“So what the bloody hell happened after that? You can’t just leave a guy hanging, Runt!” Diller gesticulated toward Runt with clear frustration. “Look at it from my point of view. The last I saw, you were getting your arse handed to you by Val and his sycophants. I gotta tell you, Runt, that was one of the worst beatings I’ve seen anyone receive, much less an undersized fella like yourself. I watched until the end, not able to help nor pull my gaze away. It was brutal.”

Thanks for the help, Diller old pal. But I suppose you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a friend around here, so I shouldn’t collapse that tunnel. “Diller, I don’t know, you probably won’t like it. Things got. . . weird right about then.”

Clearly outraged, Diller butted in before he could say more. “Weird? Weird! You know what’s weird, Runt, other than watch a fellow rat get the life beat out of him? Because that is what was happened. You were dead. You should have seen yourself, not that I would recommend it. Blood everywhere, small cuts a plenty, limbs sticking out at unnatural angles. I’m pretty sure at least one of your eyes was popping out of your damn skull!” Diller paused, shuddered momentarily at the mental image before regaining his composure.

“Look, Runt,” he spoke more calmly now, “I don’t think you understand. There is absolutely no way you could have survived it. They would still be beating your mangled corpse right now, I suspect, based on how much hate I saw in Val’s eyes. You messed with the natural order of things around here. But here’s the thing. Here’s when things began to get fuzzy. I don’t mean in some sort of metaphorical sense, I mean actual, visible fuzziness. I couldn’t tell if you were alive or dead at this point, but what I did see was fucking abnormal, to say the least!

You started to blur, or at least that’s what it looked like. But then, I realized it wasn’t my eyes failing me. From your edges first, you became a silvery color, almost like a morning mist on the meadow. This continued inward toward the center of your body, slowly at first, but then much faster. As you changed colors, your body dissipated, became less real. It began to drift away and Val’s bludgeoning and scratching began to right through you. Those boys froze with fear, let me tell you! By the time you completely turned to a cloudy vapor, Val’s lackeys were long gone. It was just me and him left when he finally pissed himself and turned tail as you completely disappeared. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around for an encore.”

“My, that certainly is most fascinating!”

“Fascinating, are you serious, you daft rat? I see my friend beaten to death then sucked away in a silvery supernatural death fog, and you find it fascinating!”

“Yes I do, Diller! What else can I think about it? I’m alive and without harm. Sure, I got summoned to the land of ignorant giant man-beasts, but since I wasn’t sent to the dirt, I choose to find the whole incident fascinating! Now I don’t pretend to know how all this business came about, but this is an opportunity that I cannot squander out of superstition or ignorance. I don’t subscribe to the former and I plan to relieve myself of the latter, so when I say now that I will adapt to my new situation, you had better believe I will.”

Diller and Runt stared intensely at each other in the silence that followed for almost a minute, each of them standing on hind legs and facing each other, Runt with his forearms defiantly on his upper waist, Diller with his own crossing his chest. It may have gone on for much longer but Diller finally broke the uncomfortable standoff.

“Fine,” he blurted out as he scowled, “but I don’t get it – never have.”

“You don’t need to, mate. All you need to do is sit your arse back down and let me continue with my story, you don’t even know the half of it.”

Diller reluctantly complied with grunt as his response as he sat back down.

“So, as I was trying to say before you interrupted, this is when things took a turn for the worse.”

***

For the next four hours, the duke and Runt did tasks, tricks, played games and generally had a jolly old time of it. In fact, it wasn’t until the duke and the world started fading away that Runt even determined that he must have been at the end of his time limit. As one world waned, another waxed into existence. After such a surreal experience, he almost didn’t recognize his own den, all the tools and unfinished projects scattered about in organized chaos.

He tried to piece together all the events of the day but was having a terrible go of it as he was soon overwhelmed with the need to sleep, so drowsy he had become. Clearly nothing productive would come out of trying to ponder things out while in such a state, so he lumbered over to his nest, circled around a couple of times and lay down.

When I awoke, I felt like I got more than the usual thirteen-to-fifteen-hour sleep that I typically get. Taking stock, I looked myself over, checking for anything out of the norm. I felt good, I mean, absolutely great. I was energized like I had never felt before; I could race a cat – I could climb a gnoll! That’s when I noticed my scars. And when I say noticed them, I refer to the lack of any signs of them. Any sign of lingering injury, scar, the small slice missing from my left ear, was gone. Hell, even my whiskers were all at the perfect length, and I never shave.

After the cobwebs receded from my brain from sleeping, I thought over the recent happenings. Unless I took a lot of head trauma, which as I far as I could tell, I had, I learned a few things about the situation I found myself in. First, I was somehow bound to a wooden statuette on another plane of existence which allows its owner the power to summon me for up to four hours a day and do their bidding. Second, no matter how badly I get hurt over there, if I die, I end up back here at home. Third, the creatures on this other world were huge, taller than ten rats standing on each other’s shoulders!

These were the main takeaways from my time there with Master Felbin and the duke. Depending on whoever had the figurine, which, mind you, was not a fair representation of me, for the record as my arse was in way that big, they may or may not summon me on a given day. However, when they did, I assumed I would be turned to the silvery mist in the middle of whatever I was doing. That being said, I didn’t know what would happen should I be killed again at home. I suspected that the only reason I was alive now was because the enchantment process summoned me right before I would have met my doom.

An emerging problem, I had figured out, was how I would ever make my quota at home for the warren. Even with a full day, my success was hit or miss; with only twenty hours in some days or some incredibly bad timing, I may not be able to collect anything. This would take some thought, but I would have to work this out. My day was almost up at this point and perhaps if nobody knew I was alive it would allow me to avoid this probably altogether.

With this realization I understood that it would be in my best self-interest to stay home and out of sight. As such, I had a small supply of food to sustain me and a large number of unfinished tools and contraptions to keep me busy during my self-imposed exile. All I could do was bide my time and wait for the call.