Search Results for 'comfortable'

His shift was almost over. Ed wondered why the funny guy had looked so insistently as his hands. That was not the part people usually stared at… He shrugged — people are always stressed when they get their new identity, probably a bit overwhelmed by the realization of how direly they liked their comfortable boundaries and restrictions.
Some people weren’t just ready for such a change. Actually, it had taken himself quite a few years as well, that it within relativilastic timing, all considering.

He looked outside the window, it was night already, but at least the rain had stopped.
Usually, he would wait a little more until the brunt of the office people had disappeared from the overcrowded stairs, escalators or “moving staircases” as they liked to call it.

But today he was feeling like leaving early. Liz’ would be waiting for him.
Putting on his raincoat, with his murse in one hand, he twirled his mustache with a grin and the other one.

Lord R’eye, the one-eyed ruler of the known universe, was known by many names, a great lot of them completely forgotten by the masses. He had to constantly reinvent Himself, borrow new disguises, create factions, sprinkle in a few miracles, create order ab chao and voilà.

He owned a few bodies, strategically placed here and there, one of his favourite in Geneva, quite involved in banking affairs. His bodies were a rare indulgence, and he couldn’t stay too long either, as his massive energy could easily get stuck with the lot of them, down to density.
Overall, he was much more comfortable managing his immense wealth “up there”, in the cosmic realms he had helped shape. So many underlings were ready to carry on his biding, and apart from a few small number of very close ergo very dangerous confidants, many of the minions didn’t even know each other, or that they were, for the most part, owned by Him, and part of the same team.

This was a cut-throat business, He had to admit, and everything was based on it. Manipulation and deceit, coercion, coaxing, anything necessary to control and manage the Empire.

One of those confidants, Lord Apex had been summoned and appeared almost instantly.
He had this charming archangelic halo and aura, but Lord R’eye would have none of it. A correction was in order, the latest results were extremely concerning.

“My Lord?” Apex asked in his mellifluous voice.
“My dear Apex, remind me what responsibility I gave you last century?”
“Of course my Lord, the Innovation project, the Great Disclosure and Holographic Contact projects, amongst other proj…”
“And how much progress have we had with those?”
“Well, my Lord surely knows that so much herding is delicate. The interference with Lord Bael’s projects too, you should know…”
“The Desert and Green Revolutions projects, indeed. A great success, so much pain and anguish! That’s what I’m talking, you should learn from Bael.”
“But my Lord, that has caused quite a conundrum with the Mars simulation, which, by way of fractal holographic recurrence, could well impact the whole delicate matrix we weave…”
“Stop your angel speech, Me’dammit. Plain Anguish, so I can understand every word. The Hell pits cannot wait to have you, so you better give some good explanation.”
“I mean, my Lord, that were the sheeple able to glimpse that the Mars experiment is but a reflection of a deception of grander scale in the cosmic realms, that the aliens saviours, or whatever saviours or… masters of any genre, are just ways to fleece them off their power… “
“Everything would unravel like a pile of dominos.” Lord R’eye’s voice made very clear that he had full grasp of the situation. “So,” he continued with the nicest menacingest voice “you better make sure that doesn’t happen.”

He dismissed Apex with a wave of a thought.

If the net of illusions unravelled before they have time to create the Earth 5th Dimension in time to double their profit, it would certainly be a disaster.

A few humans lost through the gaps were a hard to accept reality, but so long as they could cut the losses, it was not dramatic. But they were talking another order of magnitude. It could be a definitive blow. It always had been an issue when the net of illusion became too big in the past. They had bigger and bigger holes. So they had to start again, destroy, and recreate civilisations.
Stupid humans, if only they knew that Ascension was not the way out.

At the Monitoring Station Alpha-7, Eb Ruide was looking lazily at logs on the big screen and surveillance images.

Nothing ever interesting happened on MARS. Eb used all caps in his head, to distinguish it from Mars, the real Mars. But it didn’t actually matter, they only knew about MARS (Mars Animated Realistic Simulation).

He hadn’t been there at the beginning, but he’d heard the stories — even if all were sworn to secrecy for the sake of the world’s peace keeping, they couldn’t help but gossip among themselves. Must have been fun back then… Not a day without trying to fix something in the simulation. The lab rats were always trying to expand their perimeter, and physical and physiological barriers had to be put in place for them to help improve the simulation.

They were more or less all willing subjects at the time, part of the big deception. Eb didn’t know how it changed, what made them start to believe in the illusion, and start to forget. He could only assume… many didn’t believe in the world as it was, and preferred to go back to a foregone settler era where every life counted, and you could measure yourself against the big expanse of unknown land, instead of living the comfortable torpor like he was, alone in his Monitoring Station, only virtually connected.

Since the Aurora, it had been a bit hectic there. Actually, a big solar flare had almost frozen their equipment, and despite all the precautions, some of it filtered through the simulation. Water had leaked too, which could have been a disaster, but interestingly, it had given some of them a purpose, and all in all, it didn’t become the dreaded event they all feared. Even if all the ins and outs and communications were filtered, you couldn’t rule out a blunder. Especially with the lack of gripping activity.

Something biped on his screen. A red button was suddenly lit. He’d never been trained to know what the red button meant. He had to refer it to his superior. Oh God, I hope she’ll be in a good mood… Since she started her special diet and had lost so much weight, Finnley Morgan was always a bit unpredictable and snappily dangerous.

The irony of the ever-calm and dulcet AI named Finnley after her in the simulation wasn’t lost on him…

“I don’t like those tincans” Norbert muttered mostly to himself. “I’m sure they’re here to spy on us or kill us in our sleep…”

Godfrey did catch the reproach laced with fear and angst about the fresh delivery of Finnleys (Two, Three and Five), but was too busy with the unexpected audit mandated by the Mining Trading Company of Earth Colonies.

Great, not only on my first day on the job, but on my monthversary on top of that… These guys know no boundaries…

Their boss had been unusually relaxed about the whole thing. Forcefully, more like it… that guy usually can’t help but shout at everything, rocks included
Their boss had just given the team a rousing speech about transparency and how they had to stop looking like culprits of guilty secrets. “Looking guilty kind of makes you guilty and will prompt them to dig more! So be nice to them, and scram back to your post.”

Looking at the way the auditors were sniffing around, Godfrey wasn’t so sure there wasn’t something that the company had found and was hiding here. But today wasn’t the day to ask uncomfortable questions.

Mother Shirley, the head of the Covenant, was smoking in her private capsule despite the strict restrictions and despite the health risks, at her ripe age of 99.

She liked to quip that nobody had ever told her what to not do and lived to say the tale. She had smoked since age 45, after the death of her third husband, the only one she had shed a tear for. Never turned back since, and maybe it was the reason she was still alive after all. Smoked like a mighty salmon.

She grinned painfully at her reflection. Ugh. Despite all the beauty treatments, she was starting to look like a decrepit mummy. No amount of wariki body butter and ant royal geel would do the trick now. She had to resort to more extreme measures after no doctor would dare to try a peeling on what skin was left on her face.

The acrylic mask was always prickly at first, and took a few uncomfortable seconds to adjust. It was now firmly set, and sure, it restrained a bit the movements on her face,… well, she was never one for laughs out loud anyway.

With her shaking scrawny arms, but her grip strong as ever, she attached the limbs of her exoskeleton, and with now more assurance, finished to dress in proper garments on top of her fishnet corset.

She was all set for the morning sermon. She would have to strain her voice a bit, and for that the smoke had helped too. She had a lovely raucousness in her vocal chords that made all the old farts of the Covenant thrilled by what she said in hypnotic stances.

After that would be done, most importantly, they would go forth to the promised land, and she was to spend her glorious next century on a new empty planet she could mould to her vision.

Second Journey ~ August 24th, 2014

Duration 24 minutes

Directions : Meet with your power animal, ask them to lead you to the upper realm to meet with your guide. Ask the name of your guide and what they will be likely helping you with. Ask them for your personal symbol and how you can use it. Then follow your power animal into showing you the potential development for the stories.

Accounts

Eric
My snake animal guide appears very fast, I see its eyes first. It shifts into a powerful cobra, and fans out its hood into multiple heads, like Ananta (Shesha Naga), and says I can call him Nagini (like in Harry Potter, that’s also the playful name I give to the plush snake at our doorsteps).
It wraps its multiple heads around me like a ball, and we woosh into the ground to what I guess is the underworld, it seems like a long coiled path around a sort of vortex, after a few moments in a sort of crystal cave, I’m a bit skeptical what we’re doing there, I catch a glimpse of a white horse from the back, so I guess Jib’s Conan is checking on us, and restate my intent.
I go though the light of one of the brightest glowing crystals, and the travel resumes, this time like the giant snake wraps ourselves in coils around a column of rocks, and we climb that high mountain very fast. It reminds me of Mt Meru in Buddhism or the Immortals palace in the Chinese Buddhist tales (like in the 2014 movie The Monkey King).
The place is like a beautiful platform/palace of giant proportions, with a golden light. When we arrive, the snake becomes much smaller, and golden too, and wraps itself around my left arm. It guides me to explore different places, a temple, a place over the clouds where there are dances, etc. I decide to rest under a tree and meditate and be open to possibilities.
The snake shifts around in various forms as if to reflect the nature of my mind, a giant parasol, or a stream of many paths at my feet. It connects me to a picture I saw of a Buddhist painting where the mind represented as an elephant is led by the monkey brain around a snake-like path. I realize the person I saw briefly earlier is the guide that helped Sunwukong (the monkey king) and seems to be the guide I’m looking for.
(I find the name later is Puti or Subhuti).
When I mentally ask for a name, the name Pachacamac comes strongly. He shows me many things related to my symbol. As a spinning cube with the floating feather in the middle and the arrow pointing towards the heart. The spin of the cube creates illusion within illusion, the arrow wobbles but stays towards the heart.
He shows me a chasm and how to create a bridge over the clouds, by showing me the mirror image in my heart chakra. The bridge is built inside. At the same time, I was trying to focus on the music to deepen the trance, and realized outside (one storey below) was Jib’s music played on the speakers, aligned with the one playing in the headset, although a few seconds off, the rhythm was perfectly in synch…
He also shows me another image, of a deep well deep inside the mountain that we can see from above the clouds. The image inside is dark and fluctuates with the water’s surface, and also reflecting quite a small portion of the beautiful landscape around.
He explains that the well is the world we create, the mind and the perception is the water’s surface. It’s the external world, while the heart is all that we perceive as we discuss.
There are other things shared at a subjective level.

Francie
After I connected with my power animal, we went to the upper world. We went through water to get there until we came to land.
I asked for my main guide.
I think I took on the characteristics of my guide. by that I mean I felt myself become a different being, and then switched back and forwards between myself and the other. It was very clear. The other was masculine, strong, very alert, very watchful, powerful.
I asked for the guide’s name and received the answer, Carlos.
I asked for the area which the guide would work with me. I have had a sharp pain in my left abdomen under my rib for half an hour. I felt my guide reach in and do something energetically in that area. The pain left and has not returned.
I asked for a symbol and saw what looked like a key-hole shape.
There was a key too.
It was a very particular shape.
There was a door. And the key hole was up very high in the door.
I had to reach up high to get to it. And I put the key in.
I wasn’t sure if those were symbols.
The key hole and the key were shapes.
I was tracing them with my hand.

Jib
I settle in myself and arrive directly in a kind of lava world. There are stalagmites and magma puddles, it’s very fiery and earthy. Then I call my horse who just nudge my left shoulder, he was already there.
I ride him first and take time to bond with him. Then ask him to take me to the upper realm to Michel. Without much transition I am there, I feel a definite difference of feeling and texture. I say hi and ask Michel if he can show me the use of my personal symbol or particular aspects to it.
The he focuses my attention to the octagon and the connection with the number eight. He shows me how it connects with the musical octave and sounds as a resonator. It can also be used like the shamanic drum. The coil inside is connected with the circle, the spiral and the labyrinth. My symbol is a kind of labyrinth with the diamond representing the central room where the graal is, so to speak.
He shows me other stuff that I don’t recall at the moment.
When I realize that it will be all, I ask my guide if he can introduce me to another guide that can help me with the use of my symbol. He sends me in a direction that goes up in a cave world. There are faceless figures, I don’t pay much attention to them. When I arrive, the guide sits me on the ground and a journey inside my symbol begins. With the octagon connecting quite strongly with the lava and earth again. I am in a lava world again, which is strange. I ask the guide what is his name and I suddenly understand it is Athumbra the Dreamwalker from whom I’m fragmented.
He shows me the connection of my symbol to the fire and earth, and the depth of the world. He suggests me that instead of focusing on the shape of the symbol I connect with how the different parts connects together and to other aspects of consciousness, and how they are representative of my own energy personality. Not try to look outside for an answer in a way at the moment.
So I begin to experience the shapes, and it turns like a clock, take different colors, etc.
This will be something I’ll have to do again.
Then I ask my power animal to show me what would be interesting to me to explore in the story now.
He shows me a nest and I connect it with the stork nests I’ve been talking about in the last comment and that I used in the quote of the week picture. Without consciously connecting the two. I’ve written the comment before making the picture.
It will have to do with how the nest is comfortable but don’t make you learn much about life and your potentials.
Then he showed me something related to ants and colonies, that I connected with Mars, the colonies of Mars. There is something about community and social network for me to explore.
Then I asked him to help me decipher the energy transmission Eric sent to me the other day, and it had something to do with networks again and how we create a space of something through our relationships, the space of love, the space of friendship, and we create fields and connective tissues that we nourish through experience and attention and involvement.
At some point in the beginning I briefly wondered what was happening with you guys and felt propelled into something like water and impression of struggling with current, there were two moon crescents holding together by their “backs”, and purple or pink colors.

Tracy
The Zebra walked towards me across a grassy plain then I circled him, floating, and we went down a slope through the trees, an old road paved with stones. We wound down and came to a great expanse of metallic pink water, like a wise (typo! wide) river.
There was a guy in much heavy stone coloured rough clothes on with a very old face who didn’t look at me, he was on a raft with a long pole for steering. Asked his name and got Frudo. (was slightly skeptical that I got the name right) The symbol was like a clubs of cards, 3 circles interlocking with an in flow of the stem part. Domain was water, flow and fluidity (and dams, apparently).
We went down with the raft on the wide pink river, and the pace increased and there were people of all kinds lining both banks, watching. The wide river came to an immensely steep and deep waterfall, but there were pools and much smaller waterfalls on either side of it. All the water was pink.
We navigated from pool to pool on the right of the waterfall mostly, each pool had people, some of the pools were dammed, and some were more open and easily flowing to the next pool. Some dams were high and some pools had people looking over the edge at the waterfalls below their pools.
In a pool on the right, a very fat pink baby was sitting in the middle, I picked him up and held him and asked his name and it was Ezekial.
Then a fly landed on my right shoulder and I looked to the right and saw a scrunched up face of my mother, with a tight smile. My breathing started to get constricted and I saw mustard yellow mangle of tubes like intestines in that pool.
Then there was a lot of fingers stroking and pulling threads out of the dam around that pool, like pulling soft pink wax. Breathing continued to be restricted, and some becoming vapour or mist stuff that wasn’t very clear or droplets leaping from pool to pool as an alternative route to surface pools and waterfalls….
Then went down down down into a vast pool of pink water, faster and faster towards a narrow tube at the bottom, and then flipped over onto my back and saw the sun far above and rose slowly floating towards the surface.
Several times I saw purple and light green.
The breathing thing was interesting if not so pleasant.
The personal symbol may be connected to the flow from pool to pool somehow.

Even two weeks after the escape, she still woke up in cold sweats, haunted by nightmares of being chased down narrow lanes, or driving a vehicle that would only go at a snail’s pace as soon as she tried to drive it.

“Are you alright, dear?”

The comforting presence of Robert helped sooth her. He brought her a tray with some lemon and cucumber water, knowing it would help with her sore throat. The artificial air of the Mars colony tended to do that.

“Thank you Robert,… but you shouldn’t have. You’re not a robot any longer.”

She still couldn’t believe what had happened. Maybe that was the gift of retirement the Management had in store for her all alone. Unexpected gifts, unexpected islands of solitude —even at the closest to Earth in months, Mars was still 122 million miles from her Russian homeland.

It was still night outside. There, the days were slightly longer than Earth’s by half an hour or so, but she’d adapted to it rather quickly. It was still much better than the torpor on the island where she would loop on her days sometimes without even noticing it.

“Anything I can do for you dear?” Robert looked appropriately sorry for her, not too much to seem condescending, not to little to seem not caring.

“Put on some light music will you. The one from Beethoven that puts me in a meditative relaxation…”

When the deep notes started in the background, she started to relax. Her throat felt fresh and her lungs appreciative of the oxygen produced by the greenhouse plants.
Although she resisted slightly, inexorably she felt drawn to revisit the memories of the last day on Abalone.

It always started with the labyrinth, and finding herself alone.

“Mr R? Mr R?” she called. “Gweenie?”

The labyrinth looked strangely like the laboratory white walls of the Chinese Robot Incorporated Mission Eternal where she used to work as an intern first, then as a head of research for cybernetics advancements. She was quite brilliant for her age, and the prospect of bringing a golden age to mankind was, at the time, quite appealing to her young exalted mind.

She knew where to go. She had to relive again that day where she’d thrown away all of that for a life in hiding. The mysterious benevolent messages of the Management had started a few weeks prior, leading her to question the motives of her employer, and realizing she’d become quite attached to her creation. The prototype robot from Project R had shown never seen before reactions to stimuli, and a learning curve that was exponential. “R” was meant as Retirement: retirement of the last class of labor workers, of those delicate works that still required a human touch.
The Management had led her to uncover that under the Corporation’s vision, the prototype would lead humanity to its doom, becoming irrelevant, a flaw in the perfect design of profit they were looking for. So she’d taken the robot, and made a run for it.
She wouldn’t destroy it. And it seemed the Management had no intention of her to do so. With the Management’s invisible hand, she’d disguised Mr R as a common robot for elites, and led a life posing as an elite with a secret life of a for-hire spy, heist-mastermind, or ghost executioner of similarly exciting prospects.

So there she was again. The walls stretching to infinity in an endless stream of rooms nested one into the other, the fear of being caught creeping closer and closer.

“Stop that. Breathe.” she told herself. She was no longer that young innocent scientist. As soon as her fear dissipated, the rooms stream stopped, and everything was back to focus. She walked to the room she remembered clear as day. Mr R was there, still plugged to the mainframe, with a strange black doctor in a white surgical gown and blue mask she didn’t remember was there.

“Interesting situation you have here.” he greeted her, snapping his gloves to extend his hand to her. “You can call me René, I’m Tahitian.”

She could feel her lucidity fluctuating and ready to explode in a multiplicity of scenarios, but managed to maintain her focus. She refrained to punch the guy in the face too, and simply took his extended hand with caution.

“Congratulation.” he said, beaming. “You passed the test.”

All of a sudden, she was no longer in the same room. She was in the comfortable B&B of 2222. René was in a sofa, comfortably seated, and they were sharing a drink.

“What have you done with Mr R?” was her first thought.

“Oh, nothing to worry about, I borrowed it for a while, there is someone else that needed passing through my maze, and he kindly obliged to help. I will show you in a minute. We had a little conversation earlier on, while you were stranded in your past.”
“How long was I out?” she asked.
“Oh, time is inconsequential here, but in your terms, a day or two.”
“Didn’t seem that long…” she mused. “Where have you done with the others?”
“Don’t worry about them, they are on their own path. Only one should concern you now. A certain Chinese and very persistent man.”
“Oh, fuck.” was all she said. “I should have guessed, you’re with the Corporation.”
“Not at all my dear, you can relax. So as I said, we had a little conversation, and you can be proud of you. This robot has broken through, congratulations. You can be very proud of your work.”
“What do you mean?”
“He has developed a personality and a consciousness of its own. It’s still budding, but it’s very strong, and he’s quite concerned over your well-being I might add.” he said with a wink.

Irina was perplexed at the thought, but although it made some sense at a level, her conscious brain was struggling with the implications.

“Show me what you have to, and release us.” she said to René, getting up from the hypnotizing warmth of the sofa.

“In a minute” he’d say, “just have a look at the screen, will you.”

Then, she’d understood. The guy pursuing her, Cheung Lok was there, trapped in his own labyrinth, trying to catch the robot that always eluded him.

“He would rather die than let the robot go.” she said to René “we could be here for a while”.
“Not to worry ma chère, his timing has no impact on ours. All of this happens in the now.”
“So how this plays out usually?”
“It depends. In this case, all that matters is what happens when he gets the robot.”
“STOP THAT! You can’t let him take it!”
“Calm down, the robot will be safe.”

In the next scene, Cheung Lok was securing the robot, who was pleading with him. “Please! I don’t want to become a hairdresser, let go of me!”
The appeal seemed to have struck a chord, and some memories of Cheung Lok flashed through the screen, and it looked like as if the robot’s struggle mirrored his own to be his own man, free from the expectations of demanding parents, society, Corporation… Their love had been nothing but control, and had put him in chains. He sobbed, wishing for a new life free of these responsibilities.

Irina awoke from the dream again. The last memories were a bit blurry, but still fresh in her mind. René had granted Cheung Lok’s wish. He was sent back to the Island, losing some years in the process, becoming back again a young adult full of unfulfilled desires, and no memory of his previous mission. Before the process happened, he wished for those who were still alive of his platoon to be given the choice to be sent back home with only memories of the robot and himself being destroyed, or to join him on the island, with a fresh future and memories. Surprisingly, most of them chose the first option. Not everyone was ready for a brave choice of facing one’s own desires and power.

As for her, René had been kind to offer Mr R a humanoid body before sending them through the teleportation boxes to the destination of their choices.
Mr R had chosen Роберт (Robert) as a name for his new self (she’d been more than relieved he’d avoided René), and they’d agreed to let the boxes find the most beneficial location for them to go to. That’s how they landed in the middle of the central greenhouse of the main colony, in 2121.

It was fifteen days ago, but still felt like yesterday.

When Berberus arrived at Gazalbion, still wet from his swim down beanstalk through the City’s sewer waterslides, the Great Processor in person came to great him.

“Dear, dear, what have we here. That’s not so often the P’hope sends someone down here with us poor heathen… To what do we owe the pleasure?”

By the look of his office, the Processor was doing well. Small favours had earned him enough belief of his worth, and his office was full of amenities otherwise hard to come by and much more to sustain, down there.

“Would you share with me some hydromel, made from waterbee honey, you’re not mistaken. That should help you get more… comfortable.” He said his last word intently, giving a look at the hook-leg.

Berberus liked to have people guess at why he kept it so visible, while obviously he could have conjured enough belief to alter it himself. It gave him an edge over them. And the hook gave nasty scars too.

“Not drinking on duty.”
“Very well, suit yourself.” the Processor said drinking his voraciously.

“Any strange people coming lately? Out of the ordinary beliefs to contain?”
The other brushed off the question “No, not really… Now, about this promotion our dear friend the P’hope mentioned back in 2020, what do you think… Any chance to get out of this hellhole? Promised Land my butt. What do we get next? Flying whales?”
“You’re not. Answering. My. Question.” Berberus was already losing his patience and started to mentally conjure the many painful ways he could believe this talk would end.
“I have already answered it, and if you have nothing else to share with me, you might as well me back to your sad master.”

The Processor made a movement to get up from his chair, but a swift and precise swipe of the hook-leg anchored him back in it.

The other was looking at him with empty eyes, and the Processor’s mistake was to think he was an idiot that could be sent away easily.
He poured himself another drink, casually answering with a “We’re done. Get out.”

When Berberus got out, it was of his own volition, leaving a trail of blood up to the door.
He had managed to extract one word from the slob before his soul left his body: Sanso

A series of powerful meditation sessions with Greenie (Gwinie had told Irina she didn’t mind the moniker) had Irina more and more sure-footed in the strange reality of the island.

There was always confusion when she tried to change her surrounding too forcefully. All the transitions seemed like traps to dull her senses back into old familiar patterns, such as securing the perimeter, and idle talks with Mr R. Simple things like changing her focus from one object to another was proving challenging, and she had to keep herself awake grounded in shifting sands, staying clear from the comfortable dreams.

Thoughts of the light city in the clouds carried her, and she’d programmed Mr R to help her with reality checks. Mr R, unlike what she’d thought initially, was not completely immune to the effects of the changes of reality. She surmised it was because it was an evolved AI, and he probably incorporated evolved perception constructs into his programming. In a sense, he was programmed to chose between alternate realities to fulfil the expectations of those in his care. Without this choosing program at his core, or whatever speck of consciousness it was, he probably would have been immune as any piece of inanimate matter —but also probably less useful, as her reality would have been irrelevant to him.

Irina had found out that she was actually lucky to have found Greenie, since during her long sleep, she had maintained a sort of ground reality based on the blueprints she was familiar with, which seemed quite close to what the City called “reality”.
Meditations had revealed, by parts that Irina had interpolated, that Greenie was trained to be part of an order of people, who betrayed her and left her for dead. Her training had helped her survive, and even in Greenie’s quasi-autistic state, had helped Irina too.

Irina decided (and hoped it was the first time she had) to go to the cloud city, and help Greenie return to her rightful place.
It did cross her mind that it was maybe what Management had wanted her to do all along, and that her island could only be her gift if she claimed it.
Feeling the thought leading her towards unwanted manifestations and slumber, she snapped out of it.

“Mr R, prepare everything, we are leaving at dawn. To the beanstalk.”
“Madam, everything is already prepared, as you asked hours ago.”
“Very well Mr R. Then let’s make dawn happen and let’s paddle.”

“Madam, I have found something…” Mr R was pointing at a large floating piece of moss in the middle of the bog where they had landed a few days ago.
“At last,… some excitement, whoo…” said Irina with a deadpan expression that left no doubt as to her current level of excitement.

There weren’t many clues as to where and when they’d arrived, but she already hated it.
The bog for one, wasn’t her idea of a great retirement place. Of course, there were probably other places to explore on the island, it wasn’t as if she’d stay here permanently, but for now, if the bog was a nexus point of teleporting, she’d rather stay around, in case others would come from there. That was one of the first thing you learnt during the Training, to secure your entry points. You’d never know what to expect, teleporting whales were probably the least dangerous of the things that could get stranded here. And judging by the amount of strange objects littering the area, she and her robot weren’t the first thing to have been discarded here.

She’d tasked Mr R, in his immense resourcefulness, to build her a proper watchtower, or just for now, a downsized version of what she’d felt would be a decent one.
A proof of the robot’s talent was that with barely nothing, he’d managed in the past days to bulldoze a clearing in a less wet portion of the land. There, the light’s plays were purely gorgeous, creating the smallest ripples and endless reflections on the green tinges of the water —something Irina could observe with wonder for hours. Mr R had also managed to cook her a rather lovely braised water rat, with fresh peppermint and lotus roots caramelized in wild bees’ honey.
He’d already built the foundations of a anthill-sized promontory, with a clean deck where she could rest on a surprinsingly comfortable deckchair made of driftwood and pieces of whatnots gathered around the place. That was were she was enjoying the last minutes of sun for the day, just about when he’d asked her to check on his discovery. It probably was important enough for the robot to disrupt her digestive meditation.

“Well, well… What have we got here…”
“It looks like a person, Madam… Female, around 28, judging by her bone structure. Her vitals are subtly low, but it seems she is alive…” the robot said after a careful scanning.
“Alive? With that color ?” Irina was quite perplexed and slightly amused too.
She wouldn’t mind some company and probably some intel on the island. Besides, there was a side of her that liked to nurse back to life those poor little wounded creatures. The girl would be her first greenish one…

“Take her to our place, Mr R” she ordered the robot. “We will soon need double ration of your delicious water rat stew, Mr R”.

While she was adjusting her bikini over her fake boobs, Maurana Banana felt a sudden pang of panic. Nothing that could be lipsynched away with bursting into some Name Game song

Everything was here, yet she didn’t feel fleshed out enough. She wasn’t talking about gaining some padding, she had plenty enough of that, but more about depth and character. At times, she even felt highly suggestible.

The sound of the waves crashing down the rugged black volcanic stones under the white sand was soothing. The others’ shrills of delight could be heard miles away, they were hoping for a dolphins’ pod sighting and had even abandoned the Goochi platform shoes to be more comfortable.

Sadie was very quiet, and at times felt almost like she was about to say hello and run out of conversation. However, she told something that had struck the Reggie inside the Maurana’s persona. That she should act on her highest excitement, and that there was no more to life than that.
Easy enough when in drags, but when out of the wigs, make-up and fake eyelashes and acrylic nails, it was like being an out-of-water dolphin. Nothing but a big fat stranded sardine without appeal, just good for an extra pouring of olive oil.

Before being a drag queen, Reginald worked a few jobs since a young age, mostly deliveries. The last one he got was more stable, a job as a security guy. He’d almost blundered at the interview, he laughed at it now, when he’d forgotten to remove the Gothic styled nails from the night. Instead of hiding them and look stupid, he had the good sense to invent those crazy stories like the ones he would tell his teacher when he forgot some homework deadline.
Security was better than delivery, there was no denying. Being in a position were people were not quite paying attention to you, but still eyeing you from the corner, as if you could do something vicious or bully them out of the building. She liked that.
There was always excitement as there were plenty of crazy people each day to be escorted out, so following excitement wasn’t difficult. Following yours was more of a catch.

She’d joined the drag contest to win her own highest excitement. She already got points for being the first pick-up of the jury before Consuela and Terry, and also for being the one to snatch the key.

She put the last touch of green on her eyelids with a hand flourish. She was perfect. For now, that was something to get excited about.

Jonbert had developed an interesting theory while doing his morning ablutions about time travel and catching butterflies. He had a gorgeous butterfly nursery inside the submarine, and got the strange idea that trying to fiddle with time was like catching a prized butterfly among lots of others looking alike.

His thoughts were interrupted when the horn signaled they had arrived in 2222 in one of the blind spots of the ocean’s depths close to the particular spot where… some interesting butterflies would be attracted.

The submarine was mostly entirely roboted. There was little for him to take care of, so instead of pacing around in his tartan kilts, he sat back in a comfortable 1980s garish sofa from his antique collections, and revisited his memories in his memory palace.

He had taken him great patience and cunningness to hatch the plan. Through many of his Time Tourist outlets and a few shell corporations, the last of one which was named Vague, he had manipulated events to design and hire the Drag Queen time contest. Drag queens wasn’t the original plan, more of an unexpected deviation, not that it really mattered. All he needed was just one mission. Then, he only had to make sure the contestant would be diverted to a carefully selected time zone, and given a key to smuggle.
The key wasn’t really important, what it collected along the way was.

For him to be able to breach the Time wall of 3333, he needed vast amounts of gold, and to his knowledge, it could only be accomplished through true transmutation.
Artificial gold, like artificial crystal wasn’t created as good as it gets in nature, and for some reason wouldn’t remain stable enough as the machines were propelled too far in time. Of course the irony of that was a conundrum in itself and wasn’t lost to him: after all, wasn’t transmutated gold just artificial too? After what centuries had managed to push as boundaries and envelopes, he wasn’t sure any longer what was artificial or natural. And it was his last ditch effort at living everlastingly.
He didn’t care if he could just chose another of these holobodies to project his thoughts into, he was old school, and stubborn to a fault. He had to see it through, even if, and especially if so many before him had failed.

The key was designed to capture a complete hologram of the person who seemed to have accomplished the transmutation recipe he desired: St Germain.

The e-zapper’s signal was dropping until it was gone, while there were eerie hoots and echoes in the tunnels.
Sadie’s report to Linda Paul would wait till a few hours. The broadcast wouldn’t start until the afternoon anyway, so they had time to relax. The carriage wasn’t so comfortable, but the blue lights provided a smooth reassurance, and the zebras were now trotting at a regular pace.

Sadie looked with fondness at the boys in drags. A fondness which even surprised her. They were starting to reveal more of their true self as they were lulled to sleep in the carriage. How funny she thought, how a few drags and accessories can both hide and reveal parts of your personality.
Cedric, was a white guy from uptown actually quite challenged to grow a real beard, and he was playing that sassy bearded lady queen Consuela.
Amar the second-generation North African guy was raised in the suburbs before he chose to become the shiny Terry Bubble, while Reginald from the same neighbourhood was playing Maurana the big burly black queen,…

The more Sadie spent time with them, the more which labels they chose to be called with started to become inconsequential.
She was actually more and more confident they would do a great job at blending by simply hiding in broad daylight. Their eccentricities would be a rousing success at the royal fête, they just had to hone their alibis a bit, and align on their story. As soon as they would be in Versailles, with the Russians from the competing cable network in toe, they had to be at the top of their games.