Search Results for 'easily'

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

Sanso was tied securely on a Louis XVI chair, inside an ornate room kept mostly in the dark by heavy embroidered curtains that smelt of celery.
He was craving for a tomato juice to go with the smell, and could hardly focus on an empty stomach.

He could have easily escaped from his predicament, but he was curious about his captors, and the reason why they had him abducted after he went back to his little love nest in the R&R B&B where he’d hoped to meet again the mysterious Lady Cucumber. That was his name for her.
He was hopeless with names, and although he was sure he had heard hers before, he preferred to remember people by associations. With Irina, that was Cucumbers. There! he thought, another proof of the brilliance of this method, as I remembered her name… Iris? Eyrin?, well, Lady Cucumber.
He’d made love to many a lady in his life, a lady in Salmon, even a Lady Mermaid, a Lady Gingerale, a Lady Panty, a ladyboy even. He could go on for hours thinking about them, but the lady Cucumber had spun a spell around his head it seemed.

After his last mission on a rescue with Miss Bob and her Sponges Squarepanties team, he’d run back for the 2222 B&B.
No sooner had he arrived that heaven and hell broke loose and things went to rules and “do that or else”‘s, all things he abhorred with a passion. The links, and keys for his chains, that he could suffer, so he focused on it for awhile.

He was woken up by a splash of ice cold water on his pants and a raucous voice in his face. Better that than the reverse, he chuckled to himself.

“Something funny now? Tell us, where did she go?”

He knew better than to feign ignorance, so he preferred to feign knowledge, which he’d found usually worked miracles.

“Of course. She stole something from you…”
“Damn right, she steal it, and we want back it.”

The accent was difficult to place, he’d known so many inter-dimensional dialects that sometimes it was hard for him to remember.
He would have said some northern Chinese dialect accent, with a bit of kiwi.

He needed to know a bit more before disappearing. His curiosity was aroused by the implication that what she stole was certainly valuable. What could it be, a revolutionary hairsplitter, a butt-fluffer, a fringe freckler, ah! his head was teaming with great possibilities it was making him dizzy.

“Don’t be silly Mister Sanso, she steal it robot very precious and advance technology.”
and before he could reply:
“Yes we read your mind, I confirm… You have silly thinks Mr Sanso.”

He was starting to think now was a good time to get lost, and started to confuse their mindreader with energy patterns otherwise called gibberish thoughts.

The chains and ropes gave way easily.
His next move was to phase out of the room, but instead he managed to fall on his butt, in the middle of mocking looking Chinese in tuxedos and purple bow ties.

“Ah, I see, you have some antiportation technology…” Sanso was a fair player. The temptation was big to run for another exit, if only for the exhilaration of a chase in the corridors of that strange place, but his stomach was thinking otherwise.

“I see you are vely fond of kewcomber, we are no animawls, we will give you delishius kewcomber.”

Minutes after, he was thrown with a certain form of Chinese ceremony in a small cubic windowless room. On a table next to the door, was his meal apparently.

He recoiled in horror when he opened the lid covering his plate. The strong odour of garlic pricked his nose.
“No way! Fucking jokers!”
That was even worse than to eat boiled cucumber chunks in spicy sauce.
Swimming in soy sauce were slices of chewy sea cucumbers that looked more like fat juicy leeches from a filthy bog.

He ate reluctantly, arguing with his stomach about the benefits of the collagen in said sea cucumbers, and at the same time realized the Chinese mobsters were probably from the Chinese Robot Incorporated Mission Eternal, a renowned corporation that had managed to free countless people from menial jobs thanks to prodigious advances in robotics.
The Lady Cucumber was suddenly more than a mysterious beauty, she was also a mysterious wanted beauty, and he couldn’t wait to… But he had to guard his thoughts for now.

He looked at the bamboo chopsticks with a sly smile. He had not said his last word, and the person who could boast of having Sanso detained was not born yet.

Jonbert’s robot had easily found the location, but it was in standby in a cafe near the techromancer’s hut, posing as a tourist in a flower shirt with a straw hat and a glass of coconut oil.

Jonbert had received additional information about the whale network which seemed to change slightly his plans. The Ghost Whale who was supposed to preside over the rituals was apparently delayed in Time, making the retrieval of the second key problematic.
He would have loved to rudely prompt Linda Paul to get her Queens in alignment, but for now, there was no point to that yet. He’d better leave them at their little escapade, under close surveillance from his robot.
In all cases, they would all have to wait more in the nexus of times.
Using his ivory carved forking long shoehorn, he scratched his itchy back. It was for him rather infuriating to be stuck, he sighed “Stuck in 2222!”. The robot bearing those news had learnt it the hard way.

He stroked distractedly his luscious mane of red hair. At 153, thanks to regular nano-implants, Jonbert was incredibly healthy, in a very healthy and hairy manner, unlike many others he wouldn’t name.

The impending strategy and budget review was now quickly upon them.

The much questioned old new authority of the Surge Team had decided all the countries had to join for that week long first round of strategy plan and as Long Poon was too much of a reminder of work (they said, but many suspected too much of a reminder of Ed Steam’s empire), Madam Li had graciously offered to host the venue in Shangpoon, where they had managed to corner 15,000 floating piglets and her services were still probably needed.

All the thirteen chief operatives were busy setting things in order, and delegating current tasks during their business trip. Some of them were still hopelessly fumbling in spreadsheets and slides —a inane exercise in style they thought, but still…

“I can’t stand it!” Cornella almost exploded in front of her computer, now returned to decent level of cleanliness since Aqua’s return. She was sick of this old ageing alzheimering authority. Not that she missed Ed too much now. He was a pig —and gawd, this waxed mustache from another epoch… A pig they all liked because they didn’t know better at the time and his charisma covered for all the tiny slips of behaviour or even judgement. She’d seen that same feeling when the ceremony was held for his ashes spreading; most of the tears shed there had looked a bit contrived.

The mission to replace the pope with an alien-reconfigured Jesuit was a success, thanks to clever team work and her stellar delicate planning skills. A plan hatched before Ed’s demise, but that the old guys had been glad to call theirs. That was the waking call for her. If they could get rid so easily of the papacy, she would blow that budget convention from inside.
That required thorough planning though, and a bit of luck. Most of the chick would gladly be on board with this.
That’s when the mysterious vanishing dog legs cabinet came back to her attention.

While stroking his mustache fondly, Ed Steam had the clearest realization that although he’d done that quite a few times in the past mostly to his advantage, it was a lot of work to rewrite timelines and figure out the hows and whens of everyone in his team.
Maybe it was actually time for him to restore the original timeline while disappearing — by faking his own death to be certain nobody would thwart his carefully thought retirement plan. Then, he could also stop dyeing his mustache he figured… So many things to take care of, retirement would be so sweet.
Although the Egyptian timeturner gave him all the time in the world, he actually felt like he’d lost already a great deal too much of it, and started to enact his plan without further ado.

Procuring a body double was actually not so hard. The last surge had brought a few of them in Thrifteen’s Alley in their Moreguest Facility. A switch and a twist of the pocket portal and a zap and a blink of the miniaturizer was enough to get there and come back in seconds with a frozen pocket-size life-suspended body from the testing stock, with convincing enough miniaturized slim lips, safely put in a test tube in his waistcoat pocket.
A six-shot cudgel from his artefact war trove was all he needed to make sure the amateur assassin in red robes they’d hired would be taken care of easily.
Then, an enscombulator bedazzler ray spray would be enough to convince Mari Fe she’d managed to hit him, buying him time enough to then deminiaturize the thawed slim-lipped body double, to slip in his stead.
Last, but not least, he would then have a few seconds to discombobulize Mari Fe while disappearing with a backup transportable portal. The plan was perfect. The original timeline restored in pristine conditions.
Only for a few minor details of course. He’d almost forgotten to reprogram the mini-man in his pocket with enough memories for him to be a convincing Ed-himself sans la moustache of course. At least, for the short time he would survive (surge victims discovered still alive were placed in life suspension by the team, but this was mostly for medical analysis as they usually wouldn’t survive their conditions).
Oh, and the bloody mustache of course… A squeeze of foolicle solventilator would be enough to make it temporarily invisible.

Simple enough… Well, sandbagging Mari Fe would have probably conveyed similar results with minimal efforts, although the elegance of his plan, as well as the fact that he was loath to hit ladies did unmistakably weight in favour of it.

And with that, he would be back in time for dinner.
In fact, he already was.

The package was labeled in Sinese. Goat was fluent in a few languages after many a travel, and although Sinese wasn’t his mother tongue — he was only half-Sinese from his father’s side, he could read it well enough, and make himself passably understood in most of the Colonies.
It was a code, or more precisely, a reference. It said 时间舱23号, which you could probably translate as “Time capsule #23”. Back in the days, the Surge Team would bag and tag any strange artefact they confiscated during their missions, and usually would archive them in such capsules.

Although the concept of Time-capsule in itself for the old teams was soon to become somewhat of a mind puzzle if you thought too much of it, it still held value of… archaeological, rather than historical sorts for their descendants, such as himself. Of course, if you’d like some wild flowers, you’d rather pick them directly in the dewy meadows or mossy forests where they grew instead of taking them from the interstice of an old moldy book between the pages of which it had been laid down to dry, wouldn’t you. Now, anybody could easily become an historian with complete immediate sensory experience of past times at their perception tips —much like how it started, back in the twenty hundreds, with everyone able to become an amateur geographer in minutes with instant access to the satellites maps of Earth.
But being a map reader would never suffice to make you a sailor.

So, of course, Time capsules somewhat felt like such old dry plants if you were an historian. But if you were looking for ancient treasures or secret powerful artifacts, you knew you couldn’t just bring them from the past lest you disrupt the chain of events leading you to it. Many had gone madder than Lord Elmed trying to figure out safer ways. Time capsules were such a way.

“Now, I guess that fishy stench was there for a reason after all,” he sighed: to keep intruders and medlers off of its content, surely.

There, at the special bodies event, a big spiritism session was organised.
Through one of the old bodies of wisdom, came forth the great Forehead of Mazelduk, eager to converse with the lowly bodies and impart its knowledge of the great things bodies couldn’t fathom.
Such thing was, for instance, that bodies of sweet Peasland did not need to wait for the coming of the alien bodies (the alien bodies would be easily recognizable, as they were shaped as pears). Peasland bodies could very much so start to contact them, on their own —and even better, with a bit of luck, hope for successfully abducting some of them.
Such was the grand wisdom of the Forehead.

The leaves were dry. They’d started to change to a brownish hue at the tip, then rapidly withered. They’d hoped it wouldn’t affect the whole crop, and when the first tea bush went down, they quickly uprooted it, for fear it would spread to the whole hill.
But despite their best efforts, the tea bushes went down, one by one, as though engulfed by a deadly plague. He and she were worried for their next year income, as their tea field was their main source of revenue. The highlands had always been favourable to them, and it seemed such an unlikely and truly unfair event given that the beginning of the year had brought an unexpected bounty of huge tea leaves.
What had happened? He was quite the pragmatic about it: disease, pests, too much sun, over-watering, over-pruning… nothing extending outside the visible, the measurable. She was the mystical: core beliefs, did she worry too much about that sudden wealth and made it disappear, the evil eye, greed and covetousness, celestial punishment.

It never occurred to her she could reverse it as easily once she understood what it was all about.
Well, she almost started to get an inkling of that thinking about warts. How efficiently she got those growths when she was so troubled about them, and how they all disappeared when she forgot about them. How not to think about something that’s already in your head? In that case, distraction never worked; it was a rubber band that would be stretched then snapped back at the initial core issue.
Snap back at yourself.
>STOP< – She stopped. Time to read that telegram delivered to oneself.
Everything still, for a moment. Dashed.
She started to look around.
The air was still, hot and full of expectation.
Almost twinkling in potentials.
Like a providential blank page, in the middle of a heap of administrative papers full of uninteresting chatty figures.
The pages are put aside, only the blank page is here.
She can start to populate it with colours, sounds and life, anytime. Lavender maybe. Soon.
But not yet now.
She wants to breathe in the calmness, the comfort of the silence. Even the crickets seem to be far away.
She was alone, and impoverished…
She is alone, and empowered, … in power.

[link:leaves]

While Malvina had been enjoying the fishy delicacies of Olliburthon, she had gathered again a sense of purpose.
“Not quite yet, but working on it…” she snapped at Leörmn, who was always quick to point out what wasn’t quite actualized. “You see, it is merely a matter of concentrating and soon it’ll be. Anyway, the fish is good here; look at those divinely prepared dishes! Leo would have loved them.”

Leörmn wasn’t very concerned by the seeming (he almost thought “seaming” in another probability) lack of direction of late errands, as he was well aware they all served a purpose. Oh, he knew that very well indeed, so very well… — but bugger if he could explain what said purpose was. Of course he, like any dragon of his age, could have easily said, if the proper motivation, question or else had prompted him to investigate further. But in its own nature, a dragon wasn’t inquisitive. He was accepting, for all that is before him, is all that is.

So when the idea germinated inside Malvina’s head, he already knew it would lead to a manifestation of some form, sooner or later.
So how could he have been surprised when she told him.

“You could at least play a little surprised!” she said “Doesn’t it sound fun and exciting to have our own Temple of Flove?”
“I hope it won’t smell too much of fish, or you may repel your patients…”
“Don’t be silly, we can’t be doing that here, you know that much better than I do!”
Leörmn cracked a smile, knowing indeed very well where this would all lead.
“And I will have a lovely white embroidered gown to officiate” Malvina was unstoppable “with pearls and shiny moonstones…”
“Oh, of course, and rubies for the boobies” Leörmn couldn’t really remain serious.
“That’s an idea!” Malvina was so enthralled she wasn’t really paying attention. Tomorrow she would bid farewell to Kalliona’s lovely company and Olliburthon charming gastronomy, and set her new journey’s destination to the Land of her ancestors, near the Great Lake of Umphillax, where her journey started, long before she even met her sisters.

“Tally-oh!” Leörmn cheered, loving the way magic could make packing and unpacking so easy.