Beauties and Beasts

Chapter 39: brought to you by fairytales, lullabies, and cling wrap

Pregnancy happens, and the roof to end all roofs is mentioned, but not completed. Yet. The beastman world is introduced to a book and Parker takes a long walk. 

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A rainy month passed.

The roof was completed on time according to Joseph's word, and despite being a temporary shelter built with uncured wood, the craftsmanship pleased even Curtis. The rest of the home followed suit under Shay's direction: the stone floors were refound under hard-packed dirt and were restored with water and lye. The walls as well were scrubbed down with lye, which Shay discovered also came from the leaves of the tree used to prepare hide, a discovery which left her with very burnt hands for three days. Though the males didn't understand why she wanted such corrosive, hot, and fuming stuff on the walls and floor, they understood quickly enough when even the hardest dirt, water stains, and moss nigh melted away. When they finished, the stones positively gleamed. On observing the nigh-modern compound the freshly cleaned and polished stones made, she quickly adopted the method.

In an attempt to please her, Parker took a trip back to his old hut in Camel Valley to fetch her and Neara's bags. Though there wasn't anything phenomenal inside besides a notebook, old homework, some pads and painkillers, her old wallet, and a big library book of fairytales, Shay was ecstatic. She proceeded to use the notebook and pen to draw out the furnishings she wanted for the house (after the males had gotten over their wonder of the thin paper and the marking stick that didn't cover your fingers in gunk).

The biggest surprise, however, was on showing them the library book.

"It doesn't have anything useful for this world," said Shay as she opened the covers and flicked the pages for all the males to see. "This is a book, and it holds a ton of old stories from my world."

"How?" asked Joseph, his face utterly infantile with the loss of his carefully held macho air.

"What are those markings?" asked Curtis.

"There's pictures!" crowed Parker. "Holy cow, those are even better than the ones you made, Shay!"

Ryan watched in silence, yellow eyes wide as half-dollar coins.

"They're words," Shay explained. "Each symbol--or marking, make a sound, then the sounds are sounded together as they are put down to make a word." She gave an example with the word 'meat,' pointing out how the space told you the end of the word and the beginning of another.

"These say things?" Joseph sounded like his head was about to blow. "They say--they say what? Stories? From where you're from?"

"Yeah. All this together in this binding--that's this hard flat thing holding the pages together--make a book. There's countless books where I'm from, all full of anything you can think of. Not just stories, but records of people's memories and instructions of how to do things."

Curtis ducked his head past hers in his eagerness, his hair nearly blocking her view. "You can learn how to do things from these books? Including skills?"

"Oh yes! You can learn how to do just about anything from a book. Sewing, hunting, cooking, building, fighting, or even medicine and curing sickness. Books also explain a lot of things about the world, like why the sky is blue or why everything you drop falls."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Joseph, who had been pawing a page, pulled back his hand.

"This is a god?" he half-whispered.

Her sudden burst of laughter made them all jump.

"No, silly, it's just a way to record knowledge for other people to know. Civilization is flourishing where I'm from, and when civilization flourishes, so does knowledge. The beastmen would have the same thing if they were flourishing too."