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Caeli wasn’t exactly sure what he expected when he started getting closer to that strange bubbly sheriff— and he had to blame his complete ineptitude on being used to anything outside of the comfortable universe he had always been settled in— but this certainly wasn’t at all what he thought would happen.
While he did adore horses to no end, always excited at any prospect of getting to ride one through the snowy woods of the faraway city he called his home, he never thought that they would ever belong in a desert of all places. If they weren’t weaving through the dark snowy trees or lush green fields dotted with rocks and carved away by mountains, they were on warm forest paths or completely standard cobbled streets and roads.
During those few dreaded ventures into the desert, he had never seen them used there.
So why did he see horses there? Who thought it would be a good idea to put them there? The golden sun blazed down from overhead on the odd desert around him, though he couldn’t exactly call it a desert, not with the high rise of hills and rocky mountains in the near distance. But to have horses milling around as if they belonged? It wasn’t anything against the horses, he just felt terrible for them having that hot sun on their backs.
However, the one beside him didn’t seem as fazed, instead staring dotingly out at the Alamo and wooden buildings like a farmer surveying a particularly fine crop of the season. Placing their hands on their hips with their fingers sliding behind their belt, they closed the distance between themselves and Caeli before elbowing him lightly in the side.
“Well?” Chip prompted with a wide grin on his face, “What’cha think, huh? Not bad for a humble ol’ town.”
Taking his mind off of the horses and deciding that they actually seemed quite content with their living situation, Caeli turned the rest of his attention to the quaint town in front of them. It sure fit Chip as if he were a hand to a glove. Though the new scenery felt incredibly jarring with only a few places he could only imagine could compare to this.
“It’s pretty nice,” Caeli said, nodding as he took in the scenery. Was that a tumbleweed that just passed by? “I was expecting something a lot more wild with all the stories you keep giving me.
“First impressions can only get ye so far.” Chip waved his hand dismissively as if trying to swat away a particularly annoying fly. “And this is plenty wild, partner! None of that technologically advanced stuff you keep throwin’ around.”
Raising an eyebrow, his companion gave a humorous huff of laughter, his shoulders jerking once. Technologically advanced? Did he see where Caeli came from? Everyone was trapped behind the times there, though seeing this place, he was coming to realize that maybe the technology divide wasn’t as bad as he thought.
“Don’t you mean magic?” Caeli asked. That was the closest thing he could imagine being close to being more advanced than Chip there. The other was the kind of guy who tried to stay as vanilla as possible when it came to the human body’s physical limits.
“Eh, potato, potato, same thing. Oh! Now we’re talkin’! Howdy, folks!”
Caeli averted his eyes away from Chip as the latter raised his hand in a pleased wave, only to see a group of strange individuals approach them. A few he could name off the top of his head, such as Kuroi, the woman dressed in blue with the blue bell of a jellyfish shielding her eyes from the sun, and Theory, the fluffy mess with the glasses. He tried to link names to the faces of the other two but drew up blanks.
Though he wasn’t sure why the girl with the candle on her head was so adamant about avoiding eye contact with him. When he averted his own gaze from her, he thought he could catch her looking back up again. Strange.
Walking forward, Chip’s posse of misfits also waved in greeting with the aforementioned candle girl being a bit more hesitant than the others. With a hidden smile on her face that graced her eyes, Kuroi was the first to come to a stop and tilt her head to Caeli.
“Guess he finally built up the nerve to drag you here,” she teased. Somehow through her somewhat low and serious voice, the sentiment managed to land. “How much did he pay you?”
“Just promises for a good time. I like new places, so it’s right up my alley,” he said, throwing a look through upturned half-moon eyes at the sheriff, “Breaks in my schedule mean I can finally visit!”
She gave a hum in reply, slowly nodding her head along. “Well, it’s nice that you found some time. Chip sure seems pleased.”
A sudden weight on Caeli’s shoulder made itself present as the grinning cowboy in question leaned closer to him and put all of his weight down on his hand. Seeing how thrilled the other was, Kuroi stated something that was so obvious that even the blind, deaf, and perhaps even those beyond the grave could notice.
“Right on!” he said, “It’s not every day Mister Clocky gets to be with some interesting people! ‘Sides, we’ve got some things to do!”
As if his words were a starting gun, the entire posse in front of the two changed. Some such as Theo and Kuroi, perked up in interest and excitement, while the girl with the candle on her head appeared to shrink back slightly. The hulking tree person behind the group didn’t seem to react at all, instead distracted by a bird of prey soaring far overhead.
Caeli’s stomach twisted in apprehension. Things to do? What kind of things were those if there were reactions like those? Hopefully, they wouldn’t get him to drink even considering the idea was a bad thought. The last thing he wanted to do was batten down the hatch with some kind of alcoholic beverage because there was no way he’d be allowed to step near a saloon again.
“You never gave me a list before coming here,” Caeli joked, careful to not let his nervousness slip through his voice.
“Lists? Psh! Who needs ‘em?” the other said, waving yet another carefree hand, “Us folk are laid-back people and go with the flow! Though I do have something in mind.”
More serious expressions fell over the posse members around them, and Caeli had the impression that they were about to prepare for some kind of funeral. What was all of that about? Careful to study his companion’s face more, he still saw the same beaming smile that always sat there.
“Y’know how you showed me around yer universe a ton and how things work around there?” Chip continued conversationally, “Well, how about I do the same for you? There’s nothin’ more iconic than a duel!”
A duel? Caeli stared at him, unable to process what he had said at first and unable to make heads or tails of the conviction and reasoning behind it. Seriously?
“You know duels are just for people trying to settle a score by killing the other, right?” he asked, folding his arms. Suddenly, he didn’t exactly feel like being a part of this universe any longer. Having a duel against Chip? One of them was going to end up dead and he sure wasn’t going to pull the trigger against someone like that. Not in a million years!
Shaking his head, Chip patted him on the shoulders with more intensity in an attempt to stop his mind from running into dark places. “Relax, partner! Who said this was the killin’ kind of duel? If those were the status quo, then I wouldn’t have a record as squeaky clean as my badge!”
Well, he did have a point there. Caeli shot him a hesitant and unconvinced look, trying to imagine facing the other head-on like that. To be fair, it was a duel at the end of the day and it was no different than a sparring match between him and Zorro. When they were on the mat, they didn’t care what kind of bruises they gave the other as long as one of them ended up on top.
This wasn’t going to be any different, only just a variation in the form of it.
“Okay then,” he said, finally giving in. Before he could continue talking, a thought suddenly struck him and he let out a snort of laughter. “So what, are we going to be using the safety feature on our guns? They don’t work like that.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” Chip replied.
He raised up a hand and waved it in the direction of one of the posse members— the hulking tree, to be exact. Watching it lumber over on tree stumps of feet, Caeli felt oddly small when faced with the thing. He wasn’t at all uncomfortable with the living tree, instead finding it completely fascinating.
Having been so entranced in the giant, he almost missed it handing over two oddly colored pistols over to Chip. Snapping his head over to them, it only took one second for him to finally make sense of all of it. Vyomi and Ayumu had always mentioned how certain harmless guns that fired plastic bullets had orange tips, and an accurate example of that sat right in Chip’s hands.
Oh, so this was an even friendlier friendly duel than he was used to. Caeli smiled graciously and took one of the orange-tipped guns that Chip handed to him. It was— stopping, Caeli had to do a double take as he checked its weight again. For a simple “Nerf Gun”, it was surprisingly heavy like an authentic firearm.
“It’s to make it seem more real!” Chip said, cutting into his thoughts as if he were a mind reader. He twirled his own gun around his finger carelessly before catching it by the handle and walking towards an empty stretch of road. “Come on now, daylight’s a-wastin’!”
As if they were watching some kind of tennis match, the heads of all the posse members— minus the girl with the candle on her head— swiveled their heads over to him expectantly. It was kind of eerie the way they did that.
“Heh, I suppose it’s time to make you guys kiss your sheriff goodbye,” Caeli teased, throwing a wink towards Kuroi. The other rolled her eyes and shooed him towards Chip, where he happily trailed after.
Weighing the gun in his hands as he made it over to Chip, Caeli still couldn’t believe that something that was supposed to be made of plastic was so heavy. It didn’t feel like plastic anyway…
Well, he trusted Chip enough to not have given him the real thing. Because if he did… then this little excursion would end really fast.
Stopping in front of him, the two shared a smile with each other, and the second that Caeli saw Chip’s, most of his mounting anxiety quickly faded away. That was the face of a man who knew what he was doing and was going to have a blast with it, so perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to trust him just a little on it.
“Ever been in a duel before?” Chip asked once the two stood directly in front of each other.
“Not one in this style, no,” he replied. Sure, back when he was running a nowhere life, he had gone through many training sessions involving the use of firearms and sometimes circumstances demanded the use of them. But swords always felt easier to him, so one-on-one altercations with those were his most favored. This was incredibly new.
Chip’s hidden eyes lit up, the white glow becoming more pronounced. A hint of excitement brewed beneath his hidden features, only promoting his shark-toothed smile to stretch even farther across his scarred face.
“Here’s the rules for ye, then. We each turn ‘round and take ten steps away from each other. Once we face one another again, Kuroi ‘ere’s gonna give us a countdown. As soon as she hits ‘fire’… may the fastest finger in the Weast reap the riches!”
“And the slowest?” Caeli asked.
“Gets to humiliate himself and has to buy the drinks.” The other winked in his direction. “Well then, partner. Ready to have a lighter wallet?”
Oh, he was starting off that confident with Caeli still coming to grasp with the rules? So be it. Caeli smiled at the other tightly with his eyes, weighing the gun in his hand and putting it in his holster. While Chip hadn’t mentioned that bit, he figured that mirroring the other’s actions for now was his best bet. But now with Chip dangling the idea of suffering the humiliation of being too slow, Caeli wasn’t about to let him kick him while he was down.
“Since yours can’t get any lighter,” he teased back.
“You!” Chip chided with a degree of filtered annoyance as the feathers on his head bristled, “I’m shootin’ ye twice for that!”
Caeli let loose a laugh and gave a shrug. It was always fun riling the other up over things that he was suffering from too. He could count on one hand how many times he actually had a full wallet when Vyomi decided that his coins weren’t going to be a part of her balanced diet that day. Still, he thought he spent his money much more liberally than Chip.
“Ten steps?” he asked, which appeared to have stirred Chip right out of his spell of annoyance.
Chip echoed the question back but as confirmation. He still looked incredibly giddy and excited, and it stayed apparent as he turned around. The way he held his shoulders, the way he seemed to bounce on the balls of his feet. It was, quite frankly, endearing to look at. And just like that, the rest of his anxieties over the whole ordeal melted away into nothingness.
How funny Chip could make him feel like he was staring at a ray of sunshine?
Right. Caeli finally snapped himself out of staring at the other’s spring in his step once he realized he had to be walking away too. Giving a mental shake of his head, he hastily broke into his ten steps. If he didn’t end up beating Chip in this little duel of theirs, at least he got to see that ray of light glow from pride.
When he turned around, he found that Chip rotated to face him right at the same time. And just like that, his mind entered that prepared zone, one that would grow tenser and tenser until the job was done. Everything melted away— the background, the posse watching, and the stray tumbleweed that comically bounced past— as he followed Chip’s hand to hover over his own orange-tipped gun.
Nobody dared to speak until a swirling blue and brown figure stepped forward. Kuroi looked between the two and deciding that they were ready, clasped her hands in front of her.
“Three,” she announced.
Chip hunched over a margin as if he were a sprinter at the block, waiting for the gunshot to take off sprinting. In turn, Caeli tensed and all movement ceased, becoming as still as a statue with a rigid back and wide staring eyes.
“Two.”
Maybe his supports gave him a speed advantage because he didn’t have to rely on the constraints of normal muscle reaction times. Though Chip was an expert at this, it was his niche. Could pure instinct and skill take out automation? Caeli sure hoped he wouldn’t be labeled as a cheater if he out-sped him.
“One.”
The metallic ticks and tocks in his chest seemed to give out completely as if the pendulum was completely frozen in his chest. Even the feathers bristling on Chip’s head went still. So much stress and pressure for a fun introductory welcome to this town. At least it was being taken seriously.
“Fire!” Kuroi shouted.
There was a loud bang hardly even a second after Caeli reached for his gun. It was much too loud for a simple toy, and that further cemented itself in his mind as Chip gave a violent jerk and flew straight off his feet.
All around Caeli and even from himself, gasps resonated and eyes widened as the shot sheriff arched back through the air. It felt as if it were all in slow motion. Disbelief and shock shot through Caeli as he watched on in horror as Chip finally fell to the ground in a far-from-elegant thump. He didn’t move once he hit the ground as if he were nothing more than a sack of flour.
Before Caeli could stir himself out of paralyzing shock, the posse left the sidelines in horror. Even the girl with the candle seemed to stir out of her shyness as she ran to her fallen sheriff.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Those were supposed to be fake guns! But with the heaviness and the texture… along with the sound… Caeli’s blood turned to ice. He just shot and killed Chip. He killed him.
Now he was watching as the fallen sheriff’s posse huddled around him in hushed and hurried words, trying to shake a limp corpse awake. However, that body would never awaken again.
He could hardly hear anything through the rushing in his ears, how the world appeared to swim in disorienting and bright colors as Kuroi once more tried to shake Chip awake. From beside her, Theo looked up from them and straight at Caeli with a shocked and otherwise unreadable expression. Caeli swore he saw hate hidden beneath those glasses, but he wasn’t sure.
With the worried voices of the posse flooding through his ears in a string of warbled and unintelligible words, Caeli finally broke out of his horrified paralysis and walked forward. His steps were unsteady but fast as he cleared those dreaded twenty paces and joined the others. The woman with the candle snapped her head up to him, eyes going wide with what he thought was fear.
Fear that he killed the sheriff, no doubt.
He wanted to open his mouth and say that he didn’t mean it! That he didn’t mean to kill him! That he thought that this was some sort of game like they all let on! But he was so desperately wrong. He’s so sorry. He wanted to say that he was sorry.
But how could he when several pairs of eyes now found themselves boring into him? Caeli’s mouth went completely dry as he looked back at the accusatory faces, making his head spiral even more.
“No! I didn’t mean it!” he said. His voice pathetically shot out of his mouth in screechy static from his mask, but he wasn’t about saving face like that when Chip lay dead by his hand. “I thought—”
“Not hearing it,” Kuroi said with a glacially calm voice, though he swore he could hear a twisted edge to her words. Grabbing onto his arm in an iron-tight grip, she pulled him closer to them over the body of the sheriff. “Look at what you did to him.”
She let go of him as he snapped his panicked stare back at the fallen sheriff, who seemed as peaceful as he could be. He felt something in his eyes, and couldn’t be sure if it was sand or tears… probably tears with how the sheriff seemed to shift within his blurry vision.
He didn’t want to look at what he had done. Sure, he didn’t mind dead bodies, being the main reason why they kept appearing, but to see Chip as just as lifeless as them was horrible to look at. Caeli had no idea what to do. Time seemed to stand still as he stared at that peaceful face twitch again.
Dead bodies didn’t twitch like that.
Before his panic-stricken mind could catch up to what he saw, Chip’s body gave a jerk before he violently lunged forward with a loud shout. Frozen like a deer in headlights, Caeli could only feel his metaphorical heart catch in his throat as the reanimated body placed his gloved hands on his shoulders.
“Boo!” Chip shrieked.
His mouth stretched into a sharp and gleeful grin as Caeli felt as if all the boo had drained from his body in an instant. In one fraction of a second, he felt as if he were shot through with an electric-charged bullet. Everything screeched to a standstill in his mind like a train running full-kilter off the tracks and into a vast canyon below.
“I got you good!” the other continued to say, laughing as he gave him a quick shake, “That look on your face is priceless!”
All of that was a joke? Blinking slowly, Caeli attempted to come back to the present, to claw his way back into the moment. He hadn’t killed Chip? The other sat upright in front of him as happy as he ever was, still attempting to shake a reaction that wasn’t stunned disbelief out of him.
But how was Caeli going to give that when he thought he just murdered Chip over his own pride?
“Hey! Earth to Caeli!” Chip continued, “Don’t tell me that broke yer brain!”
Finally, he snapped out of it, but not by the sheriff’s words. He had no idea what stirred him but whatever it was, he had to thank it. Finally staring at him, Caeli said nothing before reaching forward, plucking the hat right off Chip’s head, and shoving it squarely in his face. It wasn’t rough, of course, but it was his way of calling him an idiot when his voice refused to work at all.
Chip gave an exclamation of annoyance, finally letting go of him to rip the cowboy hat off so he could see, which drew Caeli back more to the present. For those long few agonizing moments, he thought he would never hear the other give his grumbles and complaints. Now, Caeli realized how nice they sounded in his ears.
No, they shouldn’t sound nice. He hated Chip right now and didn’t want to hear his laughter after that stunt he pulled.
“Yeah, yeah, that was mean.” Pulling a face, Chip placed his hat back on his matted hair where it belonged. “Sorry for scarin’ ye. That’s how things are done ‘round ‘ere for welcomin’ a tenderfoot. But hey, at least ye don’t need to pay for nothin’!”
Drinks were hardly the last of Caeli’s concerns, but he figured that being offered any kind of drink from Chip was a blessing in disguise. What a way to scare him. His mind worked furiously as he tried to keep up with Chip’s carefree demeanor, though it felt so hard considering how close to tears he had become.
Then, even if he thought he couldn’t come up with anything, an evil… evil thought occurred in his head. Chip had played a sick and horrible joke on him, one that made him think he lost one of the few people he held close to his heart. This wouldn’t be swept under the rug like the sheriff believed. No. A strange sense of maliciousness and misplaced glee began to bubble up inside of him as he held out a hand for Chip to take.
Looking up, the cowboy seemed relieved that his companion was so far playing a good sport. Grinning even wider, he took Caeli’s hand and gave a hoot as the other rose, dragging him up along. Did he feel any bit of remorse for what Caeli felt about this entire thing? He looked up at the other posse members who seemed to back away, all back to their usual selves. They were in on that joke too, huh?
“Thanks, partner!” Chip said once he got back onto his feet. Brushing the dust and dirt off his poncho and pants with one hand, he let go of Caeli’s hand with the other to clap him on the shoulder again; a gesture that was met stiffly. “We best be off then! The cool saloon and a nice malt are callin’ my name. What’cha want? Water?”
Malicious intent bubbled up in Caeli’s chest. While he was going to make a fool out of himself for a stunt like this, he was more than willing to hop into the grave he dug himself, especially if he could drag Chip six feet down with him. That poor sheriff, he would never see it coming.
The consequences for later though, Caeli would have to live with. Right now, he was going to get revenge on that cowboy in the best way possible. Of course, he wasn’t going to hurt him, but was more than willing to put him through that same agonizing position.
“Actually,” he hummed, “I’d like to get the strongest there.”