Exclusive Excerpts for the Next Few Days - From Chapter 21

Today's excerpt is from Chapter 21: The Fate of the Army.

It's basically about the General of the Army sitting at his desk, musing over his army, one of his officers, and human teeth. The General's waiting for said officer to come to his office, but he's hasn't arrived yet. Again, this is a piece of my first draft taken out of context, so bear with any weirdness, please.

Unlike last excerpt, this passage is "rated E10+" and can be viewed by everyone over ten, in my opinion. The only somewhat dodgy thing about it is the fact that he's thinking about death and war, but there's nothing gory or explicit about it. So read away, tweenagers!

How many children was he killing? The youngest paranormal offspring here could not have less than seven years. He had made sure of this. But it seemed the majority of the casualty list he posted every Saturday was comprised of prepubescent children. When he had gone to find said children, many of them had loose or missing teeth. And what of the others he was sending to die for him? The grown men, women, teenagers. How many of them was he killing? Who would return to their families and who would he have to watch buried?

Osiris sat solemnly at his desk, his head turned to the rain-washed window. Ankh should have been here by now. He would never strike the boy, but what would it take to get his Logistics Officer to appreciate the need for haste in wartime? It aggravated him, aggravating being such the appropriate word here because Osiris was always facing one form of irritation or another nowadays. Ankh’s apparent intrinsic need to linger did not help. For a boy with the ability to move at speeds above 250 miles per hour, Ankh did not move very quickly when asked. Ordered, rather. Deciding it would not do to dwell on something that made him angry, Osiris put the thought to the back of his mind and returned to the subject of missing teeth.

What was it like for human-based beings to have molars, canines, and bicuspids detach themselves from one’s gums? Of course, he had had teeth fall out in his early years, but human teeth fell out only once if they weren’t knocked out, and then once adult teeth were gone, they did not grow back. Having had many dental mishaps in his youth yet still equipped with a full set of flush, white teeth, Osiris could only imagine the inefficiency of human teeth. A clap of thunder rumbled quite loudly, and the five pencils, fussily placed exactly half an inch from each other, rolled out of position. He readjusted them without looking and did the same with the other items the sound wave had disturbed.

So few. They had so few paranormals to work with. Paranormals are rare compared to the humans. With over eight billion humans roaming the Earth, less than a million paranormals occupied the world’s overall head count. Osiris always had his qualms about humans, but he did not want to see the population of Earth drop to numbers low, the human creature became endangered and then irretrievable. Paranormality would surely perish as a human derivative if humans could not breed in a vast gene pool. That was why every loss burned like fire. Particularly any dear child who departed from this life before it was their time. And every loss was one less attack inflicted on the Morri. There were many species with special and supernatural abilities, as Osiris very well knew, but the one that mattered was the paranormal aspect. This was the one species that could produce attacks that could affect the Morri unbeknownst to most humans except his special Communications Officer. Ms. Dexter, at least, had a sense of promptness that Ankh somehow lacked in leaps and bounds. Another rumble of thunder caused the pencils to roll, and Osiris positioned them once more.

That's it. I hope you enjoyed this excerpt. There's more stuff to come later on, so keep yours heads up.

Later.