Search Results for 'age'
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Search Results
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In reply to: Strings of Nines
With a temper he may have inherited from his mother (albeit adoptive), the shanghaied boy was proving to be quite a hassle to contend with. Minky was exhausted.
First Yikes (that was the given name of the boy) had cried, pouted, and when gagged enough so that he wouldn’t be heard, he had then refused to walk, and even threatened to hold his breath till he would die. Good luck with this one, had laughed Minky (who had tried it before, but it never worked, and bossy old Messmeerah had promptly kicked him back to work). Actually, he was more annoyed with the refusing to walk kind of tantrum, because that meant he had to trudge with the boy on his back or on a luge, all the way to the evil lair —which wasn’t that evil, by the way, if you managed to focus away from the bloody stained altar…
But there was something more serious he was quite anxious about —besides his bossy and irritable, though everlastingly beauteous, boss. He feared a certain purple dragon was on their trail…
If I were you, came the ruffled sound from the makeshift luge that wouldn’t be the dragon I’d be worried about… Yikes was inwardly beautifully laughing (a trait he may have inherited by osmosis from Arona) thinking of how terrible Mandrake could be if asked to fetch something —a task he was too proud to refuse, and yet that he loathed to accomplish, as it was more fit to a canine than to his subtle feline standard.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
Meanwhile, Landelin was perfecting his blubbit duct-tape traps.
Landelin was a quite reclusive man, some Peaslanders considered him even a bit mentally challenged with a reputation for having teafing as a secondary hobby. Yes, secondary. Before teafing, came duct tape ; duct tape always came first.
Landelin had been fond of duct tape since he was a kid, since he’d glued his first nanny to the cellar door and then went off buying more duct tape at the local grocery store with the money he’d teafed from her. Teafing always came second.Plagued as all Peaslanders with blubbits, he’d reasoned, quite reasonably for someone as mentally challenged as him, that blubbits were like worries and warts (and he knew quite a bit about the former and the latter), and none could stand a chance if administered the right amount of duct tape. By right amount, he meant, as much as needed to cover them in silver linings and eventually, maybe erradicate them —but that was a bit besides the point anyway.
Pity there wasn’t more than a few blue pelts’ hair to teaf from a blubbit, he thought quite reasonably again, as his last prototrap worked like a charm and had a few blubbits suffocating under a fair amount of stickiness.
Well, from blubbits, perhaps not so much, but from Peaslanders waiting for naught but a savior, maybe… After all the other treatments have failed, they surely would turn, as they all do, willingly or forcibly, to the raw power of taping.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“Are you saying that all we need is a giant blinking teabag?” inquired Lilac politely.
“Yeah, I think if you get the guage right on the net, it should work like a dream.”
“And what do we do with a giant teabag full of volcano dust?”
“Lava dust tea? Are you kidding? Sells like hotcakes in some dimensions. The bridge tarts are always smuggling it through portals.”
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
Good thing for Pee and the others deep in the furcano; having no head to start with, they didn’t suffocate from the heinous Mother Blubbit attack.
Nothing of that sort could be said for the adventurer in the Fly Boat, as they sadly had to go back to the heliport, owing to the dreadful weather condition.
“WHAT IN THE NAME OF TARTINUN IS HAPPENING NOW!?” asked in a terribly raucous voice Pee, unable to see his way through the smoke. (Tartinun was the goddess of Peagemite, a holy yeastly paste made of fermented peas, consumed by shamans in order to bridge the gaps to the Great Unhead Aknown).
Unable to withstand the sheer amount of decibels of that raucous cry of despair, Mother Blubbit suddenly drop dead of a spleen failure.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
In reply to: Strings of Nines
“Arona, it hasn’t made any sense for ages.” replied Yikesy sagely. “If you ask me, it’s time to start a new thread.”
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Arona sighed and flipped randomly through the pages of her book. Try as she might she could not make any sense of it.
“You have a go, Yikesy,” she said. “See if you can figure out what it is about.”
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“These old ezines and blogs are fascinating” remarked Periwinkle, passing the one she had just been reading to Daffodil. “Thank goodness some folks had the foresight to print some of them!”
“I know, imagine if they hadn’t. We’d have no artefacts for the collection. Well, we have all those flat discs, but no way to decipher them. Oh, did I tell you? Bignonia found something even older than the discs!”
“NO!” exclaimed Periwinkle “Do tell!”
“Yes, even older! Funny looking contraption, with two reels and a ribbon. An information storage device, so they say, although they haven’t discovered how to decipher it.”
“I wonder why we’re still not simply accessing that information without, well, without messing around with the physical contraption, you know?”
“Wouldn’t be any point in being here in the first place, if we weren’t going to mess around with physical things, silly” replied Daffodil.
There was no answer to that, so Periwikle didn’t answer. She continued to thumb through the printed pages.
Periwinkle and Daffodil sat together on the patio in the warm spring sunshine, sipping lemonade
and leafing through the papers. Bright white clouds in cartoon shapes romped across the blue sky,
and the birds chattered in the trees,
occasionally landing on the printed pages and cocking their heads sideways to read for a moment, before flying off to tell their friends, which was usually followed by a raucous group cackling.
“Dear Goofenoff” read Daffodil, “This one looks interesting Peri, someone here is asking for advice on a problem.”
“What’s a “problem”, Daffy?” asked Periwinkle. “For that matter, what does the word “advice” mean? Oh, never mind” she said as she noticed Daffodil rolling her eyes, “I’ll look it up in my pre shift dictionary of defunct words.”
“She’s asking the Snoot too, about the same problem. Oh, I think I’ve heard of them! It’s coming back to me, the old Snoot’n‘Goof team, they were quite famous in the beginning of the century, I remember hearing about them before in a Shift History discussion.”
“Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of them, but then, I’ve never been into history like you, dear. So what is this “problem” all about, then?”
“I’ll read it out to you, it’s way too convoluted to put in a nutshell. Lordy, they sure did complicate matters back then, it’s almost unbeleivable, really, but anyway, here goes:
Dear Goofenoff,
I don’t know what to do! I am confused about which probable version of a blog freind, let’s call him MrZ, I have chosen to align with. The first probable version was ok, nothing to worry about, and then I drew into my awareness the probable versions of MrZ that some of my freinds had chosen to align with….”
“Blimey”, interrupted Periwinkle, who was starting to fidget. “Is it much longer?”
“It’s alot longer, so be patient. Where was I? Oh yes:
“….and while that was very interesting indeed, and led to lots of usefully emotionally heated discussions, I started to align with their probable version, at times, although not consistently, which led to some confusion. So then I had a chat with someone who was more in alignment with my original probable version, although there were aspects of that probable version that were a little in alignment with the other folks probable version, notwithstanding. I suppose I was still in alignment with the other folks probable version when it came to my attention that there was another individual that might be aligning with a probable version, and my question is, in a nutshell, is it any of my business which probable version the new individual on the scene is aligning with?”
“Well, I can tell you the answer to that!” exclaimed Periwinkle.
Daffodil rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear, WE know the answer, but the point is, SHE didn’t know the answer at the time, which is why she asked Goofenoff.”
“If you ask me, she knew the answer all along” Periwinkle intuited. “What did Goofenoff say anyway?”
“He said:
Are you requiring a short or a long answer?”
Daffodil turned the page to continue reading. She frowned, and flicked through a few pages.
“What a shame, some of these pages appear to be missing! Now we’ll never know what Goofenoff said.”
Periwinkle laughed. “Well, never mind that anyway, have you seen the random story quote today? Rather synchronistic I’d say, listen to this bit:
Illi felt much better, and was sitting at the breakfast table, basking in the warm shafts of sunlight filtering in through the window, and listening to the birds singing in the lemon tree outside.”
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
While Doily was having her back turned in utter bewilderment, Muckus put the icons back to the way they were —he really didn’t expect to have headless Peaslanders (some less headless than the others too) remarking any of that signalization stuff (and least of all the blond Doily who still managed to forget to maintain her head fast on her shoulders, as she had not yet found another replacement for her lost head fasterer).
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“Finally the answer we need! Let’s release the damn bird and get back home now! Besides its cage needs cleaning and it’s starting to smell, and I can’t stand this place any longer…” Doily couldn’t be stopped.
Foolishly getting by that that Doily had understood most and perhaps all of the Cloud’s mysterious riddle, and that she even had managed to remember it, by a chance even slimmer than that of crossing the Eight’s Portal alive, Pee agreed with a nod of his neck.
Once the birds’ released (with a good manly slapping as the feathery creature was a bit reluctant and groggy from being rocked in its cage), they were instantaneously and quite unsurprisingly back again near the Saucerer’s house, all safe in their beloved Peasland, ravaged by blubbits holes.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“There is one man to whom I am indebted,” said Shar, with a faraway look in her eyes.
“Blimey, who’s that then Shar?”
“Enric Lemoon is his name. One day he said words to me I will never forget, and at that moment, I knew that the most important thing in the world was that I learn to speak like him.”
“Oh you do tell a good story, Shar. Go on then! I am all goggle eared. What’d that Enric chappy say to you?”
“He said, the grumpy old cat must be white of old age by now.”
“Cor!” said Mavis in awe. “Bloody marvelous! Was it a code? You know, one of them brain teasers like?”
Shar looked at Mavis pityingly and shook her head. “It was poetry, Mavis. Poetry.”
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Messmeerah (Winky) Maymhe, High Priestess of the Pendulous and Loose Otherworldly Threading, was going for a bath into the Pool of Rejuvenation. Her ineffable beauty had started to show the early signs of time tampering —signs she’d learnt to notice as soon as they’d appear. Luckily, the moons were in perfect alignment for the rituals of Spring Beautusk*.
News were good, very good indeed —which would certainly help in maintaining her perfect brow and forehead in pristine smoothness.
News were so good that she’d sent her minion Minky fetch the boy just right after her white crow Saggin had came back with news of finding him… after all those years (not that years did matter to her anyway, she prided herself on that).It’d been close to an eternity, and she weighted her words… (in actuality it was a few teens and futile years at most) that she’d been trying to recover the boy, but the dwarfs had played her, and had managed to hide him from her sight.
She had not thought he could be concealed by anyone powerful enough, and it was surely not by the magic of that headless Malvina and her pesky dragons. In fact, the boy had been concealed even after Malvina and her menagerie had left the boy and his caretaker. She was thinking the caretaker in question had a concealment charm far more powerful she thought could exist.But Minky would surely take care of that.
—
- It should be said that one of the effects of the rituals of Spring Beautusk were a slight stiffness of the overall face (and other dipped body parts), which earnt Messmeerah the cute and albeit ironic sobriquet of Winky, as she hardly managed to blink and was often victim of bouts of winking when she tried too hard.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Yikesy didn’t want to sound ungrateful, nor did he want to hurt Arona’s feeling (all matters of age were a touchy subject at home, even and especially for ageless Arona), nevertheless he did find her a tad on the mother hen side.
After all, he was nearly 18 now.In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
The Peasland Majorburgmester rubbed his hands with an evil glee.
Fwick was knee deep in kneading for what appeared to be a lunatic idea bound to failure, and more importantly, it’s been weeks that no one had heard back from the expedition to the Eighth Dimension… And frankly, anyone having spent more than a few days in the Eighth Dimension usually was never to be heard of again —or heard speak anything intelligible for that matter, which didn’t make much difference either.
In fact, there had been some reports of sightings of the poor souls’ dog, what was its name already, Gandfleur or something equally ridiculous. But a single dog was hardly a problem, and now he couldn’t see how Peasland would be able to avoid the unavoidable blubbits dominion over Peaslanders.
He’d made that surer than sure; he’d gone again no later than yesterday, concealed under a waterproof floak (a floating cloak for inundated part of the lands), deep into the heart of Peasland’s plains now ridden in burrows to feed the breading mother of all blubbits a healthy dose of blunips. It had cost him most Mungibs he thought he would ever allow to part with, but it was Mungibs well placed. Soon people would plead for a real game changer. And he knew well who would step forward, and it was nothing like those headless twats.He was in such a jolly mood, he’d called for a party. Well not officially called that, of course —Peaslanders were such worryworts about their crops and the famine that may occur… But a little friendly gathering to celebrate their heroes gone to the Eighth for answers. What a masquerade.
He was indeed in such a jolly mood that he took the sinewy and allwardly beautiful Lady Fin Min Hoot by the waist, and invited her to a delirious dance —it was indeed a dandy day for dancing— and for a little after-hour in his carriage when they are done jiggling their bodyparts (at least in public).
That was then, all tied up in leather ribbons and pillows’ owl’s feathers, when he (and Lady Fin) heard the raucous voice calling.
Gnarfle !
Yes, that was it! that was the stupid name of the dog!…How come they’d managed to come back?!
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“Well, I’m not eating bitter batter, even if it has got butter in it. I’m going out dancing, are you coming?”
“Dang it, yes! Let’s dance, darling, let’s dance! It’s a dandy day for dancing, I’m decidedly dapper today ~ and dashing and daring, dammit!”
“Come on then you cute cuddly chickpea, my carriage careers round the corner now, to catch you at the curb. Come, cherished chum, come cavorting with me!”
In reply to: Strings of Nines
“We walk, Ia’eh and Minkah, Desher and I,” Elizabeth read the email from Hypatia, “ towards the dark ridge of stone where the books lie hidden, awaiting the day they should be found again…..When Cleopatra ruled, the books numbered 400,000…and this, I think, is true. By the time of Theon of Alexandria, an age in which the books were no loner in the Great Library of the Palace of the Ptolemies, which was also no longer, but housed instead the “daughter” library of the Serapeum, they numbered 360,000. Those lost to the Bishop of Theophilus amounted to a tenth of these. But no matter if full half were lost, that Minkah brought out from Alexandria so many amazed me then; it amazes me still. He not only carried them here, but brought back an account of where each cave was sited, and which jars were placed in which cave.”
“Godfrey, didn’t we know a Minky once, who was a sort of a servant?”
“We did indeed, Liz, you were the one who inserted him into the story, surely you remember?”
“Well, the name rings a bell, Godfrey, but where did we meet him?”
Godfrey snapped his fingers and as if by magic, an excerpt from the Reality Play appeared:
“Just then a funny little man with a huge cheeky grin appeared and held out a tray. Smoothies! Coconut and berry smoothies, and pink cakes, croissants”
“Croissants!” interrupted Elizabeth.
“… and oranges, and a box of cadbury’s chocolates…”
“Don’t remind me about Cadbury’s” groaned Elizabeth. “I simply can’t bear it that they’ve blinked into another dimension”
Godfrey continued: “ Dory slurped and munched and gobbled and slurped some more, and underneath where the chocolate was, she saw a brochure.
On the front cover was a picture of a cave. OOHH A CAVE! Dory loved caves! Let’s go to the cave today, Minky! she said to the funny fellow with the impish grin. Minky winked.”“He was going to take Dory to the caves!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Why didn’t I finish that story thread!”
“There’s no need to wring your hands like that, Liz” said Godfrey soothingly. “You can continue it now!”
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
When Fwick was gone, the Majorburgmester started to grind his teeth in an annoyed manner, fumbling through his notes.
“How dare he! Killing my precious blubbits! And even if he manages to bread that stinking spider, which I highly doubt, that clown won’t live long enough to even kill the first of my dear ones!”
The Majorburgmester was hoping his plan of Peasland domination would come to fruition soon. And then all the Mungibbs in the world would be his, MWAHAHAHAH.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“What?” The Majorburgmester of Peasland almost laughed of surprise at the incongruity of Fwick con Troll’s idea. “You’re telling that this…”
“Little spider, yes”
“Contains a potent venom that could wipe the blubbits off the face of Peasland?”
“Absolutely, dear Majorburgmester”
“Are you out of your Fwicking mind, Fwick? What breading this nasty spider could possibly bring us any better than a plague of crop-eating blubbits in rut?”
“I was actually talking of breeding them, sir” Fwick objected
The Mayor continued unperturbed “Besides, we already have our fierce constable Stoll drill the mythic Eight Dimension for answers.”
“That would be placing a lot of trust in that foolish venture, I’m afraid to say, Majorburgmester. To date, very few people have managed to return safely.”
“Oh, who cares if they ever bloody come back Fwick! Come on! All we need to do is extort the answers from his spouse who’s kept all their heads in a safe place, I have no doubt of that.”
“Well… I wouldn’t place my head on this bet if I were you…”“Ah, bugger off then with your stinking spider, and do your bloody experiments… As long as it doesn’t involve my name, and especially in case any misguided and sad assassination should occur, ahahaha. I’m joking of course.” The Mayor’s face (which was framed and hanged on the wall of the Majorburgmester Hall’s main office) suddenly shut any hint of humanity that could have been left on it.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
Meanwhile somewhere else in the Eight’s, where the cuckoo sang the new year’s song
Harvey had been quick to wish his friends Aspidistra a merry new year full of reindeer pee by the gallon dripping from the roof. That’s how they wished the best to their friends here. And sure he wanted the best for Aspidistra.
Now he had to find the shaman, because that shadow leaping on the wall was that much he couldn’t bear. He had to buy that new light sprayer and have it cursed by the shaman of the Space Bar of the Fool Breadth (or was it Foul Breath?) to have it move to the light, and quick, that frigging bugger of a shadow.
In the meantime, he firmly believed that were he to keep being merry, it would repel it away further and further.
So, his mood was twittery, and he felt like singing, and dancing, and hoola hooping with all the furniture and cutlery available in the mouldy cupboards all finely balanced on his nose and appendages, all the way down to the metro.In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
The poor Peaslanders were utterly disoriented by the blatant lack of sense in the Eighth Dimension. It was such a blessing they had for most of them already lost their head, kept safe by a dear member of the family.
Once in front of them, the glowing figure uttered ominously:
“opened everyone eye ball,
Worserversity nonsense portal deep
sheila Elizabeth bird gone surprise
come speak thread
face cat Godfrey later create”And then the figure disappeared in a fit of oink oink’s.
“I think it’s her shoes that make the strange sucking sounds in the mud” aptly remarked little Pickel.
“How come you know it was a ‘her’, it could have been a cloud as far as I know…” retorted Autie Toot who never got a chance to get a good look, with her head upside down in her arms.“Silence!” ordered Pee Stoll more raucously than he had wished to “We need to concentrate! This riddle may be the clue to the plague of blubbits, can’t you see?!”
“Well… It’s not that easy, you know” Auntie Looh objected sheepishly, while still struggling with her garments as well as with her head.“I think it’s fairly simple” ventured S’illy (whom nobody ever listened to, probably owing to her tender age as well as her melodious voice) “We got to find the Worseversity, they probably have worked on a cure; our contacts there will be a sheila called Elizabeth… and a Godfrey will provide a cat to eat the bird and put us back to our dimension…”
“Darn riddle!” sweared Pee furiously who hadn’t paid any attention “It’s probably just another bunch of nonsense!”
“I guess we’ll just go anywhere then!” merrily suggested the Aunts each going in opposite directions while the bird rolled its eyes.
