A Barrage of Questions

Author’s Note: This is a continuation of Farren’s journey through a limbo world where everyone is trying to reach the peak of a mountain but have a rope tied to their ankle. Start here or with Part 1.

Farren stared at the knot attached to the outcropping of the rock. The slack hung off of it and sloped gently to his hand. When he pulled it, the line straightened and went taught.
A hand on Farren’s shoulder startled him. “Farren. Hey, Farren,” Thessius seemed to be calling from a distance.
“Huh? What?” Farren responded.
“Hey, are you okay?” Thessius said giving Farren a concerned look.
“Yeah I’m fine,” he said as he pulled his eyes away from the knot that attached him to the mountain. As he turned around, he saw a crowd of people gathered around him staring at either him or his knot. Some seemed amazed others were trying to make sense of what was going on. There was even a man who seemed so unamused with the situation that he picked his teeth with his pinky seemingly out of boredom.
Farren stared blankly back at the crowd unsure of what he should do. He gripped the last length of slack he had in his hand as if letting go of it would send him back to where he started.
The crowd gawked at him, and it seemed no one knew what to say. It wasn’t that many people, Farren estimated about twenty. However, the entire time he’d been in this world, he hadn’t seen this many people in one place. The urge to run came to Farren’s mind. He knew the group might be vengeful like Botha in the desert and destroy his neatly woven rope balls, or something even worse.

“Where did all this rope come from?” A man in the audience asked. All of Farren’s ball’s of rope scattered throughout the clearing, but some were in the crowd while others were in front of him.
“It’s the slack that connects me to my rock,” the words were routine for him, but their meaning had changed. Gauging the crowd to see how they responded he noticed looks of curiosity more than anything.
“How did you wind up attached to the mountain?” A woman asked. She had taken the liberty of pulling at the tightly knit ball of rope. Farren fought the urge to shoo her away.
“I don’t know,” Farren said. “I just asked for them to attach me to the biggest rock they had.”
“How did you know that would get you attached to the mountain?” Someone Farren couldn’t make out shouted from the back.
Farren ran the question back in his head. It didn’t make sense to him. In his silence, a few others shouted queries from the crowd. He didn’t listen or understand them. Instead of answering, he asked a question himself, “Can I tell you all a story?”
No one voiced a complaint, so Farren leaned against a rope ball for comfort. After gesturing others to do the same, he filled them in on how he traveled from the base of the mountain and around the world. It was a practiced tale, but now that he knew the ending he was able to tell it in a way that captivated the crowd in front of him.
The crowd listened patiently asking questions throughout the story. When night fell someone started a campfire, and they continued to talk around it. Some of the people were interested in the details of the story while others were obsessed with the concept of his idea to return to his rock as a whole.
Farren finally arrived at the end of the story, and to his surprise, he found that no one had fallen asleep out of boredom. However, he was about to fall asleep out of exhaustion.

Unfortunately, despite the many questions that people asked during the story he found that many people were saving their items for the end. Soon he was struck by a flood of questions at a speed he couldn’t keep up with.
Instead of answering them he announced, “I’m tired.” It felt strange to stand up to the tribe of people and deny them their answers after they waited so patiently to hear his story. However, he had no energy to respond to them. As a concession, he added, “I will answer your questions in the morning.”
He expected protests or even a riot, but that was his tired mind playing tricks on him. The crowd dispersed, and the person who made the fire put it out.
Farren began to make a bed out of the rope he had collected. In his haste and exhaustion, it wasn’t the most comfortable bed he’d made, but he was too tired to care.

The next morning he woke up to a small crowd of people politely milling around him. No one was staring at him, but he could tell each was stealing glances at him wondering when he would wake up and when it would be appropriate to talk to him. Finally, Farren was sick of the charade and sat up on his rope pallet. His shoulder was sore, and his back ached. Despite this, he woke up with the lightness of a new day where he wouldn’t be raveling rope up anymore.
When he had sat up a man kneeled next to him. “Farren, I had a question about your story last night. How did you know the world was round? You left the mountain but wound up at it again. What proved that when you set off, you’d have a chance that you would wind up back at the mountain? Did you study the sun and its shadows?”
A few more people had huddled around a groggy Farren as the man asked his question. Farren looked at him puzzled by the question. “I didn’t know the world was round when I started following my rope.”
“You had to have known. Otherwise, why would you give up all the progress of being at the base of the mountain?”
Farren shrugged, “It was what I had to do.”
The man began to ask him another question or argue, but a woman interrupted him, “What if I follow my rope back and wind up in the middle of nowhere and once I’m at my rock I don’t know how to get back to the mountain?”
Farren thought about this as a few other people chimed in with their agreement. One said, “Going the opposite direction of my rock got me this far. It’s supposed to be a guide, why would I ruin that by going towards it?”
Everyone looked at Farren expectantly. He hadn’t realized that following his rope would lead him to the mountain when he did it. He didn’t even register the idea that someone might return to their rock and not know where to go next. Gesa would be trying to figure out how to cross the ocean at some point not knowing that she could get there by land much quicker. Have I led everyone I met astray like Botha said I would? Farren wondered. Farren felt his brow grow sweaty as he tried to think of an answer to this question.

“I have an answer,” the man who had casually been picking his teeth yesterday said. He looked at Farren as if he was asking for permission to speak.
A heckler from the crowd jeered at the man, “Of course you have an answer Rungson.”
The man ignored the comment and Farren nodded his head encouraging the man to speak and curious to hear the answer himself.
“Aside from the fact that we have all eternity to search for the mountain, we also will have other people’s ropes to follow.”
“What if everyone picks up their rope?” The same heckler asked before Rungson could finish.
The man’s eyes flared with frustration but then subsided, “If everyone has picked up their rope and you are the last one Dickons it serves you right for procrastinating that long. I was going to say that there are also patterns in this world. We’ve all seen it. The forest gets thicker as we get closer to the mountain. If Farren’s story is to be believed, and with the pedigree of ropes he’s brought I believe it should be, he claims that the land is desert and nearly impossible to walk through the further away from the mountain you are.”
Farren nodded with agreement. He’d never put it into words, but the man was right. The landscape could guide a traveler back to the mountain.
“What about the ocean? That’s impossible to travel through.”
Farren began to speak, but someone else came to his defense. “It’s not impossible because Farren did it.”
The man who asked the first question, Dickons, said “This whole scheme seems like a good idea if and only if you are lucky enough to be tied to the mountain. Unfortunately for everyone here, except for Farren, that is not a gift the gods have seen fit to bestow on us. Turning back to get our rock would be an exercise in futility and put us behind square one since we wouldn’t know where the mountain is.”
“We need a guiding direction to travel in,” Someone added on, and looked at Farren for direction.
“Why not the sun like Dickson suggested originally,” Farren said without much confidence.
“We don’t know how to navigate by the sun,” Dickson retorted.
Farren saw Rungson roll his eyes. “Do your knuckles get sore from being dragged on the ground?” He asked the man. Farren made a confused look at the comment while someone else snickered. “You have all the time in this world to figure out how to get to the top of that mountain. You can use some of it learning how to navigate by the sun. It can’t be that hard. It rises in the east and sets in the west.”
“How do we know that’s west?” Someone asked.

Rungson let out a heavy sigh and shared a look with Farren that seemed to say, I can only do so much.
Thessius shouted out, “Directions are only relative to themselves. It could be anywhere as long as it’s consistent. What about the boat Farren? How did you know how to build it?”
“What if it’s not consistent?” a woman asked Thessius before Farren could answer the new questions.
“Stop!” Farren shouted fed up by the whole thing.
Everyone looked at him temporarily halting the bickering that was breaking out amongst people. “I don’t know anything more than you do.” Rungson raised an eyebrow as if to indicate he was interested in how this would pan out.
“I didn’t know the world was round, and I didn’t know how to build a boat. I didn’t know how to knot rope or make a hut in the heat of the desert. Everything I did was a guess. It took me a dozen attempts to figure out how to roll the rope tied right and a dozen more to get it to unravel when I wanted it to.
“I never thought my rock would be the mountain. Honestly, expected to arrive at my rock and have it be a massive boulder at least the size of a tree. If I had gotten to it and it was truly that big, I would have been in trouble. But someone once told me that I was not someone who stays stuck long. If there’s any single trait that has served me well it’s that I refuse to stay in one place for longer than I have to.” He looked at the people in the crowd. Rungson was smiling as Dickons glared at Farren waiting for space to jump in and speak. Farren refused to give it to him.
“Collecting my rope was the best way I found to stay unstuck. It wasn’t foolproof, no plan is. However, it kept me moving. I am going to carry that sentiment forward and begin climbing the mountain today. I hope that all of you adopt the same philosophy in your own way. You don’t have to turn back for your rock, but I encourage you not to stay stuck. I’ve seen plenty of people stuck in one way or another, and I’m sure some of them won’t make it up the mountain because of it. Please, don’t do the same.”
Rungson smiled as someone timidly asked, “won’t you at least teach us how to tie our rope in balls like yours?”
Farren smiled, the sun was already past its high point in the sky, and he didn’t want to lose more of the day getting caught up in more of their endless questions. “Thessius knows how to do it, and if you don’t learn from him, you have eternity to figure it out on your own. I did it, and so can you.”
Dickons muttered something at this loud enough for others to hear but not Farren. Rungson seemed to have heard it but found it reasonable enough to be ignored, so Farren followed suit.
He cleaned up his rope balls and began hiking up the mountain. He let out slack effortlessly no longer worried if he was making progress in the right direction.