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“I have arrived,” Wordler 386 announced.
The busy valet looked up from his paperwork. “Welcome, Miss. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“Any way you could hurry it up?” asked 386. “I have a village to save.”
The valet stifled a yawn. “Sounds exciting.” The emphasis he placed on the word showed just how little excitement was regarded in his establishment.
386 tapped her foot while the valet finished recording some numbers in what looked to be a ledger. He adjusted his cap three times before he found it to his liking. He picked at a loose thread in his red vest before biting it off with his exceptionally prominent teeth. “Won’t be much longer, Miss.”
On her way into the office, 386 had noticed that all the members and staff of the yacht club had an oddly simian look. Hunched over and covered in fur, they could have been mistaken for actual apes who had somehow gotten rich enough to afford oceangoing pleasure cruisers, and jaded enough to shuffle around as if it were all no big deal.
“All right.” The valet straightened a stack of papers on the edge of his desk. “What can I do for you, Miss?”
“I’m on a quest to save my village, and this is my final stop. I have these keys—”
“No keys, no crypto,” the valet intoned. Some kind of community mantra, 386 supposed.
“Err, exactly. The lovely degenerate who dropped me these keys assured me that they would lead to the five-letter Word I’m looking for.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to a whisper. “I’m hoping today’s word is YACHT.”
“That would be an excellent word, Miss,” the valet stated. “However, I fear your degen benefactor may have misled you. This is a club for apes, specifically of the bored variety, while you seem more like a brightly colored human.”
“All humans are apes,” 386 stated. “We’re all just hairless apes who’ve come down from the trees and picked up mobile phones.”
The valet nodded. “And we apes are all just two-legged land-fish who enjoy grooming each other. Very well then, Miss, I’ll show you to whatever those keys unlock.”
The valet moved fast, once properly motivated. Or properly curious. Or perhaps just in a proper hurry to be done with his human visitor. 386 hurried after him along the planks that led past yacht after yacht after yacht. Along the way they passed half-asleep apes of every description and more than a few who seemed to have horribly mutated. Those were ones that 386 gave an especially wide—what was the word? An especially wide amount of space, she thought, although that wasn’t quite what she’d been thinking.
“Here we are, Miss,” said the valet, stopping at a particularly large and elaborate yacht, its sonar and navigation systems already spun up for a voyage.
386 clasped her hands in joy. “Oh, this is amazing! Just wait until all the other Wordlers see me sailing this boat up the Logorrhean River, through the Plains of Thesaurus, and into the docks at Wordler Village. Even the QUEEN will be impressed!”
“You misunderstand, Miss,” said the valet. “Your key is for the empty spot on the other side of the spot containing that yacht.”
386 slumped her shoulders. “I guess that means no yacht for me, but at least I’ve found my Word.”
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Art and Text ©2022 Greg R. Fishbone
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