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“Last call for Wingarailicamdeneliarkarmellyukiran! All passsengers wishing to disembark at the Distortium, please queue up on the left. Passengers for the Retortium, on the right please.”
Arona gazed fondly at her bottle of Nhum before putting it carefully back in her bag. You couldn’t be too careful with bottles of Nhum. They weren’t easy to come by after all.
“What on earth is that? asked Mandrake.
“That, my dear Mandrake,” replied Arona smugly, “Is my bottle of Nhum.” She smiled enigmatically.
“It has been metaphysically proven” (Mandrake snorted rather rudely, interrupting Arona’s retort) “That cheap copies sold in markets are just as effective as brand name products.” Arona glared at the cat and continued, “The only difference is in the mind of the buyer. In fact, one could go so far as to say ~ although one wouldn’t, normally ~ that buyers of brand name products are…”
“Don’t say it!!” shouted Mandrake, looking anxiously over his shoulder, “Don’t say it!”
Arona stopped in her tracks, wondering what on earth was the matter with Mandrake.
Shelly Dwelling, horrifed ~ naturally enough ~ at the mention of butter and parsley, was immensely relieved to see Frobisher the frog gliding along in his electric wheelchair. “Hop on, Shelly!” he whispered urgently “My wheelchair is super fast, I’ll get you out of this pickle in a jiffy!”
“Frobisher! Oh my godfrogs, it’s good to see you! What timing! But I can’t hop!”
“Well neither can I now, without my legs” he replied, “But you can climb up my wheel, can’t you?”
“Well ok, but don’t move, I’m on my way, this may take a while…”
“Hurry, Shelly! Hurry up! I can smell butter melting, there’s no time to lose!”
Unfortunately for Shelly who was a quarter of the way up the left wheel, Frobisher engaged his electric motor and sped off into the long grass. It would have been far too risky to wait.
“Hang on, Shelly! This will be the ride of your life!” he called, as Shelly spun round the giant Ferris Wheel.
“I suppose this is why your name is Frobisher Ferris” she replied through gritted teeth.
The TIme TRavel PArty YUrt had just landed on Ferris Island, in Frobisher Bay, for a special performance of the Aurora Borealis. Dr Ferris of Frobisher House, Dolphin Square, was one of the guests, oddly enough.
“No good pulling that horrid face at me,” said Arona sternly. “The cheap copy of Nhum I bought in the market appears to have numbed my brain. Not to mention the strange hallucinations of a frog in an electric wheelchair I have been getting recently. “
Not far from there, Buckberry had found a nice shrub of ripe and juicy buckberries, probably the very last of the season, and he was torn between his duties towards sweet (albeit bossy) Arona, and his voracious appetite for said fruity treats.
Not only that, but as improbable as it seems, he had managed to crack the riddle of the double U followed by strings of letters to finish in a N… He was actually going to collect Vincentius in the apparently good, but finally not so good place, and go to the true destination followed by Yickesy and the bunch. Surely, being a flying beast had its advantages, even compared to being a semi-god.
Speaking of which, Vicentius was at the moment in hot waters, surrounded by a crowd of hapries (a merrier version of harpies), who were dying for a taste of the guy.
Aaah, too bad for the juicy shrub, but surely Arona would be devastated by the loss of her chippendale, and even a dragon could not afford that.Arona had indeed been devastated by the loss of her chippendale.
“Oh, thank you Buckberry,” she exclaimed joyfully. “My great Aunt, twice removed on my father’s side, Auntie Shelly Dwelling, gave me this beautiful chippendale tea set when I was just a little girl … before she disappeared in very strange circumstances … or so the story goes. Clever you to find it. I can make Nhum tea now!”
“This makes no sense at all,” sniffed Mandrake, privately wondering if he had better dispose of the Nhum when Arona was otherwise occupied. He did prefer things to make sense and clearly this Nhum Bhum stuff was messing with Arona’s head. Which is silly enough at the best of times.
“Vincentius is taking a long time. Perhaps we should see if he is okay and then we can all have a nice cup of tea in my beautiful tea set,” enthused Arona.
“Oh, that’s just because I was making you side-dishes for your breakfast, sweetie”, a Vincentius arms full with fresh fruits of improbable sizes and colours said as he came out of the nearby grove. “Though, I beg to differ with Mandrake, a bottle of Nhum would go great with those, especially the grogonuts.”
“Then, we can go find Yicks’.”
Despite all his best efforts, Yickesy had not yet managed to escape the crutches of chatty Minky who was herding the disparaged group of tourists to weirder and weirder spots.
Minky suggested they continued their trip on camelephant’s back, a somewhat surprising mix between camel and elephant. She said her uncle had a special breed in a farm nearby and that she would be happy to take some news.
When Yickesy heard that, he thought that maybe they could jump on the occasion and maybe leave silently when Minky would be busy with her uncle.Arona was too busy with her chippendale tea set and mumbled something unclear that Minky took as a ‘yes’, and Vincentius rolled his eyes, as someone had to do it at that moment.
Mandrake sighed. That trip on dragon’s back was a fast and bumpy ride. They’d landed right in the middle of the group of tourists in no time at all, and surprisingly Arona, still high on Nhum spiked tea had failed to notice much of what had just happened, let alone that her progeny was in the midst of them.
Even more surprisingly, the tourists had failed to notice their colourful, noisy and dusty landing, not to say the purple dragon itself that Vincentius had to refrain eating one of the big two-humped beasts. That dragon cloaking magic, was a hell of a powerful jinx.“Strange,” Arona said in her mild stuporous state “am I missing some events there? and… is it me, or that travel guide is a cross-dresser?”
And casting a suspicious look at Vincentius, almost blushing “and how did I enter into that hot pink bikini?”
It was a great relief for Arona to realise the hot pink bikini was just another figment of her slightly muddled brain. Shaking her head she desperately tried to work out what was happening, and who all these strangers were. Would there be enough tea cups to go around? she worried.
“Hem, well…” Vincentius said after a moment, not wanting to upset Arona too much “I just though you’d blend in more stealthily with that bikini, look at that naked green fairy over there, she’s far more outrageous…”
“What, darling?” Arona couldn’t make sense of what Vincentius was saying; “are you suggesting this unfit piece of garment is not a figment of my imagination? And pray tell, how could I’ve even got myself into that without noticing?”
“I’m afraid you’re unmistakably regaining your acute sense of analysis and continuity honey. As far as the clothes change is concerned, be reassured, I’ve been trained to do many things in my life, such as extracting a wisdom horn off a charging rhinope in pain, so when it comes to matters of bikini, I could have done it twice without even looking.”
Needless to say, Arona was aghast at such blunt honesty.“I’m not saying that’s what I did, though” said Vincentius, and Arona almost slapped him in the face, but the nhum was still strong in her brain.
So aghast and speechless was Arona, she’d just managed to break the dragon’s invisibility spell apparently.
She still managed to blurt out “don’t even bother darling ; it wouldn’t go so well with your crutches.”
Mandrake rolled his eyes, something he had learned from Arona, which made Yickesy chuckle.
Arona sighed, rolling her eyes twice and asked: “So who want some Nuhm tea?”
“Where does that tea set come from”, asked Vincentius.Arona blushed and looked furtive. “I told you Vincentius! Pay attention! My Great Auntie Shelly Dwelling gave it to me and clever Buckberry found it.”
“A likely story,” smurked Mandrake.
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