Ayzook scratched the side of his nose with his wristwatch band, pawing crudely at his face. Everything everywhere smelled like dirt. This business of spending all of your time in a dark, dank basement was well beyond the point of getting old. In fact it was getting ancient.
But so was Ayzook the Druid, the Most Highest Master Butte Druid, Number Three in a Series (he added that last part himself, as a joke of sorts).
He felt ancient, in any case. In terms of druid lifespans, he wasn't really that old - barely two hundred and twenty-five years in fact. He knew some druids that were over 1000. Like that big mouthed pain in the ass Hernie. Ayzook sure didn't want to end up like that asshole, but maybe that's what a thousand years of this bullshit will do for you.
Ayzook was without a doubt the shabbiest druid in the Northwestern Quadrant. He was barely four feet tall but probably weighed somewhere around 250 pounds. He didn't weigh himself. It was depressing. His clothes didn't look like the usual druid wardrobe of flowing robes, cool pointy hats and magical looking scepters. He was currently dressed in a plaid shirt with long sleeves that had to be rolled way up, because in order to get a size that would fit his body he had to choose a shirt so big the sleeves were twice as long as his stubby arms. He wore a kilt instead of pants - this was for comfort basically but it kind of pissed him off since he was a Celtic pagan of Irish origin, not some candy-assed Scotsman.
Nowadays a kilt was considered stylish for the Gaelic crowd so technically it was the sort of thing he should be wearing - but the notion just grated on him. And it was wool, and it made his balls itch. As Ralph the Angel sometimes said, "don't get you started on that god damned kilt, Ayzookie boy!".
The plaid shirt was straight out of the Good Will and there was nothing very ceremonial or majestic or dramatic about that. And it clashed with the kilt. And who would wear a kilt with wingtips? The whole deal was a mess. Ayzook knew the old time Gaelic druids were a lot more style-conscious than he was. But he had to make do, and he had bigger problems to deal with anyway. Especially now.
Somehow Ayzook the Most Highest and Shoddy Druid of Butte of Montana had managed to lose his official inscribed ditty-bag containing almost fifteen thousand dollars. And he was going to have a hell of a time finding out who had it, he was pretty sure of that.
Who had it, as opposed to who took it. He knew who had made off with it. It was that stupid mud encrusted mutt that was always wallowing in the filth down by the edge of the Pit. This whole incident was just more proof that no random act of kindness goes unpunished.
Damn it. He was just such a lousy druid
While he was lurking in the alley behind St. Lawrence, waiting for it to get dark or at least a little bit cloudy, the stupid dog had come ambling along. The thing looked like hell, just like always. He looked half starved. Ayzook usually paid no attention to things like this, but for some reason he felt sorry for the animal, so he decided to see if he had anything in his pockets that he could offer the beast as sustenance.
He carefully laid his bag down by his feet and started going through his shirt pockets and the pouch on his kilt. While he was doing this, that four legged chunk of skunk cabbage simply picked up the bag in his mouth and trotted off. He didn't even really run. It didn't matter, since Ayzook was not physically capable of chasing the animal with any hope of successfully catching it. His stubby legs were not built for this sort of thing (nobody seemed to know what it was that they were actually built for). So when he looked up and saw the dog was already thirty yards away and picking up speed, he just dropped his head and cursed to himself.
If he were a decent druid he no doubt could have come up with some appropriate glyph to maybe freeze the dog or something. But he could never remember those things - whenever he needed to use one he invariably had to look it up. The only ones he could ever remember off the top of his head were the one for entangling roots and the glyph of berserk. The practical usage for either of these was not that extensive. He thought later he could have conjured the berserk spell but probably he would have just driven himself into an insane frenzy that would not have gotten him any closer to the rapidly disappearing dog. He probably would have just fallen and hit his head. If he had directed it at the dog, it would have just made him run faster.
Ironically, he thought now, if I could manage to remember the glyph of nourishment I could have just whipped up some Milkbones or something without having to put down the pouch.
But what was done was done; the stinky old quadruped was gone and so was the poker machine money and that was that. The annual druid union dues were required in less than a week and if they found out he was so destitute that he was desperately bringing in money using a gambling device which he had finagled out of a local casino owner, they would probably just shut him down and send him to some place even more dismal than Butte - if there was such a place. Maybe somewhere in Kentucky.
Or maybe they would just pull the plug on him completely - put Ayzook in cold storage for a hundred years or something. He hated feeling like he was in the way. But he knew that was how the Council thought of him.
About this time Ayzook's self-pitying reverie in the dirt-walled catacombs of the St. Lawrence O'Toole Church was interrupted by a loud clattering on the stairs leading down from the basement of the church.
"Ay! Ay, Zookie!" called out a hoarse female voice. As if it wasn't already bad enough, Ayzook thought. "Where are ya, Zookchops? I'm back and I brought you a Zip burger!" He heard her stumble on the last step. Was she drunk already? It wasn't even three o'clock.
"In here," he said in an appropriately small voice from the small dirt chamber that he was standing in. There were only four rooms and all were pretty much the same. Even though Ayzook called this area "the Catacombs", there was no one buried here, unless you counted a pet turtle that Ayzook had grown fond of, and then tragically lost, in the early 1970s.
He had his back to the doorway but he heard Ralphie step into the room. Without looking, he knew what a sad sight was being presented.
Ralphie was an angel, but she was an angel who had gone to seed in a big way. Her life was rough - not rough as in difficult; rough as in low-down, base, disreputable. She was fallen, but there was nothing dramatic here like the casting out of Satan from Heaven. Ralphie had never served at the right hand of God Almighty. She had never even actually seen Him except one time from a very great distance - it was like somebody in the back line of cars that never actually got in at Woodstock.
Mostly Ralphie fell from grace because she just wasn't interested in maintaining the minimum efforts necessary to be allowed to stick around.
So now she was earthbound, and somehow Ayzook had ended up with her hanging around all the time. She was tall, blonde, and was once a great beauty - but she was so hard on herself she had pretty much just gone to pot. All the drinking and smoking and catting around had left her miserable ass dragging pretty low.
She was in many ways a nice match for Ayzook. The shabby druid and the sleazy angel, living in a dark dirt hole underneath the basement of a boarded up church. All they needed now, Ayzook figured, was a half-dead dog covered with industrial waste and with most of his fur rotting off his body. Ayzook was sure that somebody had already taken the bag of cash off the smelly old dog. He was trying to think of who would even go close enough to the thing to hit this particular jackpot. In order to get close to that rancid mutt, you would practically have to be dead yourself.
Now that's an interesting notion, Ayzook thought as he rubbed his stubbly chin. There were a few dead people wandering around Butte - Ayzook had encountered some, or maybe mostly just sensed their presence. Maybe some of them were pals with the stupid dog. Hell, maybe the dog was dead himself.
Ralph was a pretty poor excuse for an angel. She had taken an abrupt seat in the dirt behind him, produced a bottle of Old Grand Dad from somewhere in her robes, and was now taking a swig out of it to wash down the hamburger which she had just gotten done telling Ayzook was a gift she had brought him.
But being an angel, even a run down and rejected one, she could "commune with the dead." Maybe she could be of some use to him after all.
"Hey Ralphie," Ayzook said, trying his level best to sound friendly as he turned to face her. "Would you mind joining me in the Divining Chamber and taking a look into the Well of Souls for me?" He even effected a smile of sorts - prompting a very unladylike belch from the angel.
"What, you mean that dirt room over next to the other dirt room that is next to this one?", Ralph said as she managed to precariously regain her footing and stand up again - she was nearly seven feet tall and the image of her standing next to Ayzook was enough to make anybody want to take a pull from the nearest whiskey bottle. "The one with the old barrel of weed poison in it?"
Ayzook swallowed hard and choked back the rebuke that was fighting to escape his lips. He replaced it with another sickly smile, and nodded his head agreeably.
"Sure, I guess" said Ralphie the Seven Foot Tall Drunken Fallen Angel of Butte of Montana. "I got nothing better to do than stare into some barrel full of poison water and druid piss."
She turned and started down the dirt hallway with Ayzook scampering clumsily behind.
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