Once again, Theodore fell.
***
Theodore didn't remember thinking he was about to die, nor did he remember falling and tumbling through the one-hundred-or-so feet from the cliff's sloping edge to the valley floor. It was not a sheer drop, more like an unforgiving forty-five to sixty-degree angle of sharp, abrupt, and humorless boulders. He could remember the moment of the various birds hoisting and then tossing him, but had no recollection of his body rolling and turning in darkness and snapping to a sudden halt. But as it happened, it hurt.
When he awoke, covered in dust and blood and sweat, he recalled none of it, but his body certainly did. And while there were many bruises and cuts to remind him, the most unfortunate memory was his throbbing and now thoroughly broken right hand. The hand he drew with.
In a way it was a small gift, because the pain is what woke him and saved him. Most of the creatures who scavenged the floor of Lumpstone Valley were meek and starved, but if they found injured prey, they'd have been happy to feast. One particularly malnourished Crespin (a curious mixture of a badger, a beaver, and an owl) had heard the ruckus and was already examining the discarded pieces of The Buddy Bot when she was pleasantly surprised to find a broken child arrive like a breakfast burrito from above. She let out a little hoot of joy.
"Nyah!" Theodore screamed out, a hissing croak and a protest at the fierce alien pain in his hand. He barely noticed that his cry had sent the emaciated beast running.
He engaged in his now-too-familiar habit of checking upon the well-being of his various fingers and toes and was deeply disappointed by the early results. His bruised ribs ached, and his pants had torn around his left leg, leaving a dirt-crusted wound. As he fell, his fist had collided at an almost perfect right angle with the rock, creating what a traditional doctor would be quick to diagnose as a boxer's break – as if he had punched a wall with three times his normal strength. He tried to flex his hand experimentally and passed out again at the pain.
He awoke a few minutes later. Some time had passed, and it was a dark night, but some light still cast down into the valley from The Grid and the moon above. The air was damp and cold, and he shivered lightly. When his vision cleared and his eyes adjusted, he could begin to make out the head of the Buddy Bot half-buried in red sand about ten feet from where he lay.
"Buddy Bot!" he rasped, shocked at how little sound he could make through his dry throat. He received no response. His tired mind could barely make sense of the events that lead him here. A new type of fear caught ahold of him, a slower, colder fear that we only know in our darkest moments. He was hurt and alone. He might as well have been yelling at a rock, The Buddy Bot was completely shut down.
He lay still in the coolness, surrounded by alien sounds of unknown insects chirping, his sore chest rising and falling raggedly. Dew collected on him and, with a wrenching effort, he turned his head to look at the Buddy Bot's. From this particular vantage, and with this much time on his hands, he was able to study the back of The Buddy Bot's head in greater detail than he ever had. As he measured each diode and cable with his eyes, he caught himself nodding off again, and then snapping himself awake. The various pains flared as he blinked back into consciousness.
"Maybe this isn't happening," he heard his own alien voice whisper at the lifeless robot. "Maybe none of this ever happened. I'm probably someone else, somewhere else. Faraway and asleep. Safe and sound. I have a Mom and a Dad, and I definitely don't need to find a Brick to save seven stupid Layers...What kind of a metaphor is this one, my friend?" he giggled, and then started crying, and then nodded off again.
He awoke to the pain, which was bad, but not as bad as the tightening in his chest. It was as if someone were holding his very heart and squeezing the blood from it, somewhere between panic and despair. He thought of Terrycloth Green and Isobel and he couldn't take it. He was giving up.
"No no no!" he jerked his body upward in an effort to get himself moving and yelled out again as he knocked his side and his hand, his head swimming, pain receptors blaring from all directions. He didn't let himself pass out this time, but paused and let the pain wash over him as he laid back down and then tried to flex his hand. He quickly realized that even the smallest movement was unbearable. He rested his hand on his belly, and even that small action caused still more pain. He gritted his teeth and felt hopelessness wash over him and cover him like a leaden blanket.
He took a breath and his aching hand rose with his belly. He turned his head and looked up at a slice of sky that showed the Grid, and he spoke to it, "I'm stuck here. No one is coming to rescue me. The Buddy Bot is not coming back to life," he stated, expecting nothing in return.
In silence and biting back a scream, he tried to hoist himself up using his functioning arm and hand, and he fell on his face, eating dirt and sending another wave of pain through his arm and body from the impact. After the third time, the pain had become something close to normal, a fact he felt dimly disturbed by. Suddenly he'd hoisted himself up on his two feet, and part of him couldn't understand how he'd done it. This new perspective felt radical.
He stood, swaying unsteadily, covered in dirt and sweat and blood on the sandy floor of the Lumpstone Valley. In a fog, he slowly, agonizingly fell twice more as he proceeded to once again gather up the spare parts that made up his broken friend, no idea what he was doing or why. Unable to carry them with his useless arm, he set about the slow and painful task of tying his pack and tatters of clothes to one of his feet and dragging the robot behind him in a kind of a makeshift raggedy sled, blindly unwilling to leave the broken robot behind. The valley was narrow and long, it's rock walls to his left and right climbed upward in a nearly sheer face leaving only one direction for him and his broken friend to go.
A dim sense of survival kept him moving, and he went forward with no sense of where he was headed. He'd occasionally stop entirely, like a deflated balloon, and start slow-motion collapsing at his knees. Again and again he'd snap himself awake and push forward.
And so he set about navigating the floor of the Valley, every step a new lesson in pain, with no end in sight. He weaved forward making very little progress and nearly collapsing again. "I gotta keep moving. I can't fall down. Can't fall down," he muttered.
And then he fell down. Hard.
He woke again with a flash of non-specific pain and exhaustion. He'd landed with his cheek to the cold sand, and more dirt had crept into his mouth and eye. He moaned into the night, and a fierce beast responded in kind.
"I am going to die here, Buddy Bot."
He coughed hard, keenly aware of how thirsty he was. He regained control of his body and rasped, "I'll take your silence as...as..." he struggled, "as an affirmation. That this is a good and unlikely metaphor...for true friendship." He turned his head to look at the lifeless robot he'd been dragging behind himself, and was suddenly overwhelmed with grief and rage.
"You're supposed to help children!" he cried out and kicked fiercely, sending the Buddy Bot's head flying into a dark corner behind a bush, his already bruised foot throbbing in protest.
"No no no..." he whispered. "I'm sorry... I didn't mean it, I'm sorry..." Delirious and in shock, he gathered all of his will and crawled towards the lost head, reaching into the bramble to cover himself in more small cuts, whispering into the cold darkness, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it, we're friends..."
He stopped his crawl and blinked. He couldn't believe his eyes. He'd kicked the Buddy Bot's head straight into a little red door that sat carved into the rock wall. It was barely visible, no one could have seen or detected it. He dragged himself closer and stared in disbelief, his breath caught in his throat. "SHIMR" it said, scrawled into the lower left of the ancient-looking wood. The door stood short and stout, like it was made for a raccoon or less savory wild creature to pass through, barely tall enough to have allowed The Buddy Bot through. It had a conspicuously large keyhole in its center.
He stared at it for a very long time, his eyes blurred, and it filled his vision. He lurched himself towards the door and pushed, but he knew it would not move.
"Power Pattern," he rasped. His mind raced. He lifted up his hand to draw in the sand and the pain fell on him like a particularly angry hammer upon a particularly busted up nail. He half-laughed and half-wailed.
He tried drawing with his left hand, drawing with his foot, his nose, his mind. He pushed at the door with what little strength he had left, begging it to open.
He fell to the ground before the red door and stared at it, his body too dehydrated to give him any more tears.
"I'm a Traveler," he whispered, and he felt its profound truth like something larger than he'd ever understood. As he said it, a Power Pattern unlike any other flashed through his mind, all swirls, all colors, shapeless and majestic.
To his credit, Theodore didn't give up. His body, however, did.
He lost consciousness, and the door creaked open.
* * *
When his eyes fluttered open, much much later, he was somehow being carried through daylight.
"Professor Hero?" Theodore recognized his nose tube as it bounced up and down through his fuzzy fading vision. "Did I go through the door?"
"Door?" was all he heard in response, and he was again taken over by a deep sleep.
* * *
When he next woke, he was moving again. He'd regained enough of his senses to take a moment to figure out his situation. He was being carried on a kind of make-shift stretcher, suspended loosely between the back of Professor Hero and someone else.
He'd called himself a Traveler. What did that even mean?
"Hello, young Theodore, awake again. How do you feel?" Professor Hero asked from in front of him.
"Better," Theodore said, knowing it was deeply true, though uneasy at his near-death conclusion that he was a Traveler. He thought about asking the Professor about it, but a lifetime of indoctrination as to the inherent evil of Travelers convinced him to keep the information to himself for a time.
"How long have I been asleep? Where's Isobel?"
"We...don't know the exact location of my Rogue Assistant. And we can't be sure how long you laid where you were, but it's a day's walk now since we've found you. It's rather surprising, which is to say highly improbable that you were not eaten. You'll be glad to know that I've still 'got it.' This is not a very easy place to navigate with a stretcher and a delicate and broken human child. It's most fortunate that you found water and this salve and tucked yourself away so safely, or you'd surely have been dead when I found you."
"I... I didn't find any of that. I just remember a little red door..." a flicker of memories cascaded through his mind, fevered glimpses of someone or something helping him, but he couldn't hold on to it. He remembered a bike wheel.
"There are no doors in Lumpstone Valley, Theodore. We found you nestled comfortably in a tree with your wounds well-tended to, though the methodology was...unconventional. According to my calculations you were thrown into the valley over two weeks ago.
"Two weeks..." his mind couldn't grasp it. He'd missed his own birthday. He laughed at that.
"I've given you a variety of further treatments that should both expedite and mollify your ailments," the Professor explained through his giant nose tube. "But you're well on your way to Tip Top shape, as they say."
"Well, thanks for saving me," Theodore said, flexing his hand. It still felt sore but much better, though he'd receive uninvited reminders of the painful injury for the rest of his days.
"I am owed very few of the thanks. I was drawn by new data points and former conspirators."
"Well thanks, anyways. Where are we going?"
"The lens is destroyed, so we have no way of knowing where neither The Brick nor Ms. Earhart are. We will re-group back at my Laboratory."
"What? No, we can't go all the way back there! We've come so far!"
"There is no other alternative, what would you have us do, search the wilds of Gup blindly? We'd be dead in a week's time."
"Well, where could they go? Where does The Bird live?"
"I have no data on that, Theodore. Until comparatively recently, The Bird was a sacred celestial being who lived everywhere and nowhere at once. I am not sure where one moves to after that."
"Who's carrying me?" he tried to flail his head backward.
"Easy, Theodore," a flat familiar voice piped up from him.
"Let me down!" he cried out, wriggling to be free.
"Ok ok. Be careful. Your hand will not have healed completely, and your body is in a weakened state."
Theodore rolled off his sling and hurled himself at The Buddy Bot, wrapping him in an awkward hug, tears flowing down his face.
"This is awkward," The Buddy Bot stated, trying gamely to pat Theodore's back with his stubby robot arms.
"I didn't have time to do much but get his main functions going again. I'd never seen him so damaged," The Professor reflected. "Though now that he is repaired, he seems to be utilizing a remarkable set of self-diagnostic tools he created to continue the work. An extraordinary anomaly."
"Somebody's got to do it," The Buddy Bot added.
"He'll be ok?" Theodore asked, letting him go.
"Oh yes, of course. I built him after all."
Theodore stretched his rubbery legs and took a look over the edge of the cliff. Despite all the ache, he couldn't help but be moved by the beauty of the deep valley, he stared at its gold and red ridges and took a breath.
"I'm alive," he said quietly to himself. "We can't go back," Theodore stated. He alternated closing one eye and another, bringing the valley in and out of focus through his still-broken glasses.
"What would you have us do, young Theodore?" Professor Hero asked.
"We still need a lens?"
"Yes, but it was destroyed, and is essential in locating energy signatures from The Grid. Without it, I cannot ascertain where The Bird or The Brick has now gone."
Theodore reached into his tattered jeans and searched between two discarded box tops. It had fallen out again wile they'd been on the insect train, but it still wasn't broken.
"What about this lens?" He pulled out his discarded glasses lens and handed it to Professor Hero. It still had a little tar from the roof on it.
"Unorthodox. But with some adjustments, it could work. Unfortunately, we'd also need a Grid Bit to power the transformation, and the Grid is now in its waning period, so we won't have a time of harvest for at least another month."
He reached into his blue backpack and pulled out the tin box with his Grid Bit inside that the Buddy Bot had made for him. "What about this?"
"This is unexpected. An infinity of data points never ceases to amaze. I'll need approximately eight point four hours and a small fire, let's strike a camp here," Professor Hero was already bought in to the new plan, unpacking and setting up a makeshift desk with test tubes and tools.
"Ok, then." The Buddy Bot readily accepted the sudden shift, too.
"Let's save Isobel and get this stupid Brick," Theodore responded.
***
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