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“Absolutely not.”
Pickman looked up from the offered creature to make eye contact with Chine and repeated herself.
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on, it’ll only be for a day. I just need you to watch It for me while I get my polearm fixed up.”
Pickman looked back down at the creature, which was making nameless sounds with its mouth and lightly swimming its talons through the air. Chine was holding it up by something that might have passed for armpits and with a disconcerting ease the creature would occasionally relax some additional previously unseen part of its anatomy and slink further towards the ground, where its hips were already firmly planted, like a child sitting in wait for a teacher.
“I’m not having anything to do with that thing until we get it back to Blackwick.”
“Seriously you’ll hardly even know It’s there.”
The creature was drooling.
“Isn’t there anyone else you can ask?” Pickman was trying to break eye contact, but the beast had beset her with a staring contest and she was not one to back down.
“Marn and Es have a date, Duval is in a mood and Lye and Hazard are practicing that new trick they figured out.”
“Ask Bucho.”
“He might also be on the date.” Chine looked as bashful as a person with most of a shrew skull could look. “I didn’t want to ask.”
“Unbelievable.”
The creature had succeeded in lengthening enough of its spine to lay down while being held aloft. Its legs folded beneath it in ways legs were not meant to fold, ways that made it difficult to ascertain just how many legs it even had. It blinked in a lazy fashion, giving Pickman the victory in their staring contest, and sneezed.
“Fine. What time will you be back?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never fixed a polearm before. Sundown?”
“Which sun? All of them? Fine, I’ll do it.”
Chine smiled unselfconsciously and lifted the creature up into a hug. It made a sound that might have been a purr, a growl or a hiccup, a sound like leather being stretched too tight, and its forepaws batted at the air slightly faster for a moment.
“Okay, you be good for your Aunt Pickman now.”
“Hey. Don’t go telling it things like that, I’m not it’s biological-” Pickman pointed at the creature’s face “Mark me, beast. There is no blood between us, understand?”
The creature’s jaws lolled apart letting its slithery tongue hang loose. It sneezed again.
---
“Alright listen,” Pickman said, addressing the creature, which she had relegated to a small cart. “The two of us are never going to be friends, so let’s get that out of the way right now. My business is trains and yours is being a horrid thing, we have no common ground.”
The creature’s assorted limbs splayed in such a way that none of it quite remained in the cart while an observer could not rightly say it was outside the cart either. A child might do such things deliberately, a game of following the rules in letter if not in spirit. This creature was certainly unaware that it had been bounded and was merely existing in such a way as to be poorly bound.
Pickman narrowed her eyes, curved pupils focusing on the beast’s face. “But you saw the fire as clearly as I did. Whatever your- Whatever Chine has gotten themself into it’s clear they need my help so we’re going to have to get over there and… figure something out. I’ll handle that part you just need to not fall to pieces or anything. Got that?”
The creature stood up on its forepaws and its hindpaws while leaving its middle firmly in the cart, shivered and yipped.
“I have no idea what that means so I’m just going to assume it means yes.”
---
“Listen, hey- listen, I can only control my partner for so long before it gets hungry, so you better tell us what you did with Chine.”
The cultist whimpered as the creature continued performing amatuer phrenology with its various jaw segments.
---
Pickman knelt in the dust, a broken woman.
“It’s useless, there’s no way we can find them now.”
The creature stood before them, attendant, waiting for orders.
“I mean look at us, you’re a thing that doesn’t even have a name and I’m just some… kid in a tin can. We can’t do this.”
The child of the mother beast chirruped. It chittered. It lifted its head and faced in the direction of the breeze, closing its eyes for a moment then it made a noise something like a cackle and belch all at once. It squeaked. Lastly it turned back to Pickman and clacked its jaws, left, right, up and down, before holding its mouth open to pant for a bit.
“You’re right, this is no time to get emotional. Chine is counting on us. Other people, as well, probably. Let’s get going.”
---
The salvaged pieces of trainmetal that made up Pickman’s armor locked in place as the railcurse took her, the cultists’ dread chanting weaving a spell of binding counter to the Shape itself. To a Shapeknight, such magic was profane and also usually a death sentence. Pickman grunted with effort, trying to lift her arms, trying to get one last shot in. It was useless.
“I’d advise you kill me quick because you’re absolutely not going to like what I do to you when I get out of this.” Pickman said to her captors, who merely laughed at what they thought was false bravado.
“One lone Shapeknight is nothing for us.” They whispered in a manner Pickman might describe as trite were she in a generous mood.
A growling could be heard from deeper in the shadows of their underground temple.
“Yes, well, unfortunately I’m not alone.”
---
“Okay so it turns out they didn’t have Chine, that’s definitely a negative, but we did also save that town and stop an evil cult from some sort of machination, so all in all a pretty good day.”
The creature happily gnawed on something that was probably cursed and a bad thing for beasts to eat, but it had earned a treat.
“A pretty good day.”
---
Chine got back well after sundown, finding their companion dozing peacefully on top of the Shapeknight Pickman, also dozing.