PRL Serials

Long ago, Anansi was terribly confused. 

He had traveled extensively around the Fonlands and though he was born in the overlap between Jo and Lêgba’s Discs, he was well known by many Fonlanders who delighted at his appearance and the fact that he usually brought along entertaining stories. Anansi was a natural showman and Fonlanders would crowd around him to watch as he embellished epic tales with displays of his magic that brought the stories to life.

When his mother, via the Luminary Aziza Obea, gave him the list of warriors to capture in order to receive the stories of the Fonlands from her Scroll in the Time Chamber, Anansi decided to start on the Disc of Gu, but he quickly returned to the Cotton-Wood that Nyame called home.

“Do you want Onini the Python, or any member of the onini kin of Gu’s Disc? There are also pythons similar to the onini on the disc of Sakpata and Agê.”

Nyame had no clue and looked to Obea who was obviously frustrated and near her wits end. “There is no python in the Fonlands called Onini! Maybe there is a Fonlander with that name, but it would be confusing considering that dwellers of the Fonlands are also familiar with a kin of python-Fonlanders that use the name onini. I need an onini from the disc of Gu!”

“Is it necessary for the Luminary Aziza to yell at me?” Anansi asked his mother who just shook her head and made movements with a hand as if she were shooing both of them away. 

“This is a trial, Vodun child! It is not meant to be pleasant.” Obea was very annoyed and she took steps closer to Anansi to stand between him and his mother. 

“Mother,” Anansi said, looking past Obea at the very disinterested Luminary Nyame, “is it necessary for Obea to be part of this? Can I just do the trials for you and you call her in well after I have left?”

“You may be the child of a Vodun,” Obea barked, “but you are asking for a lot from your mother. If you take stewardship of the stories in the Time Chamber, it will be your responsibility to maintain them. Your consciousness will be linked to the Scroll. The Scroll, the Time Chamber, are important things of the Disc of Jo and for the Luminary Nyame to hand that over to someone else, that someone else must demonstrate their worthiness…”

Anansi rolled his eyes and lifted all of his hands like a question, “What does kidnapping warriors from their Discs have anything to do with the stewardship of stories?”

“And since you have refused to sit with a griot…”

“I was with a griot before I came here.” Anansi interjected with quiet objection.

“…you are tasked with demonstrating your ability to protect the very important artifacts that Nyame has created for our Vodun Jo. If you cannot overpower the warriors, which I will assume that you cannot…”

“Ok,” Anansi said with offense.

“…you will have to find some other way to bend them to your will and deliver them to the roots of this very Cotton-Wood. So go, find an onini, the mightiest that you can encounter, too, you will be graded on the quality of the warriors you deliver.”

“Great,” Anansi said ironically as he turned to leave. 

“You can leave, too,” Nyame said to Obea, which Anansi heard and he laughed aloud from a distance. 

“Fine, I will be down at the root,” Obea said and flew away from Nyame who was happy to be left alone. 

Anansi cannot fly, but he can use his webbing to create portals to places he has physically been to before, and he used his webbing to arrive on the Disc of Gu at the Arena that is west of the tall grasslands where the onini pythons are abundant. Anansi had enjoyed the battles of the Arena before and when he touched down, after climbing through the portal that emerged at the heart of the web he wove on Nyame’s Cotton-Wood, he rolled up the entire structure of the web so that he could save the trouble of creating a new web portal once he’d accomplished his mission. 

Anansi spun another web as admirers said hello and paid their respects to the son of a Vodun, some just watched him climbing around vertically in the space over the grass. It was a sight to watch Anansi spin a web because his webbing is practically invisible and it can look as though he is climbing the air. When he was done with this web, he strapped it to each of his shoulders with two long ropes of webbing and he caught the wind that took him east until he floated over the grasslands, high enough that he didn’t experience any interference from the trees that did dot the landscape. 

He saw the high grasses before he arrived to them and he snapped the webbing straps from his shoulders and let the web drift on the wind, up into the sky. The grasses had a red tint that distinguished them from the surrounding grasses. 

“Wow,”Anansi heard a voice as he approached the high red grass. “Are you a wind walker? That was quite a landing.”

Aansi watched a giant python with patterns of red, brown, and white on its back that was at least fifteen feet long, slither out of the red tinted grass. Its body coiled and as its head rose to Anansi’s eye level, arms became visible at its side and it crossed them at its chest. 

“Hello, new friend,” Anansi said with a bow.

“Hello,” the python said with a sinister delight on its face. “You don’t look like you’re from these parts, so I will warn you only once because that is my job. This is the Crimson Savannah, home to the onini python warrior band, and of our great and mighty warrior king Onin. I am Norin, the herald,” he said with a bow. “Enter the Crimson Savannah if you dare. If you have business to broker with an onini of this Savannah, I can escort you to ensure your safety, but you are welcome to travel at your leisure.”

“Does every visitor to this Crimson Savannah get the same greeting?” Anansi asked.

Norin laughed and extended a hand to Anansi. “You are the son of a Vodun, your scent tastes very distinct on the air and we have been lectured in the past to not be so quick to make meals of visitors to the Disc. But I have been designated to sniff out visitors to the Disc of Gu, to give my warning, and to offer aid if needed. I was chosen as the herald because of my amazing nose. I can taste your apprehensions, for example. But I assure you, that if you accept me as your escort, no incidental harm will come to you. If you anger someone while inside the Crimson Savannah, I cannot guarantee your safety and I will not fight on your behalf.”

“If you escort me, then who will be the herald while you are away?

“There are others. Besides, Onin would want me to escort you and to report the details of your journey into the Crimson Savannah.”

“Then this will be fortuitous for us both,” Anansi said with a smile, “for it seems that this Onin is the python I came to see.”

Norin looked at Anansi skeptically.

“Are you delivering a message on behalf of the Vodun?” Norin asked, his tongue flicking out of his mouth regularly. 

“I have come to challenge the great Onin,” Anansi said with a big smile. “I am the son of the Vodun Legba and I was enjoying myself nearby when I got into a terrible argument. Most everyone in the establishment where I found myself recognized my divine pedigree, but there were enough fonlanders there insisting that this Onin had much more of the bearing of a Vodun than one as lacking in physical prowess as myself. I attribute this to the nature of Gu’s Disc, you all here have a narrow view of power and who you will give your respect to based on the Vodun whose Disc gave you life. I am here to broaden your horizons and show the fearsome elites of this Crimson Savannah that there are better leaders than this Onin, who by all accounts is extremely strong and not one to be underestimated. I herald a new day, mighty herald of the Crimson Savannah. Show me the way to the new future.”

Norin was amused by Anansi’s bravado and he was sure that Onin would wrap him in his body and squeeze him until the essence dripped out of him like blood that evaporated quickly after pooling. Norin wondered if Anansi would be so talkative then and he eagerly escorted him to Onin’s nest that was tucked in the back of the burrow underground where he trained and trained others. It was his underground gym, large enough to contain five different heptagons for sparring and a very large space for training with equipment. Anansi was impressed with the sight of it when they arrived to the area after wading through the tall grass of the small town that comprised the savannah. There were areas of low grass that made roads and Anansi noticed the entrances to underground burrows that served as homes, restaurants, and various businesses. Onin’s gym was deep inside the savannah and Anansi followed Norin in silence, preferring to save his words for the big man himself. Because he knew that he would need his best words to get himself out of the predicament in which he found himself. He hoped that Onin would be easy to defeat, but the warriors of Gu’s Disc are notoriously fierce and Anansi hadn’t been in a battle in long enough that he doubted his own abilities. 

“What is this?” Onin asked as he approached Anansi, Norin coiled just behind him.

“This is a foreign dweller, warrior king,” Norin explained. “He says he traveled to challenge you, to be a better leader than you or something. He said a lot of words and few of them were gracious. He desires a display of your powers and I am happy to present Anansi, child of a Vodun, apparently, for your battling pleasure.”

With that, Anansi bowed, and Onin stared at him with suspicion.  

“You came here to fight me?” Onin asked skeptically. 

“I never mentioned the word fight,” Anansi corrected. “I have come here to challenge you…”

“What are you talking about?” Onin asked, now confused. “The only reason you are not already dead is because I assumed Norin brought you here to take part in an entertaining fight with me. If that is not your intention,” Onin said and he turned to another of the onini pythons who had gathered to watch, “take care of this thing and if there is a body, take it far away. I don’t want any Vodun coming around asking about their dead child.”

The onini nodded at her king and was about to approach Anansi who put up all of his hands in protest.

“Wait,” Anansi said. “I know that you are a warrior, but even warriors take pride in their intellect. What is a strong warrior without the sense to protect themselves or to outsmart their enemy?”

“Dead,” the female onini next to Onin quipped.

“Precisely. I came to challenge your wits, warrior king. If I fail, then I am at your mercy. Kill me, enslave me, do whatever. I deserve that fate if I cannot best you.”

There was a larger crowd of onini now and they seemed to be invested in what Anansi was proposing, even if they had been slightly disappointed that the warrior king wasn’t about to engage in an epic battle. And Onin recognized their interest even though he had little interest in proving his wits to this stranger. He accepted Anansi’s challenge of wits and he relaxed a bit, sure that he could overcome any challenge this outsider had thrust on him before the audience of his loyal subjects.

Anansi stood in the center of the burrow and as he talked, he mostly addressed the mighty warrior king Onin, but he was such a gregarious speaker that everyone in the room felt that he was speaking directly to them. 

“A true warrior, a good warrior is strong and brings power to bear in a fight, but the best warrior is wiley enough to see and analyze the strength and weaknesses of their opponents. The best warrior is always adjusting, making moves and judging responses, reacting, reevaluating, countering. The best warrior is distinguished by their ability to use their mind because even the strongest warrior can be out matched by an opponent with superior intellect. Onin, you are a formidable warrior by all accounts and meeting you now for the first time, I can see that those stories are likely not exaggerated. I imagine that you could squeeze the life out of anything with your powerful body of coiled muscles, and you look as fast as the stories tell. But, mighty Onin, do you have complete control of your body? Surely, a mighty warrior such as yourself is a master of his own physical vessel if he is the master of so many.”

“That is dumb questions,” Onin said, laughing out loud and looking to others with a smirk of derision. “I am without question the greatest warrior that the Crimson Savannah has ever known, of course I have complete mastery of my own body. It is how I constrict. I feel every inch of my coils as they come into contact with my opponent and wrestle them under my control. I am the master of my body.”

Anansi nodded as the onlookers nodded their agreement with Onin. Surely he was the master of his mighty body, how else could he be so mighty? 

“A demonstration,” Anansi said. “I will weave a web.” As he said this, he moved his two lower arms, hands and fingers into arcane positions, and with the upper set he produced his webbing that was normally transparent, but was enchanted by his hand spells to be visible as a gray color. He wove a web and attached it to the ceiling of the burrow, Anansi is an incredible jumper thanks to his four legs that allowed him to reach the roof of the burrow. He wove a long, thin cylinder of his webbing, a chute woven of gray webbing that was about half as wide as Anansi was. He wove the chute quickly and when he was done it was almost as long as Onin and everyone marveled at the coil of it between Anansi and Onin. 

“To demonstrate my complete control over my body, I will make my way through this chute that is obviously too small.for me to slither through. But because of my complete master over my physical being, not only will I move completely through it, I will do so while the webbing constricts and gets tighter with each passing second.”

Anansi lay down at the end of the chute that was on the ground and as he approached it, his body, including his head, shoulders, eventually his arms, then his torso, hips, and legs, squeezed in on itself enough that he was able to snake his way into the chute of webbing and onlookers made sounds of delight to watch him move thought the entirety of the chute and tumble out of the other end. Anansi’s body returned to its original dimensions as he bowed before the audience of onini who now respected him very much.

“Ges a spider, but he moves like a python,” Anansi heard one of the onlookers say. 

“He moves really well, too!” another said.

“Onin might be fast, but he can’t squeeze himself like that with all those muscles.

Even though the challenge before Onin would have been easy for a snake that fit the dimensions of the chute, Onin was four to five times the size of the shoot, not to mention that Anansi had done it while the diameter of the chute was shrinking. 

“Is it fair for me to move through the same size chute that you did?” Onin asked. “ It should be proportional or this is a rigged contest.”

Anansi agreed and quickly spun a new webbing chute that was larger than the first chute by a factor of Onini’s size relative to Anansi. The new chute was large enough for Anansi to walk though, but Onin would truly have to have a mastery of his body to condense himself and move through it. Internally, Anansi thought that Onin just might lose this challenge and if he did, Anansi had a plan to shame him into traveling with him to the Disc of Jo for training that would make him worthy of the admiration of the onini. 

But Onin is a great warrior, and slithered up to the opening of the larger chute amd paused for a while, long enough that some began to doubt his abilities. Eventually, just as Anansi had, Onin began to squeeze and condense himself to the amazement of the lookers.  His body shrank to fit as he entered the chute of webbing. The onini cheered as he made his way inside the chute and eventually his tail disappeared inside, long before his head began to emerge on the other side. As he neared the end of the chute, Onin began to yell with delight.

“This was hardly even a test! I will enjoy pummeling you for wasting my time with this stupid…” Onin’s voice caught in his throat and it seemed that he was suddenly struggling to breath. “What is happening?” he whimpered. 

“The chute is constricting as you move through it,” Anasi said to the onlookers who were glued to the action and suddenly surprised at Onin’s struggle. They were all silent in their focused interest, both fearful and joyful at the prospect that their mighty warrior king would not be able to complete Anansi’s challenge. “You should finish up quickly if this is too much. It will get tighter in there.”

Onin struggled, so much so that clouds of the Divine Essence in his body began to billow up like exhaust from an overworked machine. He lost control of the muscles of his body and his body began to expand. The gray chute of webbing was stressed and portions of Onin’s body were visible through the strings that held tight despite the stress. 

“Get this webbing off of me!” Onin yelled. “I can’t move!”

The enormity of Onin’s body was completely immobilized by the Anansi’s webbing, but he was panicking, screaming in a way that other onini had never heard from their leader before. They were concerned, but also suddenly very afraid of Anansi who had apparently created a trap that even their mighty warrior king could not escape. They had no desire to get too close to Anansi and risk being webbed up the same way. 

“Why are you not getting me out of here?” Onin continued to yell. 

“I’m afraid that I cannot free you here,” Anansi said as he walked around Onin with one hand at his chin, another scratching the back of his head, and two more crossed at his lower abdomen. “If I were to stretch these webs any further by trying to cut them, it would likely increase the tension and slice you into pieces…”

It seemed that every onini python in the burrow, including Onin, audibly gasped in unison. Some fainted. 

“Free me!” Onin pleaded. “I will do anything, just get me out of here now!”

“I will have to take you to my mother’s Cotton-Wood in the space of Jo’s Disc,” Anansi said thoughtfully and he reached into his bag that was strapped to his back and pulled out the web portal to the home of the Luminary Nyame that he had woven to arrive on the Disc of Gu. He stuck it to a wall of the hovel and then addressed everyone who was watching. “I will drag him through and then bring him back, do not worry. Can anyone assist me? I can just drag him, but that seems like an indignity.”

None of the onini moved and Anansi shrugged, then moved quickly to grab the end of the chute closest to the web portal. He ran through the portal, dragging a very stiff Onin behind him.