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In reply to: Tales of Tw’Elves
Tal turned on the invisible-izer, and smiled as he enjoyed the idea that his spaceship would never be noticed by any human or animal alike.
He exited the ship, walked a few paces and then suddenly halted in his tracks.
Directly in front of him was no other than a large sink hole.
What the Kraken? he thought. There must have been some major Earth changes since his interstellar space traveling. Good thing he didn’t land a few feet to the north.
Tal clicked a small button on his nifty zinger-space-belt, which enabled the detection of any Earth anomalies.
The gauge was reading off the charts!
In reply to: Tales of Tw’Elves
“It’s mother earth crying because humans are destroying the planet” ventured Kerry. “And before you ask, I don’t know how I got here. I was doing the remote view practice, and I got a direct hit, it was a picture of a kraken. Then I heard this rumbling noise in my head, and well, here I am…”
“Well you’re all wrong” said the guy with the blonde hair. “It’s the Galactic Federation of Light, and they’ve come to arrest all the criminals that are preventing the shift.”
Flinella slipped behind Eliza, surruptitiously looking to see where she could hide. What did he mean by criminals?
“What do you mean by criminals, my good man?” asked Eliza, sensing Flinella’s alarm.
“He means anarchists and protesters” said the politician.
“No he doesn’t, he means big pharma” interjected Kerry.
“Where the bloody hell did all these people come from?” Flinella looked around wildly, and then “Oh now really this is too much!”
The grey squishy guy just laughed, his thin shoulders jumping up and down with mirth.
In reply to: Tales of Tw’Elves
Luigi, preoccupied with worried thoughts about Flinella who he still hadn’t heard from, didn’t see the eu de nil motor scooter haring round the corner until it was too late. The scooter swerved, avoiding a head on collision, but clipped his shoulder, spinning him around. Luigi crashed into a signpost and fell to the ground. Shocked and dazed, he lay sprawled on the ground, unable to get to his feet. The narrow street was deserted, apart from a couple of tourists strolling along, looking upwards, as tourists so often do in foreign cities.
“Stupid irresponsible motorscooters, they should watch where they’re going” Luigi was saying, “Knocking old men to the ground like that, they should be more careful!”
This caught the tourists attention, so they stopped for a moment to look at the old man lying bruised on the ground. “You shouldn’t blame the motorscooter you know” said the woman. “You created that yourself”
“What are you talking about?” Luigi replied. “Please give me a hand, I can’t get back on my feet.”
“Well you created it, chum. I’m not going to give you a hand until you stop blaming the motorscooter and admit that you created it yourself.”
“Oh piss off, you vacuous fuckwit” replied Luigi, looking desperately around to see if there was anyone more helpful in the street.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Arona was starting to get cold in the pinkini. She wondered how the lady with the green hair managed to keep warm with so little (not to say as much as nothing) on her skin.
She probably had some fuel more lasting than just Nhum.
Upon seeing that (not the nakie lady, Flove forbid, but the freezing Arona and the night falling down), chivalrous Vinny and Bucky went to gather some bones and fire to spend the night around a nice bonefire. Just what she needed for a keetle of hot tea.Note from the observing Sue Maffey, who started quickly to get high and delirious on Nhum tea in chippendale cups and mumbled to herself and patient Minky-in-crutches in between a few hiccups: “you knew that a bonfire is actually a fire made of bones, originally said of fires in which the bones of slaughtered animals were burned, allegedly a Gaengelic tradition of the slaughter season in autumn (Samhain, which was soon to come).”
She almost gasped wondering where their camelephants had suddenly gone and why that purple reckless dragon suddenly looked satiated.By now, almost everyone else who was there, including (but not only) Mandrake, Yickesy, Winky-nakie-greenie-Messmeerah-with-her-carved-jamón and Mrs Janet had thought the same at least once. That and wondering whether they’d ever get to see that famed Jiborium.
So much for cheap package tours.In reply to: Strings of Nines
“I’m not saying that’s what I did, though” said Vincentius, and Arona almost slapped him in the face, but the nhum was still strong in her brain.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Mandrake sighed. That trip on dragon’s back was a fast and bumpy ride. They’d landed right in the middle of the group of tourists in no time at all, and surprisingly Arona, still high on Nhum spiked tea had failed to notice much of what had just happened, let alone that her progeny was in the midst of them.
Even more surprisingly, the tourists had failed to notice their colourful, noisy and dusty landing, not to say the purple dragon itself that Vincentius had to refrain eating one of the big two-humped beasts. That dragon cloaking magic, was a hell of a powerful jinx.“Strange,” Arona said in her mild stuporous state “am I missing some events there? and… is it me, or that travel guide is a cross-dresser?”
And casting a suspicious look at Vincentius, almost blushing “and how did I enter into that hot pink bikini?”
In reply to: Strings of Nines
“Oh, that’s just because I was making you side-dishes for your breakfast, sweetie”, a Vincentius arms full with fresh fruits of improbable sizes and colours said as he came out of the nearby grove. “Though, I beg to differ with Mandrake, a bottle of Nhum would go great with those, especially the grogonuts.”
“Then, we can go find Yicks’.”
Despite all his best efforts, Yickesy had not yet managed to escape the crutches of chatty Minky who was herding the disparaged group of tourists to weirder and weirder spots.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Arona had indeed been devastated by the loss of her chippendale.
“Oh, thank you Buckberry,” she exclaimed joyfully. “My great Aunt, twice removed on my father’s side, Auntie Shelly Dwelling, gave me this beautiful chippendale tea set when I was just a little girl … before she disappeared in very strange circumstances … or so the story goes. Clever you to find it. I can make Nhum tea now!”
“This makes no sense at all,” sniffed Mandrake, privately wondering if he had better dispose of the Nhum when Arona was otherwise occupied. He did prefer things to make sense and clearly this Nhum Bhum stuff was messing with Arona’s head. Which is silly enough at the best of times.
“Vincentius is taking a long time. Perhaps we should see if he is okay and then we can all have a nice cup of tea in my beautiful tea set,” enthused Arona.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
“No good pulling that horrid face at me,” said Arona sternly. “The cheap copy of Nhum I bought in the market appears to have numbed my brain. Not to mention the strange hallucinations of a frog in an electric wheelchair I have been getting recently. “
In reply to: Strings of Nines
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Arona gazed fondly at her bottle of Nhum before putting it carefully back in her bag. You couldn’t be too careful with bottles of Nhum. They weren’t easy to come by after all.
“What on earth is that? asked Mandrake.
“That, my dear Mandrake,” replied Arona smugly, “Is my bottle of Nhum.” She smiled enigmatically.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Of course, it wasn’t Mandrake, but a stray snakipooh, lured by the magical properties of Aronipooh’s feet that had started to lick her toes while Mandrake was away chewing on his pride. Arona had a split moment of pleasurable intensity before she came quickly to her senses to realize Mandrake wouldn’t do such an odd thing.
Arona wondered if the snakipooh would make a nice boa round her lovely shoulders, but then thought it would be a tad too daring and quite unecessary given her natural allure. She quickly shooed it away, searching in her magical bag, among the sabulmantium and her other belongings, for a bottle of Nhum.
In reply to: Strings of Nines
Messmeerah started to carve the name of all the funny bunch on a huge jamón from the fifth leg (the meatiest) of a jelly boar of the steppes, starting with her own —name, not leg— as a reminder of the good time they had all together. She was thinking as well that it would taste lovely with some of these Jiborium’s truffles.
She was sad to had to let them go, but frankly her old routines were starting to get too scrambled. For one, she didn’t quite remember if Minky was still a redhair rat in her hair (now she thought of it, breeding tiny shrews in her attic didn’t really work so well), or was now back in his human form with a secret revenge of his own on his mind. But that would be maybe a slight stretch. And gosh, did she abhor stretch marks, even on her lovely brains.
— “Oh come on, dear,” one of the motley participants, a cheery big-boned and outrageously made-up of make-up woman said in a bizarre Lizabethian accent, with a hint of bossiness that showed she had not been used to being contradicted much in her life. “Join us on that trip to Mr Jiborium’s, you shall find yourself a use or two.”
Taken aback by the turn of the events, Messmeerah, also known as Winky, took the jamón under her arm, and against all common sense decided to join the crew —thanking the Mighty Mungibs for the improbable feat of continuity that had appeared as a sign.
— “Well, if you don’t mind…” Yikesy was starting to object, but realized some things are best left unsaid, and it would be easy enough now to slip out of their sight (and off the rapacious motherly attentions of Mrs Janet, the big-boned tasteless-bags lady with an accent.)
In reply to: Snowflakes of Tens
The entrances to Faerie (and indeed to other alternate realities and dimensions) had been shrouded in disbelief for several centuries, but times were changing and the fog of scepticism was dissipating, evaporating like river mist on a hot summer morning. Looking for the entrances deliberately, Blithe found, wasn’t the most efficacious method. Sat Nav alone would be unlikely to reveal them, unless the locating device was used in conjunction with impulse and intuition. Any device and method could be used effectively when combined with random impulse, even Google Earth or Google Moon. Blithe’s friend and colleage Dealea Flare was making good use of this device on her travels, using it as a personal non physical airline and space shuttle service. Dealea could get from A to B and back again in no time at all, or even from A to well beyond Z and back again in no time at all using this device in conjunction with impulse and large dose of intention and focus. Blithe had the impulse down pat but still had difficulty with the focus, which was largely a case of having too many intentions at once, most of them somewhat vague.
The more random and impulsive Blithe was, the better her investigations went, often leading her into a new and exciting exploration which may or may not be linked to the current intention. Such was the case when she went on a mundane shopping trip to the Rock of Gibber. As she sat sipping coffee at the Counterpart Cabana sidewalk cafe listening to the locals conversing in Gibberish, she noticed the extraordinary tangle of pipework on the building opposite. It reminded her of the steampunk world she had been investigating in her spare time. The text book steampunk world was intriguing to say the least, but rather grim, and tediously full of victims and fear. The inhabitants always seemed to be running away from someone. The steampunk world she was beginning to sense in Gibber was quite different in that it was a sunny cheerful alternate reality held together with a vast labyrinthine network of water pipes, scaffold, and connecting cables.
Blithe paid for her coffee and strolled off, noticing more and more scaffolding and tangles of pipes as she climbed the warren of narrow winding streets. The air was different the higher she climbed up the winding uneven steps, the sunlight was sharper and the shadows denser, and there was a crackling kind of hush as if the air was shimmering. Cables festooned the crumbling shuttered buildings like cobwebs, and centuries of layers of crackled sun faded pastel paint coated the closed doors. Open doors revealed dark passageways and alleys with bright rectangles of light glowing in the distance, and golden dry weeds sprouted from vents and windowsills casting dancing shadows on the uneven walls.
The usual signs of life were strangely absent and present at the same time; an occasional voice was heard from inside one of the houses, and there were pots of flowers growing here and there, indicating that a human hand had watered them with water from the pipe network. There was no music to be heard though, or any indication that the cable network was in use, and there were virtually no people on the streets. A lady in a brilliant blue dress who was climbing the steps from Gibber Town below paused to chat, agreeing with Blithe who remarked on the peaceful beauty of the place. The lady in blue said “Si, it’s very nice, but there are many steps, so many steps. If you are coming from below there are SO many steps!”
There was a boy watching a white dog watching an empty space on the pavement, so Blithe stopped to watch the boy watching the dog watching nothing. Eventually Blithe inquired “What is he looking at?” and the boy shrugged and continued to watch the dog watching nothing. Blithe watched for a little while, and then wandered off. A small child was giggling from inside a doorway, and a mothers voice asked what he was laughing at. The child was looking out of the door at nothing as far as Blithe could see.
As the sun climbed higher, Blithe began to descend into Gibber town, winding and weaving through the alleys, wondering how she had failed to notice this place half way up the Rock until now. She came to a crumbling wall with a doorway in it that looked out over the bay beyond the town below. This must be one of the entrances, she deduced, to this alternate world in Gibber. “Entrance”! Blithe had a revelation. “I never noticed that the word ENtrance and enTRANCE are spelled the same.” Later, back at the office, Frolic Caper-Belle said she thought it was probably a very significant clue. “I’ll file that in the Clue Box, Blithe”, she said.
{link: entrance}
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
Dear OW’s and Favourite Daughter,
I had a dream last night. It went like this . . . . I was in the garden when I noticed an alien space ship coming down from a great height above me. It was humming, humm, hummm, humming. Like that. There was a smell of old cabbages and kitty litter.
It landed a few feet away from me. It was like a saucer and coloured olive green. A door opened on the underside and a ladder lowered. The ladder was made of wood, which surprised me. The aliens started down the ladder. They had no arms or legs. Just heads. They came down the ladder using their lips.
There were eight of them. The leader (at least I took it to be their leader as he had the biggest head) approached me. He said “Where can we get some hats ?”
Next thing I remember I was in the back of a pickup truck eating a prawn cocktail. Next to me sitting on some old sacks was the head alien slurping down uncooked carrots direct from the tin.
He said to me “We would like you to make a tv commercial for us”.
Then I woke up.
I’m afraid to report this encounter with the third kind to the authorities in case they just laugh at me.
I need your advice on this one. What should I do ?
Uncle Garnet
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“These old ezines and blogs are fascinating” remarked Periwinkle, passing the one she had just been reading to Daffodil. “Thank goodness some folks had the foresight to print some of them!”
“I know, imagine if they hadn’t. We’d have no artefacts for the collection. Well, we have all those flat discs, but no way to decipher them. Oh, did I tell you? Bignonia found something even older than the discs!”
“NO!” exclaimed Periwinkle “Do tell!”
“Yes, even older! Funny looking contraption, with two reels and a ribbon. An information storage device, so they say, although they haven’t discovered how to decipher it.”
“I wonder why we’re still not simply accessing that information without, well, without messing around with the physical contraption, you know?”
“Wouldn’t be any point in being here in the first place, if we weren’t going to mess around with physical things, silly” replied Daffodil.
There was no answer to that, so Periwikle didn’t answer. She continued to thumb through the printed pages.
Periwinkle and Daffodil sat together on the patio in the warm spring sunshine, sipping lemonade
and leafing through the papers. Bright white clouds in cartoon shapes romped across the blue sky,
and the birds chattered in the trees,
occasionally landing on the printed pages and cocking their heads sideways to read for a moment, before flying off to tell their friends, which was usually followed by a raucous group cackling.
“Dear Goofenoff” read Daffodil, “This one looks interesting Peri, someone here is asking for advice on a problem.”
“What’s a “problem”, Daffy?” asked Periwinkle. “For that matter, what does the word “advice” mean? Oh, never mind” she said as she noticed Daffodil rolling her eyes, “I’ll look it up in my pre shift dictionary of defunct words.”
“She’s asking the Snoot too, about the same problem. Oh, I think I’ve heard of them! It’s coming back to me, the old Snoot’n‘Goof team, they were quite famous in the beginning of the century, I remember hearing about them before in a Shift History discussion.”
“Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of them, but then, I’ve never been into history like you, dear. So what is this “problem” all about, then?”
“I’ll read it out to you, it’s way too convoluted to put in a nutshell. Lordy, they sure did complicate matters back then, it’s almost unbeleivable, really, but anyway, here goes:
Dear Goofenoff,
I don’t know what to do! I am confused about which probable version of a blog freind, let’s call him MrZ, I have chosen to align with. The first probable version was ok, nothing to worry about, and then I drew into my awareness the probable versions of MrZ that some of my freinds had chosen to align with….”
“Blimey”, interrupted Periwinkle, who was starting to fidget. “Is it much longer?”
“It’s alot longer, so be patient. Where was I? Oh yes:
“….and while that was very interesting indeed, and led to lots of usefully emotionally heated discussions, I started to align with their probable version, at times, although not consistently, which led to some confusion. So then I had a chat with someone who was more in alignment with my original probable version, although there were aspects of that probable version that were a little in alignment with the other folks probable version, notwithstanding. I suppose I was still in alignment with the other folks probable version when it came to my attention that there was another individual that might be aligning with a probable version, and my question is, in a nutshell, is it any of my business which probable version the new individual on the scene is aligning with?”
“Well, I can tell you the answer to that!” exclaimed Periwinkle.
Daffodil rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear, WE know the answer, but the point is, SHE didn’t know the answer at the time, which is why she asked Goofenoff.”
“If you ask me, she knew the answer all along” Periwinkle intuited. “What did Goofenoff say anyway?”
“He said:
Are you requiring a short or a long answer?”
Daffodil turned the page to continue reading. She frowned, and flicked through a few pages.
“What a shame, some of these pages appear to be missing! Now we’ll never know what Goofenoff said.”
Periwinkle laughed. “Well, never mind that anyway, have you seen the random story quote today? Rather synchronistic I’d say, listen to this bit:
Illi felt much better, and was sitting at the breakfast table, basking in the warm shafts of sunlight filtering in through the window, and listening to the birds singing in the lemon tree outside.”
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“Well, I’m not eating bitter batter, even if it has got butter in it. I’m going out dancing, are you coming?”
“Dang it, yes! Let’s dance, darling, let’s dance! It’s a dandy day for dancing, I’m decidedly dapper today ~ and dashing and daring, dammit!”
“Come on then you cute cuddly chickpea, my carriage careers round the corner now, to catch you at the curb. Come, cherished chum, come cavorting with me!”
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“What?” The Majorburgmester of Peasland almost laughed of surprise at the incongruity of Fwick con Troll’s idea. “You’re telling that this…”
“Little spider, yes”
“Contains a potent venom that could wipe the blubbits off the face of Peasland?”
“Absolutely, dear Majorburgmester”
“Are you out of your Fwicking mind, Fwick? What breading this nasty spider could possibly bring us any better than a plague of crop-eating blubbits in rut?”
“I was actually talking of breeding them, sir” Fwick objected
The Mayor continued unperturbed “Besides, we already have our fierce constable Stoll drill the mythic Eight Dimension for answers.”
“That would be placing a lot of trust in that foolish venture, I’m afraid to say, Majorburgmester. To date, very few people have managed to return safely.”
“Oh, who cares if they ever bloody come back Fwick! Come on! All we need to do is extort the answers from his spouse who’s kept all their heads in a safe place, I have no doubt of that.”
“Well… I wouldn’t place my head on this bet if I were you…”“Ah, bugger off then with your stinking spider, and do your bloody experiments… As long as it doesn’t involve my name, and especially in case any misguided and sad assassination should occur, ahahaha. I’m joking of course.” The Mayor’s face (which was framed and hanged on the wall of the Majorburgmester Hall’s main office) suddenly shut any hint of humanity that could have been left on it.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
I ache all over… arrrrgghhhhhhhh Aspidistra was complaining on the phone all the while being intrigued by Harvey’s positively good mood.
“Oh you know,” Harvey began to tell her “the secret of the hyper-mel mode (a.k.a. “HMM”) is to be happy and screaaaaaming at the top of your lungs all your merriness no matter whut.”
“And of course,” he added, “punctuating it with occasional profuse weehooes (and some wheehoees now and then).”“Woa… I will need more coffee for that” she said yawning while Harvey was continuing “and put your hands in the air, your fingers mimicking stars glitter! Wheeeha katcha twinkle twinkleepooh!”
“Oh, don’t mention hands, I dropped the milk twice this morning” Aspidistra was distraught again.
“Owlright, and have you rejoiced on having milk spilled all over the goddess body?! Mmhhh? YES! YES!”
“And I’ve got arthritis in my thumb!”
“Uh-oh, arthritis… even better! rhymes with Weehooohees! … or giant squid… architeuthis!”
“Achy tits, yeah…” she moaned plaintively. “And all that milk spilled with my poor thumbies…”
“You see, you get the hang of it,” Harvey was bouncing “got to go dearee, spread the good joy,… see you soon! Weeee…”
And off he was, hanging on Aspidistra while her ears where still full of the echoes of weehooees.
In reply to: The Eights’ Shift, Stories
“And how do I play these notes?” asked Pee raucously. “I can’t even see them without my head.”
“Mmmh! Yes that could be a problem” acquiesced Fwick. The saucerer scratched his chin for a few seconds as he couldn’t remember where he had put that ancient device.
“Well maybe I could just send you to the bird keeper, and he can give you one of our last Anthornis Melanura…”
“I beg your pardon?” Pee’s voice was more raucous than ever, it was quite disturbing to the saucerer who wasn’t used to talking with a headless Peaman, but he couldn’t show his discomfort though, as he thought of it, the headless Peaman was also eyeless and couldn’t see his discomfort.
“Hum! This is the ancient name of the legendary Bul Bird of New Peasland. Mewrich Peamon, the bird keeper, his family has been breeding these birds since the great Peaphetess Frean Psea found these notes some millenia ago; they are the only ones which can open the ED. Any other sequence of notes would… well we don’t know exactly what could occur. You’re on your own on this one, Pee. ehr, I’m sorry, ehh, But be assured that I’ll take care of Peanelope for you.”“Oh! You’re too kind, Saucerer” said Pee who couldn’t have known that his faithful wife and the Saucerer were having an affair.
A sudden cry from Lilly startled them both. She had burst into tears and her brother was looking like a culprit. But Fwick wasn’t sure as he hadn’t got a head either…
“What have you done, Pickel?” asked Pee with his raucous voice.
