“Hey, I’m getting’ there,” he replied, taking the coffee with a grin. He held it in front of him, but didn’t drink yet, as he was still rather absorbed in his storytelling. “Okay, so. Two weeks, I’m this guy’s stooge. I hafta do whatever he says, and the only way I get out of this is if I get done with the task he set for me. So I’m thinking, I gotta find a loophole. It’s all in the wording.”
He began to gesture loosely with the coffee cup. “His exact words were, ‘serve me dutifully until such a time as I have been satisfied with your diligence in the conspiracies against me.’ Apparently he thought he had to put on airs or something.” Lefty snorted. It wasn’t the same truncated gesture that most humans made; it was more like a full-blown exhale and decidedly equine in nature. It was a small reminder that the leather-clad man standing in front of Ami was only shaped like a human. For now. “I told him I spoke plain English, but that ticked him off. So anyway, I’m workin’ on a way to get out of this, and it’s so simple that I miss it for a while. I just got to uncover some kind of conspiracy, and then get him to tell me good job. That counts as being satisfied, in my book.”
He went on, “The trouble was, nobody was conspiring against him. He actually had some decent friends. I think the only time any one of his paranoid delusions came true was when I visited him.” He grinned crookedly. “So I figure I gotta do something. I start leaving suggestions in his friends’ dreams. Tell ‘em he’s doing nasty stuff--stealing and lying and talking bad about them behind their backs. I tell him something completely different, that someone is spreading rumors and that his friends are involved in bad stuff and generally getting him wound up. Sooner or later it all kind of boils over and there’s this big knock-down drag-out three way fight. And in the end, he thinks everyone was out to get him the whole time." Lefty was aware that he had potentially ruined those friendships forever, but he felt he was justified. That was what you got for screwing with a nightmare.
“Then I gotta kiss his ass and tell him how sorry I am it had to end like that. And he says, ‘You did what you could,’ which was good enough for me. I laugh and his face and tell him it\'s time to split.” He took a deep breath. “And I started to. But the bastard threw a horseshoe at me! He had one nailed over his door. Iron freaking horse shoe.” He paused uncertainly, and then decided to apparently trust Ami with another tidbit of nightmare lore. “I don’t like iron. It burns us nightmares.” He started to take a sip of his coffee, then paused, pulling it away before he could. “Wait. Where was I?”
He blinked. “Oh, right. Iron. So. It hurts a whole fucking lot. I kind of freak out like… uh, like that one time, and he sees my true form. Then he freaks out. Then I freak out some more, and I make a break for it. Bust out his whole damn window.” He looked particularly proud about that. He set the coffee down, because his hand gestures were becoming more and more animated, and he was in danger of spilling it. “And I just run. Man, I just keep running. I can’t change back, I’m out in the open, there’s some angry guy yelling at me through his window, I hurt, and I am not even paying attention to where I’m going. And when I stop…”
He paused dramatically. “Train tracks. Standing on the wooden part. The rails are steel, so they don’t bother me. And I take a moment to catch my breath--not that I was actually breathing, not having, y\'know, lungs at the time--and then there’s this… this huge sound--” Lefty’s descriptive powers apparently failed him then. "--and there’s a train! Heading right for me! So I high-tail it out of there and run summore.” He paused. “I mean, it was kind of far away. Far enough so that I didn’t notice the light right away. I actually could’ve stayed there for like five more minutes and been okay. But still. It could have hit me. What the hell, we\'ll say it almost did. Makes for a better story.” He scooped up the coffee and took a swig. “So there it is. The story of how I almost for hit by a train. Got any cream or sugar for this?”
