Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 19: Poop and Pendulums

Curufinwë went through a chemistry phase a few years ago, experimenting with potions of varying purpose before deciding to focus on those most successful in causing humiliation to his older brothers. Fëanáro was benignly tolerate of the tincture that made Tyelkormo vomit brilliantly purple when he had too much wine and even mildly amused at the herbs that, when cast in a brazier, not only turned the flames blue but exuded fumes that made Macalaurë sing solely in Spoonerisms. He was less favorable when Nelyo brought to him a pair of bottles, found among Curufinwë’s collection, labeled “Poop Powder” and “Fart Flower,” but he did not place an immediate kibosh on the ideas either—not until Curufinwë tested the Fart Flower on Carnistir before Arafinwë’s begetting day celebration, causing the family to be cooped inside a carriage with the aforementioned “floral arrangement” as they rode from their house outside the city to Tirion. After this, Fëanáro put an abrupt stop to the experimentation, and Curufinwë’s career as a chemist likewise ended. Poop Powder went untested. However, in typical Fëanárian fashion, Fëanáro did not demand the destruction of the offensive potions but merely confiscated them and locked them within his own cabinets, to which the twins now had unbridled access.

Dušamanûðânâz reclines in his chair until he is nearly prone, his glass-studded feet extended in front of him, glittering pinkly. He is left breathless by his harrowing experience. Wincing, he folds a leg onto the opposite knee and inspects the damage. His tarsi, at least, are well-formed for scooping out shards of glass; would that he’d been arthropodic all the way down! With a full exoskeleton! With each sliver that he digs painfully from his own flesh, his rage toward the little Fëanárion boy rises a degree, like the mercury creeping up a thermometer on a hot day, until there is nowhere else for it to go, and it simply simmers at the top. He simmers for exactly fourteen seconds, then he emits a chittering scream, and his body abruptly transforms again, his feet slimming and hardening into the cloven hooves of a sheep. The glass embedded in his feet spews across the floor with the transformation. He bahs in delight.

He leaps to his feet. They clatter like a pair of dancing clogs against the wood floor. “Try me now, you little sucker!” he shouts. Below his knees is the coarse curly hair of the mountain sheep, terminating in the aforementioned hooves, but above the hips, he is still very much crooked and chitinous like a mantis, and to make matters stranger, a fan has begun to unfold from his back like the spine of a dimetrodon.

It is then that he realizes that the table is littered with the remains of the twins’ holiday meal. Meat and wine he shovels between his mandibles before he sees it: the chocolate fountain, set up in the corner, silently rippling with liquid chocolate. Before it, a half moon of sweets for dipping are arranged, untouched, in the finest porcelain of Fëanáro's House; he and Iniðilêz interrupted the twins’ meal before they reached dessert. There are marshmallows and pralines and fresh slices of fruit. And behind it all, a silent waterfall of chocolate practically begging to have its courses diverted by the strategic insertion of a marshmallow embedded with butterscotch candy and wrapped in a banana.

Meanwhile, at the front of the house, Iniðilêz has ripped the key from the fishing pole. The smarting burn across his palm makes him mishandle the key the first time and drop it in a pile of snow into which he must scrounge, elbow-deep, to recover it. His hands, atremble with rage, make him fumble it into the snowbank again, and when he goes to insert it the third time, he hears Ambarto’s little feet pattering away from the door, and in his haste to get inside and grab the little bugger, he drops the key a third time and must punch a third hole into the snow to grope for it.

Ambarto, for all his blossoming cunning, could not have planned a longer diversion if he’d tried.

At last, Iniðilêz is in the house. He slams the door behind him and shouts for Dušamanûðânâz, who is on his third banana in the chocolate fountain. Before him, stairs ascend to the second floor. To his right is a dark hallway. To his left, the double doors to the library stand wide. The room beyond glimmers with light and motion, and he hears the giggle of a child and the fading patter of footsteps.

He lurches through the doorway and is immediately smacked with a ladder.

Curled upon the floor, grasping his injured shoulder, he has a moment to reconnoiter the room. The twins, like all Noldorin children, are expected to study basic physics alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. They learn the forces of motion alongside their times tables and the spelling of diphthongs. They have, to begin with, set up one of their brother Carnistir’s simple motors along the track where the ladders slide that gain access to the upper shelves. This causes the ladders to whirl around the room as though on their own volition. “Clever,” Iniðilêz admits.

From the chandelier at the middle of the room, the twins have set in motion a series of simple pendulums, no doubt using their rudimentary knowledge of the devices to create, in essence, a gauntlet that they clearly expected him to run through. From the floor, the pendulums whisk by harmlessly overhead. One grazes the tip of Iniðilêz’s nose when he turns his head upon the floor, but that is it. They have also hoisted a net full of what appear to be crystal balls and suspended it from the chandelier, which sends light romping around the room in a dazzle that is hard to look upon. Once again, Iniðilêz must congratulate the mites on their use of basic optics as a diversionary tactic. As he nods, the pendulum again brushes his nose.

“The only problem, you little devils,” he says out loud, even though neither twin is in sight, “is that I have studied physics too. Advanced physics. In fact, my master invented physics.” He jabs his finger roofward and just as quickly retracts it, smarting. It has met with a pendulum bristling with thumbtacks. He sucks at the blood and considers his options.

His eyes take in the swinging bludgeons overhead; he keeps time as steady as a metronome. It takes him a minute to calculate it all, followed by a twenty second wait for the precise moment and … he rises! And strolls to the edge of the room and out of harm’s way with the same casual poise as a man meandering through a park on a warm spring day, pendulums grazing by on all sides of him but never touching. And then he sees it.

Nerdanel keeps all of her apprentices’ work, even their aberrant first pieces, being a passionate adherent to the growth mindset theory of education. On occasion, she unpacks the statues with their far-spread eyes and too-high noses and foreshortened foreheads—anatomical blunders that all new sculptors make—and reflects with her students on how far they have come. She’d done this before sending her apprentices off for the Yule holiday, so the twins found an army of mildly misshapen busts in her workroom and conscripted them into the defense of their shared home. Iniðilêz faces one now. The chin is squat and the mouth too wide, but it wears a jeweled necklace of such splendor that he wouldn’t have noticed if the face floating above it was that of Varda herself.

Iniðilêz, recall, has kleptomaniac tendencies that put even corvids to shame. The pads of flesh on his palms seem bestowed by the Music itself to aid in the disappearance of small objects into his hand. Valued or not, it matters little to him. In the village in the past day, he has palmed with equal gusto a pot of lip balm, an opal ring, and a set of Allen wrenches. It is not the object but the taking: the satisfaction of getting away with it, the dwelling upon the confusion and inconvenience he has caused, like a child who kicks an anthill to watch them boil in panicked confusion. But this … this is the aperitif to whet his palate for the bounty that awaits belowground in Fëanáro’s famed vaults. The gemstones are clear but in the mad wheeling lights from the crystal balls suspended overhead, they scintillate in colors he’s not even sure belong to the prism. Forgetful of the pendulums, his doughy hand steals toward the necklace, already imagining the feel of the perfectly carved facets beneath his blunted fingertips.

A pendulum snicks across his wrist, and he jerks it back with a hiss. A papercut! Those imps have given him a papercut across his wrist! Papercuts are maddening because they are never sure if they hurt or itch, and he scratches it before, seeing his white fingers pinken with blood, remembering it is a technically a breach of his flesh, a wound, and he’s making it worse, so he presses it with a handkerchief, but it itches so bad—

“To the Void with it!” He watches the pendulums, calculating, and when the moment is right, snatches the necklace away from the misshapen bust.

Around the room he goes, finding more jewels and precious objects on display. He can only assume that the Fëanárions were staging some kind of art show, probably to show off their collective prowess to their hayseed neighbors, maybe to even lighten their coffers a little. Whatever the reason, their foolish trust in the bucolic virtue of their neighbors to leave such valuables unmolested is Iniðilêz’s gain. One by one, he fills his pockets with the items on the display, occasionally losing himself in his thieving lust and sustaining mild injuries from the pendulums but nothing not worth the treasures that weight his trousers so that he must now hitch constantly at the waistband to keep them from dropping around his ankles. Most of the pendulums he is able to bat away, and they are now swirling around in harmless circles, tightening themselves around the crystal ball-filled net hanging overhead. He does not notice that the pattern of treasures curves inward, following the Fibonacci spiral of the nautilus shell and drawing him to the center of the room.

There is only a single pedestal left in the center of the room, directly below the crystal balls. Hungrily, he weaves amid the last of the pendulums toward it. There is a book upon it: The Erotic Avari. His hands caress its cover. This is not a treasure to simply shove in one’s pocket; it begs time spent with it first. Each page he turns lovingly, unsure if he is more enchanted by the very accurate drawings or Fëanáro’s very revealing marginalia. Within his treasure- and lust-drunk brain, a quavering thought emerges that, after he strips Fëanáro of his treasures, it is this book that will ruin his reputation by slow degrees in Tirion. Melkor will savor it. Each page is a vicious rumor that will swirl with the same predictable course as his twins’ pendulums, doubtlessly set up to guard their father’s treasures, including the incriminating book. (Some of Iniðilêz’s rage toward them has diminished, seeing how truly juvenile they are and unsuspecting of the intellectual gulf between themselves and Iniðilêz, who is, after all, a Maia aspiring to the service of the Great Melkor. Were they here before him now, he would pat their heads before relieving them of the same.) He should hide the book away, but one more page—

What he has not noticed is that the pendulums he has batted, he thinks, harmlessly away have twisted tighter and tighter around the net overhead. What he also has not noticed is the razor-sharp wire of the kind their parents use saw and shave away recalcitrant materials.

Several times, the crystal balls have shifted and settled as the net begins to erode away. He does not notice that either. The rope whispers as it frays; the crystal balls again clatter and shift. One more page.

And then the weight becomes too much. He hears a snap and looks roofward in time for a blue crystal the size of a grapefruit to smash the bridge of his nose. And that is merely the vanguard of the attack. Others follow, small as marbles and large as watermelons, raining upon his huddled body. The book on its pedestal flutters with the wind of their falling, otherwise unscathed.

A brilliant crimson crystal has become tangled in the net and lingers, tottering one way, then the other, before deciding to fall the other and landing right at the center of Iniðilêz’s pate. He falls to the floor, out cold. The crystal balls roll and settle to nestle against him; the pendulums whirl wildly overhead.

Meanwhile, in the dining room, Dušamanûðânâz has nearly exhausted the chocolate fountain. He did not mean to, but it was available, there were bananas (and by the ultrasonic notes creeping into his voice, he has taken on some aspects of a fruit fly), and his tarsi were still sticky with caramel, and it seemed a shame not to combine this with the chocolate to create a turtle-like combination of flavors. He hears the crystal balls fall and pauses, his mandibles chocolate-smeared and his tarsi in fact still plunged into the last trickles from the fountain, and calls, “Boss?” in his buzzing, whining voice, but there is no response. He rises and licks the last of the chocolate from his tarsi.

Because Curufinwë never had the chance to experiment with the Poop Powder, Ambarto could find nothing in his notes about dosage. So he dumped the whole vial into the chocolate. Dušamanûðânâz, upon rising, becomes aware of something happening within him. As an uncontrollable shapeshifter, he is used to his body transforming without warning and the odd sensations it can produce to, say, suddenly have impressively badass batwings shrivel into the velvety, useless skin of a shark or to have his canines blunt into a horse’s teeth in the middle of tearing through a batch of biscuits. But this feels different. This feels like the internal equivalent of an evolution from a guild-based system of handicrafts to the industrial revolution, all enacted within his innards, within the space of just a few minutes. The vast amounts of chocolate and bananas and caramel and marshmallows and pralines that he has eaten are like so much raw material being shoveled into a hopper to be transformed by the gnawing, scorching, grinding, mindless machinery of the factory behind it.

He realizes he has to poop.

Thankfully, there is a privy right off of the dining room. Ambarto has even kindly propped open the door for him so that the glimpse of the sink and toilet within should leave no doubt that he will find relief nearby. Dušamanûðânâz skitters toward it. It’s only five of his galloping steps but he’s still not sure he’s going to make it. And his trousers, which loosened when he shifted to insect shape, have tightened when he swelled into a ruminant body. Tarsi are not good at handling buckles and buttons. At last, he frees himself and collapses with relief onto the toilet.

Among the menagerie Tyelkormo keeps in his room is a tank of piranhas given to him as a gift by Ossë for a recent begetting day. Normally, he sneaks fresh meat from his own plate to feed them. Because of the holiday, they have been forced to settle for fish flakes delivered from a timed feeding system that Carnistir reluctantly developed less for his brother and more for the fish, to which he is partial. As a result, the piranhas are hungry and cranky; it took Ambarussa’s bravery and Ambarto’s cunning, singing a calming song in badly accented Avarin, to bring three of them safely downstairs to the toilet, where they have circled for the last few hours without even the consolation of fish flakes, thus becoming even hungrier and even crankier. As Dušamanûðânâz's butt eclipses their narrow overhead view of the world, they gnash their teeth and decide that this insult is the final straw. They are unwilling to tolerate being pooped upon.

The shriek that Dušamanûðânâz produces is high-pitched and loud enough to awaken Iniðilêz from his stupor on the library floor. He staggers back into the vestibule, head reeling, in time to see Dušamanûðânâz prying the last of the piranhas off a very human naked ass capped by a sheep’s fluffy, fluttering tail.