As Soon As the Airship Docked
I spit it out.- “When the Stars Weep Blood”
- out of touch (at best) and disgusting (at worst)
- until it actually grows too hot to bear it
- in her uncle’s yam garden
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As soon as the airship docked we proceeded among hanging gardens and colonnades to what looked like a temple. At the entrance we were served ceremonial wine, and in keeping with tradition I spit it out. My research into Contrarian customs hadn’t included any of their medical practices, however, so I was interested to see how a pregnancy test would be conducted.
I should not have been surprised that it consisted of trial by combat. My opponent’s rabbit costume was something I felt I could legitimately find surprising. Another surprise was the music, death metal blaring over hidden loudspeakers, a song titled “When the Stars Weep Blood” by a band called Not Particularly who had been exiled from Contraria the previous year.
“Now we will find out if the rabbit dies!” bellowed Fleur’s father.
“Symbolically,” came John’s voice from behind the rabbit mask. “If you win the fight, that’s good enough.”
I grimmaced. Even knowing that the beliefs in Fleur’s homeland were out of touch (at best) and disgusting (at worst) I couldn’t convince myself this was something I’d really have to go through with.
My father-in-law handed me a large axe, and a net and trident were presented to John. The weapons looked real.
“Ready, set, DIG!” declaimed Fleur. I raised my axe in anticipation of a charge from John, unsure I’d heard correctly. But he attacked not me, but the ground. I chopped at the soil around my feet, trying to figure out the objective.
John scooped up a lump of something and ran with it around the edge of the temple courtyard. I kept hacking at the ground as I watched his progress. Before making it halfway around, he began tossing the lump up and catching it again, bouncing it from hand to hand.
“You must race with the yam until it grows too hot to actually bear it,” Fleur coached. “It’s like that game from your country, ‘hot yam.’ Of course you need to find one first!”
The tubers we unearthed reacted to air exposure, quickly bursting into flames if they weren’t quenched in a pot of water. Such pots were positioned around the courtyard, and our score was calculated by how many yams we deposited and how far we ran with them.
Fleur continued my education, telling the story of the young unwed princess who blamed her pregnancy on the hares in her uncle’s yam garden. My hands blistered from the heat of the yams as well as the inefficient digging tool I had to use. I had no idea who was winning, or what would signal the end of the contest.
bonus points for using them in order