Art Pact 181 - Titanor

"Ugh," roared Titanor, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Yellow boulders tumbled away from his tear ducts, rolling down the hillside and demolishing a series of small shacks on the northern outskirts of the city. "I'm getting too old for this shit."

It was a bright morning, a blue sky above and the sun risen high with summertime enthusiasm, but Titanor found it all too much. His head was pounding from the night before, three of his eight legs were twinging uncomfortably with that feeling that presages a cramp, and his mouth felt as though he'd been chewing on a chemical plant, a simile that was confirmed when he reached a tentacle into his mouth and tentatively picked out a few crumbs from between his teeth and found that they were mostly the front half of a fork-lift. He felt groggy from sleep, and there was an uncomfortable pressure in his flame bladder.

"Hey hey, look who's awake!" A cheery voice and the sound of macropodic feet bounding up the hillside. Titanor groaned - he should have been expecting her, of course, but it still seemed to early in the morning. Had he really been rampaging that late last night? He remembered talking to Velocitraktor as they were knocking over some kind of water-tower (still child's play for Titanor, even with his joints aching and that twinge in his backs), but hadn't their conversation been about knocking off early and calling it a night? Velocitraktor was hardly a callow youth itself, its great crushing wheels covered in rust and some sort of greenish mould that it was taking a cream for.

"Hello," he growled, letting seven or eight of the eyes on his left side open up. Kangarex was standing on the hillside just below him, smiling up earnestly like the last girl-scout. Of course, being Kangarex she wasn't actually standing - he often thought that the woman must be allergic to inaction or something, she was physically incapable of remaining still. Seeing that his eyes were open she bounced forward and touched him on one of his shoulders with her little forepaw.

"How are we feeling today?"

"Bloody awful."

She mock-frowned.

"I think," she said, "that someone has been burning the midnight oil at both ends! Haha!"

"Very good," he said, getting a bundle of tentacles underneath his chest so that he could push himself up to a more comfortable position. The pressure in his flame bladder relented somewhat, to his relief, and the cause was revealed to be a small farm house and its associated out-buildings that he must have fallen asleep on top of. They were rubble now, of course, but the pile of bricks and concrete they had collapsed into had been high enough to jab him in the belly.

"Oh good lord," said Kangarex. "Now, you know what Doctor Smashalot says about sleeping on buildings!"

"Is he against it?"

"He's against it!" she said, beaming and nodding as though she were talking to a child.

Damn Doctor Smashalot, he wanted to say. Damn his stupid prognostications and his ridiculous health fads. Last year the doctor had told everyone that drinking the river Thames would bring back a youthful sheen to tired scales, so of course everyone had been on at him to go to Britain. Well, there was no way he was travelling all the way across the Atlantic ocean, and walking across the top of the world was apparently out (Smashalot also opining at the time that cold air aged the skin five times faster than warm air). Besides, as he'd pointed out to Velocitraktor, how many people could drink the Thames? The first person to get there would drink it, sure, but it would probably take decades for the river to return to its full glory. He wasn't waiting around decades.

But he said nothing, staying his tentacles for the sake of Kangarex. She was just too earnest, and even as grumpy as he felt that morning, he could not bring himself to step on the poor creature. The sister of one of his grand-daughters-in-law, Kangarex was the sort of monster that one could like and feel sorry for at the same time, and this quality of pathetic endearingness made her - if not the best carer, at least the best that he could think of. His sons had been on at him for the last two centuries to bring in someone to look after him, and at least Kangarex had some things in common with him: a particular love of helicopter-swatting, for instance. Perhaps he could persuade her to take a trip down to the airport, he thought.

"Are you excited for the get-together?" she said, bursting his bubble.

Oh god, the get-together. He closed all of his eyes again, wrapped his tentacles around his head.

"I'll take that as a no, shall I?"

"Yes. I mean no," he added. "Look, I'm an old monster, you're young. These family things are for the middle-aged, which means neither of us. Why don't you take the day off and see that burrowing monstrosity thing you're always pining after."

"His name is Robert," Kangarex said haughtily. "And he's a tunnelling monstrosity."

Titanor levered himself up until he was standing, although he had to stop halfway to let the twinge in his back go. He peered at Kangarex with the eyes on that side, squinted, moved closer and then slightly further away until the young monster was in focus.

"Hasn't anyone ever told you it's rude to correct your elders?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "You, frequently. And equally frequently you tell me to call you out when you're unintentionally racist."

"So I did," he nodded. He took a long sniff of the air. Age had dulled his nostrils, and all he could make out were the most pervasive smells - the sea of silage from the crushed farm below, the smoke from a heavy-goods vehicle that had been overturned by one of Kangarex's bounds and was now blazing at the side of the road a few hundred feet down. "Mmmm," he hummed, closing his eyes. "I love the smell of carnage in the morning. Reminds me of being young again."

He took one creaky step, straightened himself up, then extended a claw-ended tentacle to Kangarex. She took it in one tiny clawed-hand, curtseying politely.

"Come on then," he said. "Let's get this shindig over with."