My Wendoggo Bestie

Shady suddenly grabbed me by the Sage-designed shirt and pulled me out of the car, spinning me through the air, laughing wildly.

“No! Down girl!” I ordered.

Shady did not go directly down as expected. Instead, she went sideways.

She crashed into the sand with me still in her grip, rolling us both across the beach in a tangle of limbs and antlers. Sand flew everywhere. My back hit the ground, then the sky spun, then the ground again.

“Shady!”

She pinned me flat on my back, planted both hands with black paw pads on my wrists, and proceeded to lick my entire face with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever greeting its owner after a five-minute absence.

“Mlem. Mlem. Mlem.” Each lick was dastardly in its methodical deliberation, covering forehead, nose, left cheek, right cheek, chin.

“You missed a spot,” I said flatly.

She licked my ear.

“I was being sarcastic!”

“Too late. The grooming is complete! Bork, bork, bork!” she made incredibly fake dog barking sounds.

“Get off me and… Sit!” I ordered.

She released me and sat back on her haunches, feathered tail carving a wide arc in the sand, looking enormously pleased with herself. Sand dusted her black fur like powdered sugar on a demonic pastry.

I sat up too, shaking off sand and wiped the wendoggo slobber off my face with my shirt hem. “Bleh.”

“You love it.”

“I… tolerate it,” I huffed. “There’s a spectrum.”

“The spectrum of love starts at toleration, Ashy. S’ basic ‘ship science.”

“Relationship science with you is basically a book on ‘How to Avoid Giant Ships’.” I stood up, brushed sand and random detritus off my pants, walked over to the car to snap the door shut and pointed at the diner. “Follow.”

Shady dropped to all fours, digitigrade legs and elongated hands folding into a natural quadrupedal stance.

“Heel,” I said, walking toward the diner entrance.

She heeled. Far too damn well. Tail swishing, head up, moving in lockstep with my left leg as if she’d graduated from obedience school with honors.

“Good girl,” I said, testing the waters.

Her ears wiggled. Silver eyes burned holes into the side of my skull as she sent me a devious toothy grin.

“The goodest girl,” I added. “Such a well-behaved pupper. Yes you are. Yes you ARE.”

A low growl vibrated through her chest. I laughed.

“Who’s my big fluffy nightmare baby? Is it you? IS IT YOU?”

“Keep this up and I will bite your kneecap off,” she ground out.

I knew that the threat was false, yet the sight of her hellishly large, sharp teeth sent a small, uncontrollable shiver down my spine.

“Shhhh, doggies don’t talk. Doggies listen to their Alpha,” I stated.

We reached the patio entrance. A middle-aged waitress with sun-bleached hair and a nametag reading “Claire” looked up from wiping a table.

“Good morning! Oh Wow, what a gorgeous dog! Is she friendly?”

I glanced down at my cryptid girlfriend.

“Very friendly,” I said with a smile. “Her name is… Princess Snugglebottom.”

Shady’s skull-head snapped at me. “Say what. Who gave you the right to mangle my name?”

Claire beamed at my massive “dog” and reached out to scratch behind one ear. “Aww, Princess Snugglebottom! What a sweetie! What breed?”

“Newfoundland-Irish Wolfhound mix,” I stated.

Shady let out a huff. “You will suffer greatly for this indignity.”

“She’s huge! Must eat you out of house and home!” The waitress added.

“Oh, you have no idea.” With a weary sigh I took a seat at a patio table overlooking the beach. “Can I get two coffees, a quadruple stack of blueberry pancakes, and… four sides of bacon? And a… bowl of water for the dog?”

“Coming right up, honey!”

The waitress disappeared inside. I looked at Shady, who sat down beside my chair, feathery tail swaying left and right.

“Enjoying your position in life, doggo?” I asked.

“Immensely,” she stated.

A thought struck me. “People don’t perceive your replies to me. Do they… hear barks or something?”

“Took you long enough to notice. The holofractal glamour creates a perceptual extradimensional envelope. Observers or cameras staring at me get a sort of a… narrative smoothing. They see a man with a big dog. Anything I say and most things I do get filtered out.”

“And if I call you an irksome space invader that won’t stop squeezing the life outta me?”

“Anything you say back to me that’s too far outside of the mundane expectations gets filtered out too as long as we are close enough to touch.” She pawed at my legs.

“And when you spun me through the air on the beach?”

“A man playing with his dog. Nothing out of the ordinary. Minor unnerving oddness at the edges at most in observers nearby, which produces a pitch of yummy dread.”

“Hrmm. Can all Wendigos dog up like that?”

“Nah, the Deep diving and holofractal dog are Shuck skills I got from my dad.”

“Holofractal dogness is different from phase-shift?”

“Yes. Phase-shift is total physical change. Dogness wrap is projected outward.”

“I see. How different could you become using phase shift alone?”

“No limit, really. Practice makes perfect and the more I shift around the better I become at it. Elder Wendigos with massive hoards can shift lots. Their range is incredibly wide and they can change shape from massive dragons to elk monstrosities to sexy humanoids with flat faces.”

I mentally pictured myself riding a massive, black, Shady-elk through the forest.

“Who exactly decides which way reality gets smoothed out when you dog up?”

“Not me, it’s an innate skill. I just push mana in and it does its own thing while concealing me.”

“Convenient. If Wendigos eat fear, what do Black Shucks eat?”

“Black Shucks feed on dread.”

“Isn’t that a type of fear?”

“Yep. Specifically, the slow-burn existential kind. Like… the 2 AM ‘did I leave the oven on and also what is the meaning of my life’ flavor.”

“Your dad noms dread then?”

“Uh-huh. ‘Dread is a five-course meal,’ Shady deepened and shifted her voice to that of an older male, clearly pantomiming her father. “‘Oh my, how ever-so-dreadful! A man walking past a dark alley and quickening his step? Appetizer. A sailor watching fog roll in and wondering if he’ll make it home? Entrée. A child hearing scratching under the bed and pulling the covers up real slow?’” She grinned toothily. “‘Dessert.’”

“I feel like you just described our first reunion.”

“Why do you think I was under your bed, genius?”

“I can just imagine the gothic romantic origin story for your parents. ‘I met your father in a fog bank. He was terrifying. I fell in love immediately.’” I laughed.

“Not far off, actually.” Shady snorted. “Mom saw him lurking outside the Davvors Citadel during a diplomatic visit. Thought he was exotic. Dad thought Mom was the scariest girl he’d ever encountered. Mutual terror. Very Frontenachii courtship. At least that’s how dad described it.”

Claire returned with a tray featuring two coffees, a mountain of blueberry pancakes, a generous side of bacon, and a large ceramic bowl of water she set on the patio stones.

“Here you go, sweetie! And water for the princess!” Claire cooed, bending down to pat Shady’s head again.

Shady endured the head-pat, wiggling her ears.

“She’s so well-behaved!” Claire gushed.

“Years of training,” I said, pouring syrup. “She used to chew furniture.”

“Aww, they all do when they’re puppies!”

Claire retreated inside. I slid a plate with half the pancakes and most of the bacon onto the ground beside my chair.

“Enjoy your floor meal, Miss Snugglebottom.”

The silver eyes promised retribution. She ate the pancakes anyway, skull-face diving into the plate with zero table manners, lapping up syrup and inhaling bacon strips like a furry vacuum cleaner.

“Stay,” I ordered.

Shady rolled her eyes at me when I departed to wash my sandy hands.

“So,” I resumed when I returned and started on my meal. “What’s Omnithornia really like? How big is it exactly?”

Shady licked the plate clean, sat back on her haunches, and burped loudly.

“Omnithornia is… basically a nation run by cryptids. The geography features a giant crater left by the Wormwood Star impact and the supermassive Leviathan bones forming extra mountains. The size, climate and the coastline is similar to your California plus a few other surrounding states. Beach towns, desert inland, mountains, redwood forests. It’s an Earth, one where Omnids came out on top instead of humans.”

“And the… humans?”

“Exist on the fringes, ghettos like Scab Row and reservations. Lots of them. For the most part, they’re… non-citizens, Omnicorp property. Many are seen as criminals, useless scum or are used as under-the-table-cash cheap laborers, drivers, cooks or worshippers to feed on.”

I frowned.

“The Omnid Elders run everything at the top. Think of it like… okay, you know how on your Earth, billionaires run the world through mega-corporations? Same concept, except our billionaires are immortal shapeshifting monsters… like me or Sage with soul-eating powers.”

“Charming.”

“The everyday vibe is pretty chill tho’. People go to work, eat at restaurants, watch movies, go surfing. There’s a thriving film industry in what you’d call Hollywood aka our Cradlefall. Except the movies have bigger budgets because you can hire an actual dragon for your action sequences.”

“Okay, I’m slightly jealous.”

“Don’t be. The healthcare system is absolutely horrific if you’re human and the rent is worse than your San Francisco.”

I snorted. “Doubtful.”

“Believe it, bud. A studio apartment in Omnithornian Los Angeles aka Leviathan’s Cradle goes for a few thousand O-bux a month. And O-bux are worth… uhhh… millions of your paper dollars probably? I dunno. Your currency and gold is basically worthless to us, as none of it is magical.”

“I see.”

“The Frontenachii offer prads from less magical worlds good salaries in their own currencies, but in reality the Fleet kobolds get paid fuck all.”

“Sneaky.”

“Mhmm.”

“Does the USA even exist in Cryptid-land?”

“Nope,” Shady replied, resting her dark skull on my lap, dark, star-dotted antlers phasing through the table in an unnerving way, like a videogame glitch. “Big nation states like your USA or European Union… simply don’t happen that often nowadays, not since the Second World War. Generally, City State Territories are controlled by Omnid Omnicorp alliances and powerful Omnid families.”

“What exactly are the Stabalists then?”

“The Stabalists are… kind of like… ehhh… your United Nations and kind of like an Omnithornian corpo consortium, I guess? They represent interests of many Omnicorps and try to stabalize… global and interdimensional problems.”

“Are they as useless as our UN?”

“No,” Shady said. “They are incredibly well armed and will invade a place and resort to extreme violence… if need be.”

“Could we direct this ‘violence’ to solve our Frontenachii invasion problems?”

“Doubtful,” she sighed. “The Stabalist ship is likely packed with Agents of various other Omnicorps… Each with their own interests. Many of them prolly want to colonize your Earth as much as the Frontenachii.”

“Should we expect more invader fleets then?”

“Later on, most likely,” the Wendigo let out, looking up at me nervously.

“Yes?”

“The Stabalists miiiiiiiight have a problem with what we did.”

“What we did?”

“Weaponizing my death. Using duplicate Omnid bodies to create Astral Fountains. That’s… incredibly illegal, Ashy. The kind of shit Stabalists straight up execute other Omnids for, on the account that it hell-a de-stabilizes reality.”

“What, their laws apply to other dimensions? What are they going to do? Shame me for punching a hole in our own moon? Or… find and execute you?”

“I dunno.” She shrugged slightly. “Maybe, not shame, but like show less respect to us for using such vile methods. Am really not a diplomacy gal, nor am I that knowledgeable about the Stabalist Concordat. Great-granny Acony tried to hammer that boring shit into me but I didn’t bother memorizing very much. The best human-analogy I can think of is… like your… World War 2 Germany using incredibly poisonous chemical weapons on the battlefield.”

“And you think they’ll figure out that’s what we did?”

“It is possible,” Shady speculated. “They have Thunderbird-designed, extremely specialized artificery… better than the Frontenachii fleet with its kobold sniffer Scruts. All they gotta do is point their artifacts at the liminal tree on the moon and they might get an answer of what caused it.”

Both of us fell silent. I listened to the waves of the Pacific crashing against the shore with a rumble.

Two hundred thousand miles above me, the Emperor of Humanity was about to meet with the Stabalists and influence the fate of every being down on Earth including my human self.