OG meets Sloth, Invents Hallucinogens, Boards Spaceship.

Spring lay siege to the land with the very air - weighty ,moist, and inevitable - attacking down through the forest. Thick sunlight and a breeze like regiments occupying the pre-historic greenway, winning over the population, seeking and destroying the remnants of the frozen hell that had been the winter before. Og the caveman, sitting on a rock outside his cave, let his mind wander. Daydreams full of blood and food and the breasts of cavewomen had rendered him motionless for the last four or five hours. For the last few days, ever since the episode with the sloth, things had been weird for the old beast, and some little part of him was glad for the rest. Most of his tiny, almost uselessly small brain however, was taken up with melting. Not that Og had any real conception of the actual word “melting,”, he didn’t. It’s just that what was happening inside his internal mind and his vision couldn’t really be described by any other means. Everything he saw and everything he thought about turned to mush and ran, only to be replaced by more complex and equally runny visions and thoughts.

Two days prior to the “melty period“ as Bird eventually came to call it, Bird and Og had been sitting and enjoying each others company. The two had been in league for a long time now, performing a sort of Triassic strip-hunting on every valley they came upon. Constantly hunting and eating, these two. The hustle they’d worked out upon meeting for he first time had proved sound to the point that, taking account the obscenely short life-span of the average cave-person, they were basically set for life food wise. As long as there were valleys full of well-fed, unsuspecting cave folk, Bird and Og would be packing it in.

And they did pack it. Until the day they saw the Sloth. Og had seen it first. He was standing outside his cave in a morning ground fog that concealed the runny shit running down both his legs. One of the last cave folk to fall under his murderous blows had been fighting something for sure. He felt muddled, hot and freezing. And his shit and piss had begun to look and smell the same. Suddenly from the tree-line below, a sneezy, stuffy yelp and some herky running movement. Og turned his taxed head in the direction of the commotion.

Bird said: What the shit is that?

Og said nothing, but sprung to his feet and took off after the ridiculous creature, for the moment distracted from his pungent ailments. For all it’s violence, the chase was not a long one. The Sloth wasn’t fast, or cunning, or in any way agile. Og himself was no ballerina. The Sloth had meant to run through a shallow stream and then up the far bank hoping to loose Og in the muddy little valley. Instead he faked his own self out and ended up face down in the stream with Ogger a-squat on his back. The caveman was so repulsed by the smell of the thing that it took him a moment to figure out where its throat was. In time though, he found it. A few minutes afterward he climbed back up the bank shouldering the fetid, Slothy corpse. He found Bird and dropped the musky thing at his feet. Together they hoped it would taste better than it smelled.

It did not. Og had attempted to remove it’s furry outer layer, but the thing was stuck fast to the slimy under-tissue. They decided to quarter the beast and take their chances roasting it’s limbs over a fire. The pile of dung loosed from it’s intestinal home deep within the sloth was amazing. Neither Og nor Bird had ever beheld it’s equal.

Bird said:

It was mostly shit. The thing was really more shit than thing.

Og grunted his agreement.

When it was all said and done, the sloth had been more of a diversion than a meal. Og and Bird had so much meat in surplus from their hunting that the gamy, gummy meat of the sloth was, thankfully, not necessary for them to eat. The shit pile that came from the sloth, however, held endless fascination for both of them. Og marveled at its longevity. In his experience, most refuse just sort of dried up and blew away after a while, not so with the sloth poo. It looked as if it may have even gotten a bit bigger since it’s untimely exhumation. Also it’s stench was overpowering. Being a caveman whose best friend is a bird, Og’s world was punctuated with smells too horrific for a more modern persons to even contemplate. Why Og himself had been walking upright for the better part of 17 years and had never had a shower or even a sponge bath! His ass and mouth were constantly running with some grimy solute or other. Had he been allowed to roam about in modern culture his stench-cloud would precede him as a stiff breeze hails an impending storm. His stink was complete, and abominable. However, his stench had nothing on the scent of this Sloth poo. It was as if all the darkness and confusion in the entire universe had come to this particular scat-pile to test it’s mettle. The odor was so pervasive that Bird flew away without discussion. Saying only:

I’ll catch up with you when that shit is gone old man. Find somewhere to put that and get it done sooner rather than later. Anything that smells so wretched is almost certain to bring bad luck and trouble. Take it far away and bury it, and then go swimming for an entire day.

And with that, Bird was off and Og was at a loss. He had grown attached to Bird since the beginning of their adventures together and he didn’t want for them to separate. The sooner the Sloth dookie was disposed of the better. Og started casting about in search of a rock big enough to smear all the dung on yet small enough to portage without help.

In the end it took quite a while. Og wasted most of a day moving crap back and forth to his hidey-hole deep in the forest. He had to make three trips in all, and so by the time it was over his body was almost coated in the rank-smelling offal. He vomited and gagged and tried to find some relief from it’s terrible ubiquitous-ness. He wanted the shit off his person and so he did the only thing he knew to do to get stuff off him. He licked every flat surface he could get his tongue on, pausing only long enough to study the weird looking little half-moon shaped nuggets protruding from the shit smears. Og had never seen anything like them and they tasted good. He promised himself to revisit their existence after he’d cat-licked himself clean.

After that things began happening very quickly. First was the melting. Og’s field of vision became massively distorted and all that he saw began to quake and phase-shift. He tried to close his eyes and alleviate the effect, but the melting was ever-evolving, with fractal images of spirals and explosions of color across his mind-eye. His sense of time passing became problematic as well. He had the impression of having been awake for a great many days on end. He felt as if he had lived lifetime upon lifetime of interminable daylight and that whenever he, Og himself, decided to bring on the night that it would become night. He tested the theory over and over but for some reason the sun wasn’t cooperating. What’s more, it began to insult him. The sun taunted at Og and called him sickening names in myriad unknown tongues. It yelled at him in a voice that sounded like the loudest thunder and then. in the middle of tirades that seemed to take years, the sun would completely change tactics, talking to Og in peaceful, familiar tones. The sun assured Og that it was on his side, and that it would never leave his side, even when the going got tough. After a few hours of this though, the sun seemed to run out of things to say and so it just sat there staring at the caveman. Being stared at didn’t sit well with Og and he started striking out at the sun, scratching at it with his hands and farting and pissing in it’s direction. Og promised the sun that one day he would be it’s undoing but Og’s threats, fearsome though they were, seemed to have no effect. The sun just beamed away at him, oblivious to his gesticulation and yelling. All this happened in the first fifteen minutes of eating the Sloth-dirt.

And so it’s here that we’ll pick up the story. Og’s been sitting for the entire day outside his cave and he hasn’t so much as moved his eyes. His thoughts keep cycling back on themselves and making it impossible for him to move or think or do anything. He sits and ponders millions of un-ponderable questions and unspeakable answers until the metal sphere appears in front of him.

Having recently made the acquaintance of a talking bird who could read his mind, not to mention having recently (and inadvertently) eaten almost a ½ ounce of psilocybin mushrooms, Og wasn’t completely surprised to see the sphere appear. Since Bird, he’d seen and done a few things and he had come to understand (in sort of a limited, cave-man sort of way) that the worlds possibilities were pretty much limitless. Nevertheless, he was quite amazed indeed to see what came out of the sphere when a tiny door opened up in it’s side. For the first time in almost two days, Og got up and started moving his stiffened, overtaxed joints toward the thing.