Short Stories about Giant Bats
Three stories about Aerys. He is a trickster god who is also a bat. Enjoy!
The 24th floor
The ride to the 24th floor always made Bruce's ears pop. As he stretched his jaw he pondered his estimate again. Yes, given the notice he could be packed and out of New York City in a maximum of four days. At least the office at in this damn place had a decent kitchen. After he and his coworkers hung their jackets on the wall they walked to the table and set out their lunches. The laborador grabbed a soda from the fridge and pulled paper plates and utensils from the cupboard. He would miss the free soda here, to be sure. Bruce pulled out his sandwich from its brown paper bag and set it onto the plate. It smelled amazing as always. "Basically, I could eat a Banh Mi for lunch every single day until I quit this job," he said to Jin and Christian.
"Bruce, we know you're looking at rolling over to A&R next year," Jin snapped back. "I swear to God, they're seriously a bunch of assholes over there. What did they offer you? Fifteen? Twenty? You're going to regret leaving before you even take their God damn piss test." The cat turned her gaze towards Christian, eyebrows lowered.
"Come on Jin, leave off of him," Chris responded. The horse took a bite of his sandwich and chewed it over. Jin turned her stare back to the lab. "Neither of us would care if Bruce left," Chris continued, "and besides, his work sucks. You hear about his report for Atlantic Holdings?"
"Fuck you guys," Bruce laughed, shaking his head, and stood up to grab a few napkins. As he lifted the smooth metal weight from the top of the stack, his ears perked up. "Did you two hear that?" he asked. He was positive that a low, resonating thud had sounded from outside, or perhaps from the basement otherwise.
"Yeah, I heard it too," Chris responded. "There must be some construction going on outside or something." The thud repeated itself, quiet but definite. Bruce walked over to the window and looked out over the edge. There didn't seem to be much out of the ordinary, gridlocked cars and people scurrying about in the usual lunchtime rush. If the sound had come from construction on the ground there would be no way they would been able to hear it from this high up. But he heard it again, louder, framed by what sounded like snapping.
"What's going on, an earthquake?" Jin asked. "I've never been in an earthquake before." Thud.
"No way it's an earthquake. We would have felt it, not heard it," Bruce responded. Several sirens rose from below. They were clearly not the only ones who had heard the commotion. Thud.
"Attention," the PA system crackled. "Please proceed to your designated evacuation zone." Chris stood up and ran over to the window to join Bruce, the horse crouching down and adjusting his glasses. Bruce noticed that the lunchtime rush was headed in only one direction. Thud. He squinted and looked down, observing cars attempting three-point turns despite the people darting through the street blocking their way. Jin started to back towards the exit. Thud.
"What the fuck is going on?" she stuttered. "Floors three and four, due to construction in the elevator bay, please proceed to the west conference room on floor three. This is your temporary evacuation zone." The sound of helicopters joined the sirens, the pitch increasing as the rotors approached. Thud.
"Bruce, we need to get out of here," Chris said with a swallow, grabbing onto his arm. The labrador did not listen. Thud.
"Once you have reached your evacuation zone, please await further instruction from your hall safety officer." Thud.
The view outside was blocked by a wall of brown fur, the window framing a solid patch of hair like a thick carpet. The individual hairs rushed past their view; they brushed against the glass, smearing light oily streaks across the surface. A patch of cream colored pelt replaced the brown in front of their eyes. "The fuck?" Jin yelled. Bruce's heart was racing, and the napkin weight fell from his hand. Slimy white fangs swung into view, long, pointed, rough and scratched. Only the pink gums framing them allowed comprehension of their nature. There was a creature outside, a creature so big it could not possibly exist. Something defying all prior experience and conception of natural order. Frozen, Bruce took that moment to consider whether he should believe what was going on, overriding his senses with a calculated calm, or whether he should simply react.
An eyeball met his own gaze from the other side of the window. Liquid pooled above the ridge of that massive eyelid, the wet surface of the cornea shimmering. An emerald green iris twisted in a contraction as the pupil refocused its gaze into the building. The laborador knew the gaze was directed at him and him alone. He looked back to into that black pit and recognized it. It was the end. Jin's voice cracked into a broken, visceral shriek from the hallway. Bruce then chose to react.
The labrador stumbled over a chair, Christian already having kicked it onto the ground in his own flight out. His body was as cold as ice and soaked with sweat. It was only a few steps toward the elevators. There was no such thing as an evacuation zone. The laughing began, a low thundering discord which shook his bowels to the point of sickness. Bruce slammed the horizontal bar to open the door to the stairwell. He had made it. Bruce leaped into the crowd, the rest of the building packed on the stairs, scrounging towards escape downward. He climbed over the others, stepping over fallen bodies and knocking others over to move himself forward to safety. It all ended with a blowout. It was the loudest, most painful and terrible sound Bruce had ever experienced. Blocks of metal and concrete exploded among a cloud of gray dust as the entire universe shattered into agony and black oblivion.
A blip. Bruce's stomach untwisted, his heartbeat slowing. He felt the sweat on his palm dry, the metal weight in his hand becoming cool again. Bruce felt himself in the middle of asking: "Did you two hear that?"
"No, I didn't hear anything," Chris responded. "What sort of sound was it? I'll try to listen for it."
Bruce blinked and swallowed, placing the weight back on the pile of napkins. He remembered there was something he had forgotten. "Uh... I'm not sure. Just thought I heard something." Chris shrugged.
It was a few seconds before Jin broke the silence. "Nice shirt, Bruce, is it new?"
Back-of-the-Envelope
"Aerys, you said you don't play any sports, right?" Peter asked him.
"Nope, like I said, the wings get in the way. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm not even allowed to play in the basketball league upstairs," the bat responded. "I'll kick your ass bowling though," he added.
"As if," Peter responded. "I've never lost to a mammal in my life." He leered across the room as he leaned on the bat's office door, the tip of the lizard's tail curling slowly over the carpet. "That's not the reason I asked. It's just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. You work, what, ten hours a day?"
"Yes-"
"You don't play any sports, you don't go to the gym."
"So?" Aerys quipped. "Are you worried about my health?"
Peter walked over and sat in the bat's guest chair, grabbing a pad of paper and a pen from the plastic holder sitting on his desk. "No, I'm worried because these numbers don't add up."
Aerys rolled his eyes. "What are you talking about, exactly?" he asked.
Peter requested silence by sticking his forefinger in the air. "You say you fly to work?"
"Yes, both ways," the bat agreed.
"But you live right in DUMBO. Add to this the fact that you take the subway in the winter, and whenever it rains, and you're really making that flight far less often than ten times a week. Let's assume it is raining or too cold one quarter of the year, would that be fair?"
Aerys sighed, "Alright, Peter, that would be fair." At one time he thought he would be done with this shit after grad school. The lizard continued.
"You take the elevators to the top of the building to get started on your way home. You must simply coast the whole way. Do you do the same in the morning?"
"I take off from the top of my building, though it's not as tall as this one," Aerys also allowed. Peter noted all of this on the paper pad, writing as he spoke.
"I'll be generous and give you forty minutes of flying-equivalent exercise a week on the commute. Twelve hundred calories an hour, that's eight hundred calories a week. We're talking on average here, counting winter."
Aerys exhaled through his teeth. "You're also forgetting those survey tours," he complained.
Peter shook his head. "During which you fly around a building for about twenty minutes, snap a dozen photos, and write it up, maybe once every month?" he asked.
"It's more like an hour of flying; it's great exercise!" Aerys huffed back. "Besides," he added, "plenty of people stay thin with that little exercise."
"Yes, but you're also not very active during the weekend. You're always sleeping in or whatever you do. I've called you up at home and you've been in bed at 12:30 in the afternoon. I haven't seen you anywhere outside of work that doesn't involve drinking, and that doesn't help your case much."
"Tsh, you got me," Aerys cracked up. "But that doesn't prove anything. I have to walk around town to get anywhere just like you. I don't own a car or anything."
Peter looked back down on his pad. "I'll give you another generous five hundred calories a week above baseline metabolism for your oh-so-active, urban lifestyle," Peter said. "You're what, one-eighty?"
"One eighty-five."
"Alright, due to the wings that's about one-seventy equivalent for a biped. Twenty five years old, athletic build, monthly exercise..." Peter muttered as he typed these pieces of information into an application on his phone. He must have downloaded it just for this occasion. "Twenty five hundred calories per day." "Now, since you eat probably three thousand calories," the lizard said before Aerys cut him off.
"Whoa, whoa, hold on," he said. "Where did you come up with that?"
Peter chuckled. "No offense, buddy, but you eat like a pig. Good thing the cafeteria is subsidized or I'm sure you would go broke. I've eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner with you and I've never seen anything like it except seeing competitive athletes on TV, or perhaps when watching the morbidly obese."
"God damn it Peter, is that the point of all this?" Aerys responded, his nose just a bit red.
The lizard continued. "I'm going to be very conservative: you've got something like a three thousand calorie gap every week. A pound of fat is about thirty five hundred calories. Working here for three years, one hundred and four weeks, four fifths of a pound per week, you should probably weigh about fifty percent more than you currently do." He hadn't written any of the last calculation down. "My only explanation is that either you're a complete freak of nature, or that you're involved in some major extra activity I'm not aware of," he concluded.
Aerys sat wordless, licking the backside of his teeth. "Well," he finally responded, "You're right, there is something big you overlooked. Based on your own experience, you assume a negligible amount of sexual activity. However, given the amount of ass I get it's a wonder that I'm still standing and in one piece on three thousand calories per day."
Peter got a kick out of that one. The lizard burst into laughter, hitting his hand on the desk. "Aw, fuck you, bat," he said, catching his breath.
"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful, you dick," Aerys laughed back. "Hey, Bruce and I are getting drinks at Fresh Salt tonight, are you coming?"
Loki
Michael checked over the next safety report in his pile, red pen in hand. As dull as it was he forced himself to spend a few minutes on each page. It was amazing how often the most common mistakes were repeated. The city's preliminary draft of the budget was scheduled for only a month, so it was crunch time. Every municipal agency there was either needed to know how much they would have left after PP&E or else needed to prepare supporting material to request supplemental budgeting. That meant safety reports.
The next report was by Aerys. This meant that he didn't need to check the math but that he needed to triple check for general sloppiness and hastiness. This report was written on an old project in Queens - highrise, residential, seventies. Junky building from the photographs. Or maybe the photographs were junky. The tiger figured the odds were fifty percent that he would need to review something major about this report. Michael adjusted his reading glasses, breezing through the interior and exterior maintenence sections, which were taken as-is from the on-site evaluations. The structural integrity portion was what Aerys had worked on.
He picked up the phone and called the bat into his office. The bat dashed over as quickly as always. "You did the report on 201 40th avenue, correct?" he asked.
"I did; why do you ask?" Aerys replied.
"Look here," Michael said, looking up at his employee and then back at the report. "You said 'torsional resilience falls below specification according to standard estimates, and pending verification should be addressed within 18 months.' Now I'm all for keeping buildings up to code, but you can't just make claims like this without justification. Do you know how much money this would tie up?"
Aerys sat wide-eyed in front of his boss. This experienced and very intelligent engineer rarely took this tone with him. He knew that the tiger was right. "Honestly, Michael, I don't remember writing the report, can I see it?" he asked.
Michael handed over the piece of paper. "Look on pages 7 and 8. You make this claim about torsional stability without any way of knowing it in advance. You don't even estimate it. It makes no sense to me whatsoever." Aerys hurriedly flipped through the report.
"Michael, here's what I meant, if we just extrapolate the numbers from the last survey-" he began.
The tiger interrupted. "Aerys, extrapolation can tell you whatever you want to hear. This is starting to become my catchphrase, and I don't want it to be. I looked at those numbers already. They were gathered over ten years ago. You can use a coefficient less than half a standard deviation lower and tell the exact opposite story. Why is the structural integrity of this building questionable? Do you have some crystal ball telling you it's going to collapse? The next survey is due to be conducted in a year, just let this one go."
Aerys flipped through the pages of the report as Michael spoke. The tiger felt a shock. He thought he saw the bat flip through the packet twice. "Look, the most recent survey data is dated February of last year." Aerys responded. "Using a linear model would not be a bad estimate at all in this case. It's a wonder nobody has brought this issue up sooner."
The tiger inhaled slowly and held out his paw. "Let me see that," he growled. There was no way that an entire report reported last February had been in there. It was simply impossible.
Aerys handed the report back, his face blank save a slight twinkle in his eye. The tiger tore his glasses from his face and stared closely at the table of values. The date of the report stared right back at him, not anywhere close to ten years old. This trick was unacceptable. "This is, I..." Michael began, his stomach clenching into a fist. He lifted his eyes to meet the bat's, and all at once a wave of calm washed over him. He knew that his irrational aversion to being wrong was only hurting himself in the long run. He thought of his wife. Yes, he told himself, his memory failed like everyone else's, as much as he hated to admit it. "This is a good catch. The building might actually be compromised. The borough's just going to have to swallow this one. I'll call you again if I have any more questions." The bat nodded as he stood up to leave, pressing his lips together to contain his smirk until he had shut the door to his own office.