Rodentia Adventures

CHAPTER 6: HEROES AND VILLAINS

Although the details of the life of the mouse who had originally discovered the text were lost to history, the book itself was not. Quite the contrary, many would argue that it defined the upcoming age, or at the very least helped to set it into motion. Even though they could only recognize the pictures (and even in those cases, a few of the more abstract ones were quite challenging), those alone taught the mice a great many things. They might have figured out wooden, stone and even metal tools and weapons on their own, eventually, but this certainly gave them a head start on both their basic construction and use. Not only tools either, but clothing, armor, basic trade, the concept of drawing and sculpture, ideas which may seem simplistic to a human, but not so long ago were incomprehensible to mere animals. 

It wasn't simply about creating tools to make their lives easier, either. There was far more to it than that. While they avoided humans and their machines, they still saw such things every day, and marveled at them, but reaching that level simply seemed impossible. The pictures looked different from the humans they saw, different in nearly every way, but they were still images of humans, and while they could never dream of building their own cars and airplanes (they'd have no idea where to even begin, after all), the images represented a viable stepping stone into a much larger world, depicting people and places and things which were still advanced but no longer incomprehensible. Beyond a way to make it easier to move goods and to shield ones self from the rain, they were a way to become just a little bit closer to those mystifying creatures that the mice admired above all others. 

From this step, they could potentially continue to improve, and achieve their true goal: becoming Makers themselves, able to alter the world as they saw fit. For now, however? All they could do was crudely copy the humans. It took a while for them to get used to walking on two legs, wearing clothes, and holding and manipulating objects within their not entirely dexterous fingers. It was all worth it, however. They had something to strive for beyond simple survival, and they had that one book to thank. There was still so much more, however. Endless amounts of incomprehensible text, text which must have held countless precious secrets. Experts had pored over every image within it, studying them closely, learning every little detail from them, and none of this was done in vain. Much was to be learned from these methods, but so many of the pages didn't have any pictures at all. 

Thus, it came down to the library researchers, guided by a single elderly mouse who had spent nearly every waking moment of his long life studying and categorizing the runes, searching for patterns, as his parents had before him. Within his stone structure, the most secure in the city, including the palace (kings and queens were replaceable, after all, but the book was not), he was finally drawing closer to the answers that he sought. One would probably assume that this researcher was the relative of Mathias the thief. It would make narrative sense after all. Despite that, they would be mistaken. 

<3~ <3~ <3~ 

"...all of the other kids made fun of me for not having a tail, so my mom made me this." Jerin said, holding up her artificial tail across her paws, comprised of multicolored threads of yarn, all woven together. It was a pretty good replica, really, with the only real drawback being that while she could still move the stub of her original tail, the remainder of it simply drooped and dragged behind her. If it happened to get wet from being pulled through a puddle, it took a long time to dry out which was a non-trivial issue within a city that was largely comprised of puddle. For a while there, it was a little bit on the long side as well, but she'd effectively grown into it. 

"It's pretty! She must have put a lot of work into it. Your mother must be a very special woman." Mathias said, rubbing the soft tip of it through his fingers. 

"Yeah, she is! She's not my real mom, though." Jerin replied. 

"She's not?" 

"Nope, but that's okay. I still love both of them, though, even if they aren't my real parents." She answered with a soft smile.