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  • #4291

    Absentmindedly, Eleri put the bones in her pocket and continued to gaze down upon the valley, lost in thoughts of the past. What had that tree said to her, that day it came to life?

    Yorath sat quietly, watching her. He noticed the mushrooms growing on the exposed roots beside him, wondering if he had unwittingly crushed any when he sat down next to the tree.

    “Mushrooms,” he said quietly to himself.

    Eleri didn’t answer, wasn’t even aware that he has said it, but now she was remembering the days of the floods in the lowlands. The wet, dismal months and years when everything was damp, if not saturated or submerged, when mold grew on every surface. Bright green mossy mold, and slimy dank black mold, and fungus everywhere. Nothing would grow like it used to grow and the odour of rot permeated everything. The fruit trees crumbled in a sickly sweet stench into the mud, and the people named it keeg, and started wearing keegkerchiefs wrapped around their faces to keep the stink out of their nostrils.

    “Goodbye, farewell,” the tree had said to her. “We are moving north, migrating. But fear not, little one, there are mushrooms migrating here to replace us.”

    At the time Eleri had thought it was a ridiculous idea, imagining trees packing their trunks and pulling their roots out of the ground, and stomping off into the sunset. A few years later, she understood what the tree had meant.

    Before the last of the fruit trees crumbled into the swamps, the people has resorted to eating the snails and the mushrooms, unwillingly at first, missing the bright colours and refreshing juices, but as time went on, they found more and more varieties of fungi springing up overnight. There came more and more bright colours, and more interesting flavours. It wasn’t long before they noticed the healing and restorative properties of the new varieties, not to mention the recreational effects of some of the more elusive ones. There was no need for any organized farming of the fungi, because they simply sprang up overnight: the days menu would be whatever had appeared that morning.

    And so it was considered a gift from the gods in times of trouble, and the people were grateful. Their faith was restored in the earth’s capacity for magic and abundance, and they were inspired and rejuvenated. Eleri vowed never to forget the earth’s magic providence, in the form of mushrooms

    #4263

    “I know you want to get out, but it’s not time yet” Margoritt is braiding small twig figurines on the wooden table, and has lined up already four of them.
    “One for each soul in the house,” she says as if to answer silent questions, “you Tak, Rukshan, Emma and myself.”
    The young Tak is pointing at the last one she makes inquisitively.

    “It’s tradition to make one more for the Stranger. Who knows maybe someone is on their way, or in need of help. There, help me hold this.” She ties the head firmly and nips the thread with a quick jab.

    “If they come, they’d better arrive during daytime. Nobody wants to be outside during the night.”

    She looks pensively at the bed, where Rukshan lies motionless. “Whatever got you, may still be out there, lurking. Tonight’s the longest night, better get prepared.”

    She smiles again and gives the little figurines to Tak. “Keep them safe, we’ll do the burning ceremony at noon. I hope it will give new energy to your friend. He’s been in deep sleep for a long time already.”

    #4261

    The cry startled Lobbocks, who had been enjoying the long peaceful walk home through the forest, and instinctively he dived behind an uprooted tree stump. Peering between the fungi sprouting on the rotting limbs, he felt a moments disorientation as he identified the clumsy giant of a man as the statue of Hasamelis that stood opposite the town clock.

    For a moment he felt mildly irritated at the interruption. Lobbocks always found solitary walks soothing and beneficial, despite his sociable personality, and was by no means averse to chance encounters and surprises. But this felt a bit different, even before Lobbocks had identified the intruder into his forest space. Whatever part of the woodland paths he was on, he considered his forest space. He didn’t tend to think much about the rest of the forest, just the space he was in. But usually the surprises and encounters glided in, or flew in, to his space ~ this one had dive bombed in, somehow. And who was the lad with him? The lad seemed to have glided in, but the statue crash landed.

    For reasons he couldn’t fathom, although he didn’t wonder why at the time, he remained hidden. It simply didn’t occur to him to announce himself cordially, and simply ask a few questions of the fellow travelers, in an attempt to deduce the meaning of a statue relocating ~ and animating ~ in the middle of the forest.

    Lobbocks breathed a sigh of relief as they lumbered off back down the hill, in the opposite direction to his journey home to the mountain village. The last thing he heard before they moved out of earshot was: “That woman who turned me to stone, she was down by a river, down in the valley….”

    Aghast, Lobbocks started to understand why Hasamelis had felt so repellent. He was on a rampage of revenge and he blamed Eleri.

    Should he follow them, try to over take them somehow, and warn Eleri? Or go back to the village and confer with the others. Lobbocks didn’t know a thing about magic, but some of the others did. And this might be one of those kind of things. Not like intercepting Leroway, back in the old days, so Eleri could slip away….

    Lobbocks quickened his pace. Someone in the village would know what to do.

    #4244

    Fox ran through the city, enjoying his transient invisibility. He didn’t have to care about people, he didn’t feel the social burden of being himself. He had fun brushing past the legs of men to frighten them, biting the dresses of women to make them drop their baskets. One of them contained some freshly baked meatloaf. Fox got rid of the bread and swallowed the meat. He laughed with his fox’s laugh at the puzzled look of a child seeing the meat disappear in mid air.

    At first, Fox enjoyed being invisible tremendously. Then, he felt a bit lonely. No one was there to see him have fun. Furthermore, he had no idea how long of it remained. The woman had said one hour. His problem was that in his fox form, he wasn’t so good at keeping track of time. The fun of the invisibility wearing off, he decided to go back to the forest. He would get back his clothes and meet with the woman in his human form.

    He followed the scent of the autumn leaves.

    After barely five minutes, he noticed that people were going in the same direction. How unusual, Fox thought. He kept on running. After another five minutes, he felt a tingling feeling. Then, he heard the familiar shout accompanying his being seen.

    Fox had mixed feelings. At the same time he felt relieved —he was happy to be back into the world—, and he felt annoyed by what he considered to be an unnecessary mishap. He felt his heartbeat speeding up and prepared himself to the chase. But nobody seemed to care about the shout. People looked hypnotized and simply didn’t pay attention to him even though they looked at him running past them.

    How unusual, he thought again.

    Fifteen minutes later, he stopped in front of a fence that wasn’t there in the early morning. It was not so high that he couldn’t jump over it and continue on his way to the forest. But he stayed there a few seconds, too startled to think anything. He got out of his own puzzlement when he heard a whine. It was coming from his own mouth. It was so unusual that it helped him got rid off the spell that surrounded the fence. It seemed to be powerful enough to make people believe they couldn’t go past it into the forest.

    Very clever, he thought. Whoever erected this fence, they were no ordinary man or woman. Fox thought about the old young witch who gave him the potion but readily shook the idea away. This is something else, he decided. His nose became itchy, Fox needed to find out who created this thing. Maybe they knew about the burning smell.

    Fox left the flow of people still following the fence to some unknown destination and jumped over into the forest. The feeling was the same on the other side. A repelling spell. But once on this side of the fence, it had a different flavour. This one talked about danger of leaving the forest, whereas in the city it whispered about the danger of going into the forest. Fox didn’t feel surprised. It was simply another odd occurence.

    He took a deep breath, enjoying the rich scents of the soil and the trees. The smell of the little animals close to the ground, and those of the birds in the air above. The odorant track left by a wild boar. Among all those scents, one was quite unique and remarkable. The gentleman of the forests, Fox thought. What is he doing here? Whatever the explanation was, the wise ape and would certainly have answers. After all, he was the one who taught a little fox the art of human shapeshifting.

    Fox began to run deep into the forest. His heart beating fast at the idea to see his old master. He had totally forgotten about the dwarf and his strange companion, or about the kind witch and her potions. He only felt hope in his heart and cold winter air on his snout. Leading him to some resolution.

    #4200

    When Eleri’s little dog started coughing and wheezing again her first reaction was to snap at him. Irritating though it inevitably was, once again she realized she’d been holding her breath somehow, or probably more accurately, holding her energy. Or holding everyone elses, like a brick layers hod carrier, weighed down with blocks from other peoples walls.

    “It’s too hot in here, come outside,” she said to the scruffy mongrel. The cozy warmth of the wood stoves had become stifling. She slipped through the door into the cool night.

    Breathe, she said to herself, momentarily forgetting the gasping dog. Her hunched shoulders descended jerkily as she inhaled the sodden air, wondering about ozone or ions, what was it people said about the air after the rain? Whatever it was, it was good for something, good for the heart and soul of mortal humans.

    Feeling better with every breath, Eleri noticed the olive branches rustling wetly overhead. The olive tree had been planted too close to the fig tree ~ wasn’t that always the way, forgetting how large things grow when one plants a seed or a sapling. As the old fig tree had broadened it’s sheltering canopy, the olive sapling had reached out an an angle to find the sun, and sprinted upwards in a most un olive like manner. This reminded her of the straight little sapling story, which had always irritated her. What was commendable about a row of straight little soldier saplings anyway? All neat and tidy and oh so boring, none of them stepping out of line with a twist here or a gnarl there. No character! But the olive tree, in it’s race towards the light, leaned over the gable end of the dwelling as if spreading it’s arms protectively over the roof. A regimental straight sapling would have simply withered in among the fig leaves, whereas this one had the feel of a grandfatherly embrace of benevolent support.

    What was it she’d heard about trees and oxygen? They exhaled the stuff that we wanted and inhaled the stuff we didn’t want, that was about as technical as she could muster, and it was enough. She breathed in tandem with the trembling rain sparkled leaves. In. And out. In, and out. Deeper breaths. Damn, it was good! That was good air to be breathing, what with the rain and the trees doing their thing. And there for the taking, no strings attached.

    When the oven timer interrupted her sojourn in the night air, Eleri noticed that the little dog had stopped coughing. On her way back inside, she noticed the new mermaids patiently awaiting a coat or two of sea green paint and wondered if she would ever find a dragon to replicate. She was sure they’d be popular, if only she could find one.

    #4195
    F LoveF Love
    Participant

      Finnley staring at Godfrey in a bemused manner. Dragons? She hated it when characters changed personality mid-story and without warning. It was unsettling. Sidling closer to him she tentatively reached out and poked his arm firmly with her index finger.

      “Ouch, dammit Finnley! What are you doing?”

      “Testing to see if you are real or if I am hallucinating. Anyway, seems you are real so all good.”

      “Oh, there you are, Finnley!” Liz beamed. “I seem to recall I was looking for you but I can’t remember why. Perhaps it was to remind you not to monopolise my thread. You are doing it again, you know.”

      #4179
      TracyTracy
      Participant

        “Why don’t you get on with telling us your dream and then we can all bugger off,” prompted Finnley.

        “It was a big rambling house, much more to it than we expected. The kind of house with lots and lots of little rooms and different areas, and two or three people here or there, doing whatever they were doing. Sort of odd people, but not madly strange. A lovely feeling of curiosity and interest, and a marveling at how much more there was than we had anticipated. It was the kind of place,” Liz said, “That I could have moved into and not changed a thing.”

        Roberto and Finnley started to fidget noisily while Liz was lost in the remembrance of wandering around the labyrinthine dream house.

        “Did you move into it?” asked Godfrey.

        “Well that is the funny thing, old bean. I said to Dan, in the dream, when I noticed the place was on the top of some very steep close together craggy mountain peaks with narrow bridges between them, I said “ Dan, I’ll never be able to drive all the way home in the dark after classes” and he said with a chuckle, “That’s what I was thinking.” It seems as if I had been contemplating taking a course at this place. But you know what I think?”

        Liz paused to make sure everyone was paying attention.

        “I don’t think you need to drive a car to get to that place.”

        #4175

        In reply to: Scrying the Word Cloud

        TracyTracy
        Participant

          itself direction
          attention indeed
          whether certainly short
          house continued
          wondered whatever watching pea
          sometimes later
          interesting certain
          appeared body
          human picked

          #4159

          In reply to: Coma Cameleon

          TracyTracy
          Participant

            A man needs a name, so they called him Tibu. It wasn’t that anyone chose the name, they had started calling him “the man from the back of the Tibu” and it got shortened. It was where they found him sitting next to an empty suitcase, by the back entrance of the Tibu nightclub, in the service alley behind the marina shop fronts.

            The man they called Tibu had been staying with the street hawkers from Senegal for several months. They were kind, and he was grateful. He was fed and had a place to sleep. It perplexed him that he couldn’t recall anything of the language they spoke between themselves. Was he one of them? Many of them spoke English, but the way they spoke it wasn’t familiar to him. Nothing seemed familiar, not the people he now shared a life with, nor the whitewashed Spanish town.

            Some of his new friends assumed that he’d been so traumatized during the journey that brought him here that he had mentally blocked it; others were inclined towards the idea of witchcraft. One or two of them suspected he was pretending, that he was hiding something, but for the most part they were patient and accommodating. He was a mystery, but he was no trouble. They all had their own stories, after all, and the focus wasn’t on the past but on the present ~ and the hopes of a different future. So they did what they had to do and sold what they could. They ate and they sent money back home when they could.

            They filled Tibu’s suitcase with watches, gave him a threadbare white sheet, and showed him the ropes. The first time they left him to hawk on his own he’s walked and walked before he could bring himself to find a spot and lay out the watches. Fear knotted his stomach and threatened to loosen his bowels. Before long the fear was replaced by a profound sadness. He felt invisible, not worth looking at.

            He began to hate the ugly replica watches he was selling, and wondered why he hated them so. He had never liked them, but now he detested them. Hadn’t he had better watches than this? He stared at his watchless left wrist and wondered.

            #4156

            In reply to: Coma Cameleon

            rmkreeg
            Participant

              “Aaron!” his focus snapped. Was he day dreaming?

              As he came to the door, he looked at his suit in the mirror. It was keen, with straight lines and not a wave or wrinkle to be found. It was the epitome of structure and order.

              He hated it.

              He hated the way it felt. He hated the properness that came with it. He hated the lie.

              In the next moment, he began to shake off the prissiness. It felt as if he could wriggle out of it, loosen up a little. And as he stood there, shaking his hands and feet, trying to get the funk off him, the suit shook off, too. It fell to the floor in pieces as though it were the very manifestation of inhibition.

              As he stood there, in front of the mirror and half naked, a low murmur came up from his stomach. It was an uneasiness, a call to action, a desire to move…but he had no idea what for or why. It welled up in him and he became anxious without the slightest clue as to what he was going through. Frankly enough, it scared him.

              “AARON!”

              The voice was a part of him and there was nothing but himself staring at himself. Everything seemed to become more and more energized. It felt like he extended beyond the limit of his skin, like water in a balloon trying to push outward.

              Were it not for his containment, there was a very real possibility that he might just completely leap out of his skin and bones. He felt that, given a small slip in concentration, he’d be liable to explode headlong into the atmosphere with the vigor of a superhero on poorly made bath salts.

              His heart raced. He could feel it beating in his chest. He could feel it beating all over. What was happening? Where was he?

              He looked back at his surroundings and found himself sitting behind a tattered cloth spread with sunglasses and watches…and his suitcase?

              #4131

              “Doctor, doctor, I think we’ve located our escaped test subject.” Barbara gleamed at the Doctor, showing her a bit of newspaper.

              “Not that rag again!” he grumbled “You should know how I hate that piece of rubbish.”

              “Well, they make for entertaining rea…” She quickly swallowed her last words, seeing the mad look in the Doctor’s eyes. “… they make for interesting findings… sometimes…” she pursued more vehemently, “such as this one! Look! The Hairy Trenchcoat Ape Sightings by our special extreme reporter in … well sorry, I can’t read that location’s name, it looks so hopelessly from the British Isles…”

              “Well, we will soon see if this is contagious now, shan’t we?” The Doctor said with an evil glee.

              “Be as it may,” the Doctor continued “how are our new guests doing so far on the rejuvenating cure?”

              “Oh well, they’re curing alright.” Barbara said matter-of-factly.

              #4104
              Jib
              Participant

                “Is that lamb head on the menu?” asked Connie with a grimace on her face. “I can’t believe it.”

                “It looks like it, dear”, retorted Sophie offhandedly. “Don’t look at me like that, I’ve seen and eaten worse.”

                “Ewh”, said Connie, “I don’t want to know.” She was not quite honest, her reporter blood was thirsty about good and juicy stories. But she was not here to interview the temp, and the menu was leaving her perplexed. “What’s Hrútspungar ?”

                “You don’t want to know”, said Sophie, “Trust me.”

                Connie craved some vegan food and they didn’t seem to have any vegetables in the hotel restaurant. She pouted and finally gave up. “Take whatever you want, I’ll follow.”

                “You like to live dangerously”, said Sophie.
                “Whatever”, retorted Connie with a sigh. She put a hand on her round belly. “It may be an opportunity to begin that diet.”

                Sophie snorted. She never believed in diet. She had tried them all, just for fun, but she eventually found the rules boring and just forgot about the whole diet business.

                “Nice beehive hair Ladies”, said the waiter with an appreciative look at their heads. “What will you order?” he asked opening his small notebook.

                Sophie smiled at the compliment and closed the menu. “I’ve been told you had a special”, she said.

                The man tilted his head and looked at the old woman with a hint of surprise in his eyes. He shrugged as if it wasn’t his problem after all. Connie gulped, expecting the worse.

                “Two Svið with Gellur”, he said scribbling something in his notebook. “May I suggest some Brennivín?”
                “You may”, answered Sophie. “It can help us gulp the whole thingy”, she explained to Connie.

                “The common error is to go for the head and dismiss the eyes”, said the waiter. “They may surprise you”, he added before leaving.

                Connie looked murderously at Sweet Sophie, whom she would have renamed Sour Sophie in that moment. The old woman had an air of satisfaction on her face. “Why on earth would you pick that ?” asked the reporter.

                “Oh! That was part of the instructions in the letter”, answered Sophie with a shrug that made her beehive tremble.

                #4099

                Funley sniffed loudly as she unhurriedly emptied the trash can in Ed Steam’s office, pausing to read any interesting correspondence which may have wound up there. Looking over towards Ed and finding that his attention was still fixed on the computer monitor, she followed her sniff up with a small snort and then a throat clearing noise. When her sniffs and snorts didn’t capture Ed’s attention, she proceeded to blow her nose explosively.

                This did the trick. Ed jumped and looked at Funley in alarm.

                “Whatever is the matter, Funley? Are you ill?”

                “Sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you,” apologised Finnley, pulling up a chair in front of Ed’s desk and seating herself comfortably on it.

                “Actually, if you are not too busy, there is a small problem I’ve been wanting to speak with you about. I promised I would untangle the threads for you however the entanglement situation is worse than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Or nightmares for that matter. I don’t know who has been doing the record keeping — although I would hazard a guess at Evangeline — but the cross referencing, where it exists, is appalling and … “

                A tap on the door and the new employee, Duncan Minestrone, popped his head into the office. “You wanted to see me, Mr Steam?” he asked.

                Funley glanced towards the door in exasperation at the interruption and then her expression changed to one of horror.

                Jasper Grok!” she gasped. “What are you doing here?”

                #4071

                “Thanks,” said Bossy taking her cup of tea.

                “So, tell me more about this evil fruit-loop doctor,” said Ricardo with an encouraging smile.

                Bossy looked intently at him. “It’s no joke,” she admonished him sharply.

                “Oh, no. No, of course not. I mean, yeah, I really want to know. It all sounds very … intriguing. And sort of creepy, to be honest. But definitely not a joke.”

                Bossy relented and gestured imperatively for Ricardo to be seated.

                The doctor could best be described as a mad genius. He believed he had found the answer to looking eternally youthful but didn’t want to go through the time and expense of clinical trials through the normal channels. So he set up a testing laboratory on a small and relatively unknown Pacific Island. Tifikijoo, I believe it was called.”

                “Uh huh. Actually I do vaguely remember something about that story.”

                “We got the story first,” Bossie said proudly, “but there was a media ban on publishing some of the information, unfortunately. The Doctor managed to get funding for his tests through an undercover organisation whose hidden agenda was to hide an ancient crystal skull while at the same time providing them with a facility where they could continue their own secret testing into spider genomes. I can’t tell you too much about that — it was all hush hush. So, you wouldn’t have read about that in the news, I bet,” she added with a smug smile.

                “Uh, no,” answered Ricardo, privately wondering if Bossy was the mad one. It was all starting to feel a bit surreal to him.

                “Did the doctor know about the skull stuff?”

                “No, the doctor was genuinely only interested in preserving beauty. Unfortunately, to this end, he killed one of his first guinea pigs. And tried to disguise his crime by mummifying the body. That’s when it all began to implode on him.”

                “What happened to him?”

                “He had some good lawyers and was found not competent to stand trial on the grounds of insanity. And the fact that all his clients had signed liability waivers helped a bit. He was sent to a high security psychiatric institution but managed to escape by reverting to his female identity—he was transsexual—and hiding in a laundry trolley.

                The doctor hated the way he was portrayed in the media and most of his venom was focused on our people. We had a guy working with us then, John Smith, and he covered the story with Connie. They got the brunt of the hate emails. John nearly had a nervous breakdown with the stress of it and moved to the country. Pity, he was a good writer.”

                “So what makes you think Santa Claus and the doctor are one and the same?”

                “Call it a very strong hunch. The Doctor was born in Iceland and had strong family ties there. And now I fear he has lured Connie and Sophie there in order to exact his evil revenge!”

                #4022

                Final nail in the coffin, indeed.

                Despite the overwhelmnity of the situation, Ed couldn’t fathom why nobody would take some time to stop and ponder on the incoherences, the gaps in the net, so to speak.

                It behooved him to do so. The deranged cackler, like a mockery of the divine breath, ruling over the bizarro earth he had been sworn to protect — it had to be stopped.

                But where was the elusive cackler hiding, he would seemed to appear anywhere and everywhere. And what to make of those cases of mistaken identities, or all the althreadnarrative-realities jumping. The occurrences were piling up. He couldn’t even seem to count on assembling his old fierce Surge Team. All gone bizarro too.

                Pouring over his copious notes, he remembered how it all started. The strange case of Baked Bean Bea.
                She seemed to have breached through, and quite frankly shattered in all likelihood some old reality limitation, and somehow, she now was able to unwittingly shape the world to new strange alternate realities at her every whims.

                He painfully tried to recall, what he was, who he had been in the course of the last months. Blaze, his old genius inventor friend had left him some device, a transfocal whatever thingy. Usually it would change shapes as well, reconfigure itself with each realities. But its function was more or less the same. Reconnect him to his previous alternate realities. Which was handy, when you couldn’t even trust the notes you took. Obviously Bea wasn’t Baked Bean Bea before… or was she?

                Now the Transfocal Thingy seemed to have relocated in the bathroom. The shower head with the wires seemed a bit of a giveaway.
                Ed put on the water.

                #3975
                F LoveF Love
                Participant

                  “Don’t push me,” snapped Finnley. “Yes Godfrey, I believe picking up rubbish is in my job description. Your job description … well buggered if I know what you do around here,” she said snarkily, perversely annoyed at being telepathically described as ‘the maid’. “Give me that rubbish immediately and I will deal with it,” she commanded, making a grab for Godfrey’s hand. “You go and help LIz with Roberto. And whatever you do, don’t let the blighter jump 3 times in the air and shout stickum lute putty.

                  “Who are you?” whispered Godfrey, keeping a firm grasp on the scraps of paper, aided perhaps by the fact that the honey was adhering them to his hand. “You are not the Finnley we know and … well, the Finnley we know. Is that cucumber on your face really a disguise? What have you done with Finnley?”

                  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Finnley, rolling her eyes.

                  “Help!” screamed Liz. “He’s trying to jump!”

                  #3934
                  ÉricÉric
                  Keymaster

                    “Why do you suffer pain? You have compressed yourself into a form and an identity, hence the suffering. You pursue spirituality from the same limited and conditioned standpoint and hence you cannot secure any foothold in these pursuits. In whatever subject you are absorbed, you deal with it from the standpoint of a personalized entity, and not as dynamic manifest consciousness…”

                    “Hear that Liz’ ?” Godfrey beamed in delight “It was not Roberto or any bloody character, it was only your dynamic manifest consciousness!”
                    “In other words, are you saying it was all my fault again, cheeky blithering fool?” Liz’ couldn’t contain her petulance.

                    “I think you’re missing the point, dear,… but yes.” He added after a dramatic pause “or you can blame it on Cynchtia Dipity, or her twin sister, Serene.”

                    #3928
                    TracyTracy
                    Participant

                      Godfrey, shouldn’t you DO something about that? The characters are wandering all over the place, on the wrong threads, wandering right out of stories, whether they’ve been written out or not. They’re all just doing whatever they damn well want, it’s getting ridiculous!”

                      Obligingly Godfrey cackled loudly, in what Liz presumed was a game attempt to restore some order in the threads (mistakenly assuming momentarily that they were in Caketown) .

                      “Are they all turning into anarchists?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

                      “Don’t be daft, Godfrey, you can have characters that are anarchists, but you can’t have anarchists that are characters, where will it end? Who will be in control, and lead the story?”

                      “The writer will have to follow the lead of the characters, then, and support their moves with filler and back story.”

                      Elizabeth felt faint. “What are you suggesting?” she whispered, filled with dread and uncertainty.

                      #3891
                      ÉricÉric
                      Keymaster

                        Liz had taken well to her new prescription drugs.
                        In appearance, it had seemed to have drained out the inexhaustible source of inspiration that let her write novels after novels. Or maybe that was just due to the absence of Finnleys to take care of the editing.

                        In the meantime, Godfrey had worked hard to nurture her back to whatever state she called sanity and suited her best, and gently coax her to resume her former passion.

                        Godfrey, let me retire from writing, it’s too passé.” she was pouring concrete into the silicon molds to make new saint statues. Over the years, she’d accumulated quite a few of those saints and martyrs that she collected (or stole) from derelict places of cult during her travels. She liked to paint them back to life with gaudy colours, mimicking some sort of Mexican style. Sometimes she would dress them, and ask Finnley to sew them clothes and little hats.

                        Strangely, getting her out of the hospice had made her want to populate the whole house with concrete clones of those statues. Maybe to fill a void of inspiration ?
                        Nevertheless, Godfrey was amazed at her capacity to innovate. Her writing momentum was certainly at a low, but did she channel her creativity in many ways.
                        The last batch of Christian martyr statues painted in the many outfits of David Bowie were a testament to that.

                        #3875

                        Cornella giggled, dusting off her keyboard before leaving the office. Ed Steam might have something to say about it when he saw the new lists of identities in the morning, but it had been worth it. A little alliteration helped to pass the day, after all. For the most part the story refugees either didn’t notice, or at any rate didn’t complain. They were relieved that the endless process was over, or too nervous about starting a new story to notice.

                        Zoe Zuckerberg to Zimbabwe was one of her favourites; and Quentin Quincy to Queensland. What did it matter that Zoe, previously known as Madam Li, had no desire to go to Zimbabwe, or that Ted Marshall had family in Spain? It was up to them to make up whatever they wanted once they started the new story. Her job was assigning names and locations, the rest was up to them.

                        She’d laughed out loud when one of them sat down at her desk, clearing his throat nervously. Current name and location? she asked.
                        Percy Piedmont from Paris, he said, I have a brother in Shanghai who has a new story, he said he’d insert me into his.

                        Cornella couldn’t help wondering who had assigned him his last character role, and if they were playing games in the office to pass the day, too.

                        Alright Percy, how about Shane Shylock?

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