There were gears and cogs and sprockets and chimes and rhymes and soft music all pouring around and washing apart my color but I wanted my color because it was my color.

And then there was a spider and it crossed over the cogs and my color stayed with me and the spider wove a web and every thing was better and there was webbing and everything was so bright.

"Tsk Tsk. Stupid Ivan." The spider spoke. He continued to slowly weave away the marvelous gears and cogs. I missed them they were so pretty.

The spider sighed. "I would really rather that you weren't so brittle. And you really must try to keep more of your soul in you. Where did you plan on keeping that soul bound dragon? You are lucky I was hungry or you really would have been in trouble."

I did not know where I was and everything was silent.

The spider got in my face and its eyes all stared at me with chitinous gleaming and there were eyes. "Your soul is sort of like a nice bit of webbing. You can snare stuff in it if you want to, but the more stuff in it the more likely that you are to break. Of course... I am the spider. And I eat the itty bits you snare with your soul. But only if you don't want to, you know. Use me?"

He stared at me and I stared back.

----

"If this zebra passes out one more time I swear I am going to make him get me two islands." Boss muttered, kicking his body. Her ears still rang from what ever the hell that idiot had done. If that had been aimed at her she probably would've had her ear drums pop.

The other zebra, this one not half as important, trotted up to her side. "Is he going to be ok?"

The steel and wooden airship was probably the safest place on the whole island. The tar blob monster thing had returned with a vengeance and it was only through the near constant flame of the now friendly dragon that they hadn't been swallowed up by it. She waved her stump on the air and growled at it. "I hate this fucking ship." She declared, walking on her back two legs for the time being.

Canary frowned. "You know, it is pretty uncanny."

She raised an eyebrow. He was actually going to say something useful? "What?" She almost snarled.

"Why do we follow him? He is just one zebra that has an annoying ability to not die. With your intelligence you could probably start your own pack." he scuffed a metal plate with his hoof.

She looked at Ivan's body. "I just get this feeling that if I stick around with him I'll get to be on the history books, you know? Like he is going places whether he knows where or not. Did you see what happened when he saw this air ship?"

Canary looked at her oddly. She barely resisted the urge to bury her remaining fist in his face. "That bass thing? Yeah. Kinda hard to miss that."

She turned away from him. "Here's the real problem. Do you have any idea how to fly an air ship?"

He winced. "Not really..."

A burble of dread came from her stomach. "Please don't let me trapped with an unconscious body with alien goo taking over the island?"

Canary opened his mouth. "Maybe we can try and convince the dragon to push us to the mainland?"

If she had been drinking anything she would have spat it into his face. Actually, next time she got a good drink she was going to spit it all over his face. "That is the stupidest idea I HAVE EVER HEARD."

And if she believed in gods of fate she would've sworn that they had intervened to get Ivan to wake up at that very moment. "Ughhh..." He was awake. Grand. Fantastic.

Canary rushed over like a particularly maternal kitten to coo over his figurative little kitten. She really didn't like cats.

She slowly padded over to him. "What's the plan, dragon tamer?"

Ivan looked around. "The air ship?" There was a strange gleam in his eye.

Canary nodded in his face and She pushed the over zealous zebra away with a light kick of my right leg. "So. Any idea how to pilot this thing?"

He craned his head to the side and stood up. "Do we have any blue paint? Or rocket engines?"

Her eye twitched. "What the hell. Just. What?"

He had a massive smile on his face. "This is now The Scourge. Also, I might have a tiny bit of brain damage or a concussion or something not threatening like that." He walked over to the side of the ship and whistled.

Her left eye twitched again. "This rusty termite riddled glorified balloon is now called The Scourge." Admittedly, it was fitting in an odd way.

Canary smiled brightly. "I bet he wants to paint it blue."

She resisted the urge to hurl herself off the boat. "There are two of you?"

And then the dragon flew over to the side of the boat and hovered there. Ivan walked over to a large valve near the center of the ship and unleashed it to full. The craft rocked and she barely kept her footing as they shot into the air. Ivan opened his mouth. "Scorch, buddy. Could you push us to the mainland?"

She slammed her face against the nearest solid surface.

The red dragon nodded subserviently and went to the aft of the boat and turned it to face a specific direction. Ivan nodded. "Good dragon. I'll be sure to get you plenty of gems when we return."

She whirled around and forced the nearest door open. "I'm going to see if the rest of the sense in the world is below deck. I'll be there if you need me."

---------

I laughed loudly as she went below deck. I would've kept walking for a longer time but canary walked over with an odd look on his face.

"Ok. Where did you learn to tame dragons?" He looked serious.

Oh god, he was going to love this. "I blew up his mind and pretty much made him into a mind slave on accident." I burst into howls of laughter.

Canary grimaced. "Uh... What?"

I merely shrugged in response. "I don't know what I'm doing half the time. Care to help me figure out where they keep the weapons on the hunk of metal?" The quiet roar of the fire filled the balloon and did a good job patching holes in the silence on board.

Canary gave an uneasy smile. "Sure?"

I practically pranced over to the door that Boss had ventured down.

----

Long story short, there was almost a hundred gems of varying sizes and shapes and there was a single crossbow well stocked with bolts. Along with some chain mail clearly meant with griffons in mind and a few leather pieces designed for dogs. Also, ingots of an unknown metal.

Wished I had a sock. I'd be able to use the metal for something.

I was scattered brained but I thought it was understandable. I took out a dragon and made it my slave. THAT IS WHAT WE CALL AN EGO BOOST.

And I was going to walk into a place with a dragon pushing my ship.

Wait, where were we going again?

-----

Boss growled under her breath. Idiots. "All of you are idiots. We are going to a rogue's port with a dragon pushing us. DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT IMPLIES?" She yelled at Ivan.

He blinked. "That we will come off as awesome?"

She slammed her good forepaw against the wall. "No. They will think we will have something worth guarding. Like massive amounts of gems?"

Ivan smirked at her in a manner that made her want to crawl under a rock and die and kill him and cook his flesh over a fire. She wasn't going to do it, but it would be so easy to just...

She shook her head rapidly to clear the thoughts of murder.

"I just mind raped a dragon into pushing us to another continent. I think we can handle a few convicts."

She snarled loudly. "If you weren't the one guiding the ship I'd throw you overboard. And why are we leaving Rej?" Only the last bit wasn't sarcastic.

Ivan opened his mouth to reply but shut it quickly. "Do you want to try to deal with the tar monster without more people?"

She gashed her teeth together. "Can we at least have a better plan than hiring random people? And can you please act serious?"

He nodded. "Ok. We have an Eldritch horror taking up residence on my island. My island is nothing but rubble and destroyed buildings. We are in a stolen vessel with no crew to pilot it and I have a half way soulless dragon pushing our boat." His brow became furrowed and a feeling of doom and gloom settled into the room.

She sighed. "On second thought I prefer you being stupid."

He growled in a manner that would have been threatening if he had claws. Or if he was a few octaves lower. "Right. We need a decent plan for how to get something to get rid of the Shoggoth. And then we need to pray to some non zebra gods that there isn't anything else like it anywhere near Rej."

She smirked. "That's more like it, zebra." It was annoying how he refused to look at her when they spoke.

There was a long moment where Ivan stared at a wall. "Say... How many bits do you think we can get for those gems?"

"A few hundred at the least. They aren't the high quality gems."

He drew out a rather large diamond out from his satchel and gently placed it on the table in front of him. She watched with her curiosity piqued. He drew his knife and slammed it into it.

A flash of lightning seemed explode out from the gem and shatter out across the room. After blinking her eyes clear from the spots that danced across them, she found Ivan smirking at a floating diamond.

Floating as in that it was a foot off the desk with no strings attached.

He laughed brightly. "That's what I thought."

She growled. "Warn me idiot."

He looked up and the gem whizzed through the around his head. It jammed itself into his satchel. "That is so cool." He has a goofy grin.

She didn't ask.

"I have partial control over the dragon, right? Turns out that dragons have this massive pool of magic to draw from. It's like I'm draining a battery." He shook his head. "Regardless, I have a plan."

----

The primordial tar ooze hissed as it slowly spread through the tunnels. Half formed eyes and ear holes collapsed and formed as it seemed to sit idle.

It wasn't. As it sat there, a few waves shook up its form and slowly the spread out mass of the Shoggoth went back to a central point. Where nerves and half muscles formed and dissolved and dragged the rest of the beast to the center, the center thickened. Like an ancient diagram of a brain, neurons slowly formed at the center of the slime.

The Shoggoth didn't have a sensory network persay, it was more like it knew what every eye saw and every muscle felt and attacked and devoured.

The tar like neurons streamed thoughts and ideas. After a long few minutes of half thought it came to a conclusion. It was hungry. And there was nothing left on the island for it to feed on.

The mass surges back together to a large ball like mass and slowly rolled itself to the beach. Its simplistic thought processes decided that the dragon was the closest thing that was devourable. In some odd reaction a large portion of the mass slowly inflated up and up.

The organic balloon slowly sank into the mass that made up the creature and expanded it. The creature formed defensive plates around its outside to protect the balloon. It slowly grew bigger and bigger, letting off a sound like someone was filling a balloon made of someone's intestines.

After a long time the Eldritch horror was in the air.

And with a puff of wind it slowly drifted after the boat.