Queegan stumbled into the bar in a dust cloud of angst and brimstone. He thundered through the room, disturbing the other patrons with both his size and girth.
“Give me a pint of stallion’s blood!” He bellowed from his parched throat. His mighty thews flexed and did somersaults absently. The patrons gaped in ill-concealed awe, but Queegan was used to that, and he paid it no mind.
“Diet stallion’s blood if you’ve got it! And don’t be trying to pass any of that gelding’s blood off on me like I won’t notice. Gelding’s blood lacks the fire, a blind moron with an artificial forearm could tell the difference.”
The bartender wiped off a mug with a shaking hand and then handed it to the stable boy with careful instructions to bleed the biggest stallion in the joint. He didn’t know what Queegan meant by ‘diet’ but he was too afraid to ask. Besides, he had seen Queegan before and knew the big warrior was always spouting off about some crazy nonsense that didn’t make any sense.
Queegan whirled on the commons room sending his wolf fur cape in a wide and dramatic arc. Seven tumblers were knocked from the bar and spilled their amber contents to the worn oaken floor. Normally that would be cause for a brawl, but the offended parties merely sat in their places, watching Queegan with a terrified eye.
“I’ve been to the forbidden lands and returned to tell the tale.” Queegan boasted, and the commons room went silent.
“Turns out,” Queegan continued, taking the awe of his audience as a matter of course and not even bothering to check for it, “it’s just another one of those damn ruses the snake worshipers are always trying to finagle us with.” Queegan paused and took a long look into the pewter mug filled with stallion’s blood that had just arrived. “I hate those guys.” He said, almost wistfully, then he drank.
The bartender held his breath, as did everybody in the tavern. Queegan was known to all of them, he was big and powerful and he was prone, if he got upset about anything, to tear whatever local he was in to pieces.
Queegan pulled the empty mug away from his lips, the thick liquid still sticking to his moustache. He made a smacking noise and stared crookedly into the air. The people of the tavern waited in barely concealed expectation.
“It’s not diet!” Queegan roared and the room was just about to panic when Queegan continued, “but it’s good!” He slammed the mug down on the bar, “bring me another, and keep ‘em coming until that stallion gets weak in the knees.” The boy ran off to follow the order.
“Anyway, like I was saying, the forbidden lands....”
Suddenly Queegan’s story was interrupted by a shriek of pure rage that originated from outside the room. In rushed seven men, all dressed in the scaled red armor of the snake worshippers.
“Damn!” Cried Queegan, “I must have missed a few!”
The snake worshippers charged at the big warrior who merely stood and waited for them.
He grabbed the first by the throat and ripped out the Adam’s apple with a primordial shriek, then he grabbed the face of the second and stuck it into the bubbling wound, holding the trashing body in place until it drowned on the blood of it’s compatriot. He grabbed the heads of the next two warriors and merely smashed them together. Then he ripped a leg off the fifth and beat numbers six and seven to death. Hardly out of breath, Queegan reached back for his newly filled mug of stallion’s blood.
“Stupid snake worshippers, a retarded midget with a glass eye could have seen that the seven of them didn’t have a chance against me. Anyway, where was I?”
“The forbidden lands?” Somebody from the crowd said helpfully.
“Oh yes. Damnedest thing in there, the snake worshipers had constructed a singularity. I almost got worried when I crossed the event horizon, you’re not supposed to be able to get back when that happens, but I did it. I am, after all Queegan.”
The bartender shook his head in frustration, Queegan was always like this, speaking in strange tongues that nobody understood. He wiped another mug and awaited the end of the story.
Queegan was looking back into his mug thoughtfully. “Funny thing though,” he said after a while, “it’s hard to explain what was going in that singularity with classical physics, I’m going to have to come up with another whole system just to describe it.”
Suddenly as if in defiance of his brief melancholy, Queegan smashed his mug back down on the bar.
“Boy, get me a pencil and paper. Remember this day well, sometime in the far future you will be able to say to your grandkids that you were there when Queegan discovered his vast unified quantum and gravitational universal theory.” The boy started running away when Queegan offered one final thought.
“And get me some blood from a different horse, I think that other one’s a diabetic.”
The End