Percuse
Legacy Name: Percuse

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Per-koo-shay
Hermit|Koi Farmer|Witch Doctor
Dragon-Fish|Pearl Giver|Demigod



Time to Feed the Fish

The cool feel of water spread slowly across her body from head to tail, and she could make out shapes in the darkness of her nest as sleep faded from her mind. Fighting it, she snuggled deeper into the mud under the mangrove trees, pushing aside her sleeping children as she did so. They woke and wriggled under her, rushing to save their tiny bodies from being crushed under her gargantuan one. She felt their tiny feelers brush her back as they swam around her.

Hello, Mommy.

Good morning, Mommy.

Good morning.

Their soft touches only woke her more, and so she grumpily forced herself deeper into the muddy roots of the mangrove. One of her sons shot out from under her, having been too far asleep to escape the first time. She reached back a long feeler to his stomach in gentle apology, which he darted away from, then settled down by her side. The rest of her children followed suit, and soon she was penned in against the mangrove by a massive wall of of her own spawn.

There was no way she could sleep like that, covered nose to tail in wiggly, wormy children, so she shook them off with a flick of her fin and arched her sides against the mud of her mangrove nest, pushing upward and outward. Her babies rushed up with her, pushing gunk away with their scaled noses and squeezing past her in a quiet race to be first. The impossibly large, rainbow-scaled koi shoved her nose out into open water, then freed herself with a giant shower of mud. Through the blanket of disturbed lakebed, her koi children swam eagerly forward, their tails thrashing like a hummingbird`s wings to keep up with their mother`s slow, powerful movements that propelled her through the water like a submarine.

On the bank, a tall, lean, fifty-ish man waited, burlap sack of dead bugs and other odd things close by. He watched the water carefully, happily anticipating the gigantic bulge of the surface of the small lake that meant the dragon-koi was coming. As he watched, the surface rose, tinted pink by the mother koi`s great head. The bulge rose and gained in speed, seemingly ready to swallow him, yet the man didn`t flinch. Just as it looked ready to engulf him, it stopped, throwing a pool`s worth of water forward. The man hastily grabbed the large burlap bag and hoisted it up to keep it from soaking. He grinned.

"Hungry, miss?" he asked the massive, blurry pink form of hungry and patiently waiting koi, motionless, save her flicking fins. Her children crowded the edge of the pool, their hungry mouths sucking the surface like a bunch of baby birds. The man stepped carefully into the water, avoiding the "small" normal-sized koi, and turned the burlap bag upside-down at arm's length. The young koi swarmed the food, as did one very large pink mouth that carefully sucked bits here and there from around her babies` tails. The man sloshed out onto dry land and back into his little cabin, where he had prepared a second and third bag in case he needed it.

Given the babies' morning hunger, he supposed he quite did. The surface of the water was spotless by the time he returned.

This time, he pushed the koi aside to get at the great mother, who rotated her head upward in anticipation. He tossed the food out a bit, past arm's length, and took care to step back quickly after he had done so. The rainbow-scaled koi`s eager gulps sucked up half the pond with each take, and he did not want to become a tragedy.

"`Yes, I`m hungry, Mr. Percuse!`" he mocked playfully, and sloshed his way back inside. His cabin was full of organic odds and ends, mainly things strange and delightful to those unfamiliar with the Medicine Man world. He also had a few unrelated items, things like his favorite pipe and tobacco, which he took up in hand as he walked out through his front door.

His porch overlooked a massive cliff, from which he could peer down through the mist at the foot of the mountains and keep tabs on the well-being and health of the people that lived in a town there. So far, they remained healthy.

He had a wooden chair of his own making facing the sunrise, so he took his seat, wanting to enjoy nature's beauty. It was a beautiful sunrise, especially through the morning fog on the mountains on the horizon.

The definition of relaxed, he set a wet leg on his knee and sighed, pipe smoke curling, waiting for when the sunrise ended and he could make his own breakfast.

Percuse the Paper Dragon

Percuse is loosely based off of a drawing I made to accompany a short story I`d written for a class assignment in fourth grade. He was a red, worm-like dragon cursed into the form of a sticker by an evil witch that had posed as a substitute teacher for fourth grade as a part of some diabolical plan.

The teacher accidentally gave a little girl his sticker for being a good student, and let her walk home with him. He quickly revealed his true nature once a safe distance away from the witch, and asked her to aid him in becoming a real dragon again in the form of granting 10,000 wishes.

The girl was determined to find a quicker way, since 10,000 wishes was just silly--even if she DID wish for 10,000 birthday cakes like the dragon suggested. To make him more mobile and thus more useful, she cut out his shape and stuck him on paper so that could move freely on his own.

He declared himself a paper dragon and, on top of moving about at will, could breathe paper fire, as well as create living doodles by drawing on paper and cutting them out (with the girl`s aid, of course).

The assignment was to write a page of text, so I never finished the story, but it and the paper dragon Percuse hold a very special place in my heart to this day.
This is what the original dragon looked like.