rumbleHUM

  I. Ronald sat cross-legged in the middle of the coliseum on a floor of sand and blood, bone and tattered clothing. Above him stretched a black night pinpricked with tiny yellow-white twinkles. ‘Around one of those twinkles spins Earth,’ he thought. Around the top of the coliseum, a set of mellowed lights hummed a low intensity blue providing just enough illumination to show a crowd of humanoids of various shapes and sizes. They rumbled in a foreign language, something Ronald believed to be a hybrid of Chinese and bear. In addition to the language, they all shared similar skin tone, a pale yellow akin to sun-bleached daisy petal, large eyes which fell deep into their misshapen skulls, and long thin digits attached to a pair of meaty palms. Although most of the beings had hair, it grew in odd places and in odd ways. Some had long tails, for that is the way that Ronald thought of them, growing from the hollowed cheeks and from the thin arms. The hue of the tails varied in every shad