Chatterbox: KYNGDOM™ Archive

[Sorry, I've changed Rey's name to Ray.]

I studied the package in my hand. My pet automaton I'd mad when I was eleven, Dingy, had just brought it in, presumably from the post office Downtown. One thought wormed it's way to the forfront of my mind, and made itself quite clear: I don't get mail. 

There was a slight movement in the corner of my eye. Ray had appeared soundlessly next to me, like he always did. I showed him the package.

"Mail? From the Post?"

"No, it's obviously food I picked up." I rolled my eyes. "Duh, it's mail, and duh it's from the Post, if it's mail."

Ray snatched the package from my hand, and examined it from all sides. He shook it next to his ear too see if it made a sound. Then he tossed it back, grinning. "I'll let you face the poisonous snake hiding inside."

"Ha. Ha ha, no. I don't think anyone wants to kill me that bad–except for you, of course." I grinned back. We had this ongoing joke about him wanting to kill me ever since that time with the Mech dinosaur.

"You won't ever let me forget that one, will you?" 

"Nope. You'll just have to live with your conscience for once." I sat down at the rickety old table, an looked the parcel over one more time. It was wrapped with some kind of thin, tough material that reminded me of tree bark, only smoother and more flexible. It was bound with some kind of vine-like twine. I opened it carefully, taking care not to rip the wrappings. Instead of the predicted deadly snake, a roll of birch bark fell out. I unrolled it, and blinked. There was a kind of code drawn across it.

"Hey, I've seen this code before. Look." Ray grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper. He drew a kind of Tic-Tac-Toe grid, with three letters in each box or half-box. Then he drew another copy of the grid, this time with dots replacing the letters. "See, each of these dots represent a letter, given they're drawn with the right lines around them." 

"Okay. So this is a 'C' then an 'O', and... um... 'M, E'. So that obviously means 'come'." I was slowly but surely getting the hang of it. "'T-O', space, 'T-H-E', space, 'B-O-G'" I hesitated. 'Come to the bog'? Surely it was just a coincidence. Surely someone was just playing a prank? But the small animal footprints that replaced the dots in the code told me differently. It was really a message sent by the animals.

In the time it took me to contemplate this, Ray had deciphered the rest of the code. It read: 'Come to the Bog and Burrow Inn, two nights from now. We await you. Regards, fafa.'

"Who's Fafa?" Ray asked curiously. He, of course, didn't know about it all. It was just as well, too. He'd never let me out of the house if he knew. He'd be worried for me.

"Ray, there's stuff I've not told you about. It's not a person, FaFA is an organization." I said quietly. I wrote it down so he saw the difference between fafa and FaFA.