The Beast And The Pufferbelly

A girl needs a sword...even if it talks.

I.

I know what you’re thinking when I responded to your invitation and walked in here. “She’s not from here, and what, exactly, is that thing she’s got in her hands?” So I better explain myself right from the top.

Yes, I know I’m not from here, ‘cause I look way different than most of you. My given name is Candace, and I came here against my will, in a giant bubble. I know it may sound funny to you, but it isn’t to me. My younger brothers, who fancy themselves practitioners of some sort of magic, or science, or something like that- they’re pretty much all the same, right?-used me as a guinea pig for one of their experiments, and I ended up in the bubble to see whether a human being could survive in some sort of enclosed environment for an extended period of time-or so they said. Bottom line is, the thing got caught in a big gust of wind with me inside of it, and it blew me over the hills and far away, out of the kingdom I come from and into this one. They told me they’d try to find a way to get me back as I was cursing them blue upon my departure, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know that it ever will.

It wasn’t too long before I got here that they started calling me the Beast.

It obviously isn’t ‘cause I’m ugly. I know that ‘cause of the way the guys around here are always looking at me. Up at me, for the most part, because I’m pretty tall and most of you are pretty short. Also because I got red hair, and that seems to be a real novelty in these parts. No- I got tagged as “The Beast” right off the mark because I’m so big and I have a pretty loud voice, especially by the standard of girls. Or, at least, the kind of girls you typically deal with here, who aren’t of the kind of roving adventurer class I became by force. All I had to do was run up to one of the local peasants, who obviously never saw a big girl with a loud mouth in his life, and ask directions, and he turns tail and runs in the opposite direction. Next thing I know I’m “The Beast”, complete with some rather unflattering and biased drawings of me coming up all over the kingdom. After that, I haven’t been anywhere here, and I’ve been around a bit for a girl in her teens, without some other lady adventurer trying to prove how much bravery and muscle power she has by challenging me to a fight. Usually I can beat ‘em on my size alone, but not always. A little while ago, I nearly bought it, but thanks to my pal here, the Pufferbelly, I got out of it clean.

Here’s how I got to have him on my side…

II.

On the adventure I’d had before this one, I’d had the misfortune to encounter a couple of bad miscreants: an old crone of a witch who I handled easily, and a cute and very naïve guy whom I rescued from the witch’s bondage and then had in the sack, only to discover that he was really a big, ugly troll who had been made handsome only due to the witch’s glamour. In the process of fighting them both I ended up losing the knife and the wooden quarterstaff that had previously been my protection against them that tried to hurt me, and I was hard up for means of defending myself beyond my feet and my fists. That was all I needed for a while, but I knew I couldn’t depend on them forever.

Then, one day, I met the Pufferbelly.

Like any adventurer worth their salt, I’m a sucker for anyone crying for help. This happened to be one of those occasions. I heard a voice- a man’s voice- calling for assistance. I scampered towards where the voice was coming from, but I couldn’t see a person anywhere. All I could see was a river that was starting to overflow its banks, and a big rock that was starting to be consumed by the river.

And it was the sword that was calling for help.

Seriously. I heard him- it was a “he”, without question- myself.

So I figured I should relieve him of his misery.

“All right, already!” I called out above the roaring water. “Keep your scabbard on, hot pants. I’m coming!”

So I wandered into the river, in the process getting my threadbare shoes and the legs of my Lincoln green coveralls wet, and put a grip on the sword’s bottom. Whoever put that thing in there must have really wanted to get rid of it, and placed in a position where it was sure to get abandoned and destroyed. But they never counted on a girl with my size and strength coming into this kingdom. I grabbed the scabbard with both of my hands, gave it a first class tug, and, the next thing I knew, he and I were back on the banks of the river, and me flat on my butt with him in one of my hands.

And then he started talking to me, to my shock.

“Thanks,” he said. “I would have bought it if you didn’t come along.”

“You’re….welcome,” I said. “Are you….really able to talk?”

“Just to whoever’s my master….or mistress, in this case,” he replied. “Because you are that now- I mean, if you want to be.”

“Sure,” I said. “I need a new weapon. Bad.”

I introduced myself to him, and he thought it was odd that a pretty girl like me would be known as “The Beast”.

“You haven’t seen me fight yet,” I answered.

“I figured it had something to do with that,” he said. “At least, you got a decent name. Not like mine.”

“What is it?” he said.

“Pufferbelly.”

“I hate to ask why that is.”

“You’ll find that out when you need to,” he said, cryptically.

“You were probably cursed or something by some wizard-type, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. I was a wandering adventurer like you are, once. Only I happened to get captured by some evil wizard, like you said, and he cursed me by putting me inside of this sword. Plus he imprisoned the sword in that rock you freed me from. He figured I’d stay there forever, but he didn’t count on you coming along.”

“Obviously not,” I said. “Listen, Puff- you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

“Not at all.”

“Okay. So- I expect that name has something to do with what happens to you when you get into battle?”

“It does.”

“I hope I can handle you when that happens.”

“You’re the only one who can. I won’t do it for no one else.”

“If you can help me win a fight when it happens, that’s all I care about.”

“That’s all I care about, too,” he said. So I knew this would work out.

III.

That was all Puff would say about himself, although I prodded him when I felt like it over the next couple of days of wandering we went through. (And it won’t do any of you any good trying to speak to him like I do, especially you dames. He’s a faithful, one-girl-only sword that way.) It was pretty uneventful, other than us trying to negotiate exactly where on my body I’d put him when we traveled. When you’re a lady adventurer traveling with a living, male sword, that can get pretty awkward, and all the places he or I suggested usually ended up with the other making a dirty joke about it. Finally, we settled on me carrying him in the most unattractive part of my body, to mutual agreement.

I managed to avoid trouble until I got into the next town. A couple of friendly guys offered to buy some mead, since they could see I needed some, and I took them up on the offer. I get drunk fairly easily, and I usually don’t have too many at one sitting, but that night there was stormy and there wasn’t much else I could do in that town that night, things being as they are. There was another dame there, another adventurer, a big blonde goddess-looking type that was nearly as big as I was, and she had a sword for her preferred weapon, too. She was also as drunk as I was, and she started boasting about all the crap she’d done with that sword of hers, since she was seemingly capable of turning it into anything besides a sword to whip peoples’ tails when she needed to. Naturally, I took offense. I had no idea what Puff was capable of then, but I take pride in not letting nobody, man or woman, best me at anything. So I shot up out of my chair, and roared out that me and my sword could smack down her and hers any day and time she named.

She strode up to me, and, in so many profane words, challenged me to a fight, which I did in nearly as many profane words. We might have done it right then and there, to the delight of the men in the room, only the landlord had class, and didn’t want nobody wrecking his rooms. So we arranged to meet the next day in the forest and do it there- with nobody watching or helping.

My inebriation let me sleep off what I’d done and said until the following day, when she rode up on her horse, got off, and took a swing at me with her weapon. That got me awake.

“What the hell?” I said. “How come you’re attacking me, lady?”

She reminded me of the challenge I’d made the night before, as well as calling me a dirty name. I proceeded to whip Puff from out where I’d been concealing him.

“I hope you can fight as well as you insult people,” I said, calling her a dirty name back.

We went into it then. Standard parry and thrust stuff for the most part. We threw the blades at each other, and mostly had the delight of having the other one block us. I got to see how sharp Puff was when he cut her wrist, but she got her own back when she nipped me in the thigh. But it was a stalemate until she decided to get tough.

By that I mean she showed that her sword really had magical powers beyond cutting and thrusting. She uttered something arcane that I didn’t catch, and, suddenly, her sword turned a pure golden color. And a beam of light from it hit me in the stomach and knocked me down on my knees. I wasn’t up against a mere sorceress- she was some kind of witch! Another beam knocked me down on the ground and made Puff jump a good foot out of my hands, making him out of reach. She was all set to destroy me with another beam when I used one of my feet to kick her sword out of her hands and out of her reach, as well.

“Now we’re even,” I said.

“So that’s how it is, huh?” she growled.

She leapt onto me and we wrestled on the ground, then and there. Straight rough-and-tumble fighting, now. Again, we were pretty evenly matched in terms of size, strength and skill level, so the only way one of us could win was to play a wild card. That happened to be our hair, like it usually is when girls fight. I tugged a clump out of her head, and was able to disable her enough in the process to get her down on the ground with a flying tackle. But she took the hint, and snatched a hank from my red roots with even more strength than I had applied, and that was enough to get me down on the ground and flat on my ass. She took the advantage of having direct access to my throat to put her meat hooks on it, and soon I was gasping for air and nearing death.

“PUFF!!!” I cried out, weakly. “If you’re going to do that secret trick of yours, now’s the time!”

“Got it,” he said.

And I am not making up what happened next.

He levitated up from the ground without any human hand assisting him. And then, without any warning, his blade expanded to about three times its normal length and twice its weight. (Hence the “Pufferbelly”, l later learned.) And, with a whirl of wind, a flash of lightning, and a crush of thunder, he wasn’t a normal sword anymore, but a super-weapon. My opponent was unnerved enough by this display to stop killing me and turn around. She immediately sensed what was going on, and quickly ran for her own weapon to defend herself. But it was too late. As she ran towards it, he got her, and ran her through like a stuck pig. But, rather than having blood flow from the wound that resulted, a gaping hole came about that allowed me to see right inside of her body. Not for long, though. She collapsed and died, and her remains almost immediately decayed and disappeared.

Puff returned to his normal size and shape, and I picked him up by the scabbard and held him tight.

“I guess we’re squared now,” I said. “I saved your life, and you saved me.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to do.”

He explained that he knew that particular specimen of lady warrior from his days as a full-bodied adventurer and knew exactly what to do to tame them, thanks to past experience. They had been created by the same wizard who’d imprisoned him in the blade, before he got there. They had been created by him as an elite guard unit by him, for some unknown reason, but they had rebelled against him for another unknown reason. His human body had been captured to be used as the fuel for being turned into the sword, but, when he had refused to serve evil, he had been abandoned in the rock where I happened to find him.

“Wow,” I said. “I knew absolutely nothing about any of that. Can you imagine what would have happened if I walked into a fight with that wench without you having me back? We’re lucky we ran into each other, Puff. You would have rusted away in that river water, and I would’ve gotten my head chopped off.”

“That’s about the size of it,” he concurred. “But we got each other now, Candace. We can survive together, now. Knowing what both of us know.”

“Me as much as you,” I agreed. “I’m not exactly an idiot, myself. I might teach you a few things.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as telling you about the fact that we can have a better relationship as a guy and a girl together than about 99% of them because of one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You can’t get me pregnant. But I can still keep you sharp for when I need you.“

“You’re pretty tough,” he said, admiringly. “Especially your tongue.”

“You better remember that,” I said, as I returned him to his hiding place.

Neither of us has forgotten that since.