plan. In this episode we learn something startling about Barris, the sun god, who is developing a little too much liking for the ideas sold below in Lathe…

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