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Finnley snorted. “Madam Liz now, is it. Next she will be having us curtsey.”

“MUST you snort and mutter all the time, Finnley? It really is most distracting, not to mention unattractive, and I need my wits about me to sort out this unexpected husband fiasco. It really is not a good time, not with my bum looking like this.”

The Flying Fish Inn was passsed down to Abcynthia (the childrens mother) from her father, who had a boarding house during the gold rush. He died just after the mine closed and Abcynthia closed the place up and moved to the city where she went to university and met her husband Fred (name to be arranged later).

Fred was a journalist who aspired to write a science fiction novel. He convinced his wife to give up her career as a corporate lawyer, and raise a family at the old inn in the outback, while he write his novel and earned a rudimentary income from writing articles online, enough to live on. Just after their 4th child was born, Abcynthia had had enough, and left the family to pursue her career in the city.

Fred’s sister Aunt idle was at a loose end at the time, needing to keep a low profile and “disappear” for reasons to be discovered, and agreed to come and help Fred with the children. Fred’s cranky mother had already been living with them for a few years but was not up to the responsibility of the four children while Fred was busy writing.

A few months after Abcynthia’s disappearance, some unexplained incidents occurred in the area around the ghost town and the defunct mines ~ possibly connected to the sci fi novel Fred was writing in some way ~ which Fred wrote articles about, which went viral in the popular imagination and thirst for weird tales, and visitors started coming to the town.

Aunt Ilde started to informally put them up in rooms, and enjoyed the unexpected company of these strangers which relieved her increasing boredom, then as the visitors increased (not so very many, but two or three a week perhaps) decided to officially reopen the boarding house and a B and B.

Fred, though, must have had some kind of a meltdown because he left a cryptic note saying he’d be back, and to carry on without him for the foreseeable future. Nobody really knew why, or where he had gone.

Amber Graystone was dead. Killed by a bunch of masked men. Linda Pol would be dead also if it weren’t for Mr Graystone, whatever his firstname was. That man knows how to use his gun, she thought. Too bad he was caught by surprise. He managed to kill the three men before they could hurt anybody, but it seemed they had gotten to their main target anyway.

“They tried a car incident, poison. I thought I could protect her”, the man was holding his wife, tears in his voice. She had been shot in the head. One clean wound meant to kill. Linda Pol didn’t want to state the obvious, they were professionals. A vibration in her purse signaled a message on her e-zapper.

“Sorry for the glitch. It seems the Chinese have found a way to cloak themselves from our surveillance. Retrieve the data from the husband. The Management”
The queen began to wonder if they were the network management after all. Why would a TV network have a surveillance system and warn them about the Chinese ? Why would they send her meet a random scientist in Hawai’i ?

While Mr Graystone was grieving his wife, Linda Pol took the liberty to remove the masks of the dead squad. The Chinese indeed. Nothing that could be useful, they all looked the same for her.

She received another message.
“Move quick. Others are coming. The Management”

“You know”, she said aloud, “I think we should move.”
“I can’t leave my wife here.”
“I know, sweetie. But I think she’s already gone. And I fear those men are not be the only ones after your wife’s secret. Do you have any idea how we can get out discretly ?”

A buzz from her e-zapper told her she just got her answer.

The dogs barking woke Lisa up; at first she assumed she had woken up disorientated and disgruntled because of that, but then she recalled all the screaming, no, more like bellowing, she’d been doing in her dream. Intense passionate bellowing howls, like an expulsion of pained frustrated energy, of outrage. Frustratingly, she recalled no details. There had been a similar dream the previous Easter when she was sick ~ the same kind of howls, and she had felt much better afterwards, but she wasn’t sick now ~ in fact, she had been feeling better than she had in a long time.
Sipping her tea and still feeling cranky at being woken up, Lisa recalled the strange phone call she’d received the night before, and had a feeling it might be an element of her dream. One of her neighbours from just outside the village phoned, Clarissa. Clarissa was a young widow; since her elderly husband had died some months ago, and she had lived alone with her eight dogs. There had been nobody to ensure she took the medication she needed for her condition, which had resulted in a series of challenging episodes, alarming the locals. A few weeks ago, one of Juan’s sheep had been talking to her and wouldn’t stop, so she killed it in the lane outside her house. The sheep kept talking to her, so she cut it’s head off (a gruesome struggle by all accounts, although thankfully Lisa hadn’t witnessed it herself). The severed sheeps head continued to talk to the troubled Clarissa, so she kept the head on her verandah. That was the last thing that Lisa had heard when she received the unexpected phone call.
Clarissa was polite and friendly on the phone, inviting Lisa and Jack over for drinks ~ insisting really with an edge of desperation in her voice. Lisa declined the invitition, and omitted to mention that Jack was out playing poker. If it had not been for the sheep incident, Lisa might have responded differently, but her sense of responsibility to her own animals made her cautious. Then, to her horror, Clarissa offered to come round and feed Lisa’s dogs.
As soon as the long and insistent phone call ended, Lisa gathered all the dogs up into the gated top patio; a little later she was gratified to hear a noisy game of football going on in the street outside. Had she over reacted? Should she have had more compassion for the distressed young woman? Lisa lit another cigarette, feeling confused. She had only met Clarissa once, many years ago, and had no idea why she had called her, or where she got her phone number from. She knew of her because of the convoluted connecting links between them ~ Clarissa’s husband had been her own friends father. And she had heard about the various incidents since he had died from other neighbours.
Lisa had the unsettling feeling that she had refused a call for help. On the other hand, she felt that she had responded to the call for help in merely speaking to Clarissa on the phone. Lisa had been kindly towards her, although not encouraging of any physical contact.
Lisa sighed. She felt a stronger connection to Clarissa now, but was unsure what it would entail.

The phone rang while she was preparing her cabbage with soy sauce. It triggered a memory of a blue helmet. Quickly gone.
She hesitated a moment and stopped what she was doing to pick up the phone.
Her mother began speaking straight away.
“Where have you been all this time ? You’ll turn me mad. You’re so like your father, keeping to himself all those times when he was out playing mahjong with his friends. But I knew where that bastard was…”
Her voice was raspy after years of never being able to be speechless, and most astoundingly, she never repeated herself. The woman was even a sleeptalker. No wonder her husband would rather sneak out of the house to play with his friends.
Aqua Luna had developed an opposite habit, she would find her solace in silence and in doing house cleaning. But this time, the voice of her mother was fascinating. Something in it seemed different.

A blue flash interrupted her fascination. She almost jumped out of her pajamas.
“Listen carefully”, was saying the blue helmet.

1364

Marie put the the perfect husband down. She was looking for a rope and tied it to the door handle while she went for the knees, thankful for the power.

In exchange for some strange things, it had been agreed that Franiel’s angel met Derwent, a very ordinary mortal. Bit disappointed, she chuckled. Most of the others are lovely and colorful.

Ann Aspect had started the evening course “Free the Fiction Writer Within” without much hope, but much to her surprise, she loved it. She enjoyed it so much that on impulse she quit her day job at the Frozen Flounder Company and signed up at the Fiction Writers Academy as a full time immature student.

After a few weeks of juggling the struggling to look after the children and cook for her husband, keep the house clean, and all the other things a busy wife and mother does, as well as her assignments, Ann decided that it would be much more fun to stay in the students accomodation. She left them a note on the kitchen table saying simply “Have Fun Dears, I’m off!” and left, taking nothing with her but the clothes she was wearing (and the red wig). She called in at the cash point machine on the way to the Academy and withdrew as much money as it would allow her, and then threw her bank card in the gutter. Free! A clean slate, a new life!

“I just had the strangest dream, Rob” Jane said to her husband. “About a future probability, but it was really kind of silly.”

“What was it about?” he asked, leaning over the kitchen table to turn down the volume of the radio. Leon Russel’s new Back To The Island was playing, the waves rolling onto the shore mingled with the trucks thundering past on the busy road outside.

“Well, I’m pretty sure it was in the future, around 2009, and the kids were creating having a day off from school by throwing a peanut at the school building.”

Rob smiled at his wife, shaking his head.

“The class of ’75 today,” Jane continued, “Create a day off school by making a prank bomb scare phone call, but those kids in the future just threw a peanut at the place!”

“You sure do explore some far out probabilities, honey.”

Are Nut Bans Promoting Hysteria?

Every parent of a school-age child has heard the warnings about nuts. Some schools ban nuts entirely, while others set aside special nut-free tables.

While nuts are clearly a risk to some children, often the response to this health concern represents “a gross overreaction to the magnitude of the threat,” argues Dr Pistachio, an internal medicine doctor and professor at Pecan Medical School, in a recent column in the medical journal Nut Case.

Measures to protect children from nuts are becoming increasingly absurd and hysterical, say experts.

A nut rolling on the floor of a US school bus recently led to evacuation and decontamination for fear it might have affected the 10-year-old passengers, who were not classified as nuts.

Professor Pistachio said the issue was not whether nuts existed or whether they could occasionally be a serious threat. Nor was the issue whether reasonable preventative steps should be made for the few children who were documented as non-nuts, he argued.

“The issue is what accounts for the extreme responses to nuts.”

“We try to relieve anxiety about nuts by signs saying, ‘this is a nut free zone,’ which suggests that nuts are a clear and present danger,” Dr. Pistachio said. “But in doing so, we increase the anxiety.”

Being a severe nut shapes your whole life – and those of the people around you, as Cashew Cacahuete learned.

For most women trying to avoid the amorous advances of their husband, the line “Not tonight, I’ve got a headache” will suffice. For her, a simple “Don’t come near me, I am nuts” does the trick.

‘Nut phobias are a growing phenomenon of the last 10 to 15 years,” says Professor P. Nut, an expert in nuts who is conducting a study to see if exposure to nuts in early life can inhibit such phobias. “One reason is that we’re all far too scared and bored, so we start attacking friendly characters such as nuts.” Prof P. Nut says that in African and Asian countries where pregnant women aren’t discouraged from socializing with nuts, have very low levels of nut phobia. “These countries have higher levels of parasitic infections than ours, so it’s possible that their belief systems may be protected from phobias.”

He also disputes Department of Fear advice that advises pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers to avoid nuts. He says there may be a case for exposing children to nuts. “Those who meet nuts early in life may in fact be protected against nut phobia, in contrast with previous studies which have suggested the opposite.”

“Oh no! Last night’s frost has killed all the blibilong plants!” exclaimed Snettie, shivering in the unnatural cold. “Honestly, this global freezing is spoiling everything. If blibilong plants can’t stand this cold, then nothing will grow here anymore, and I am sick to death of eating leopard seal with no greens.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me. What I wouldn’t give for a nice fresh sun warmed bobbit fruit. All the smikkerts have migrated north as well, I haven’t seen one for months” replied Snooter. “I don’t know if I can stick around here for much longer myself.”

“But this is our home, Snooter!” Snettie started to cry, her tears freezing on her cheeks. We’re Sprealians, we’ve always lived here. Where will we go?”

Snooter hugged Snettie. “I suppose we’ll have to go north, like the rest of them.”

Snooter and Snettie gazed around at the deserted city. Alabash had been built around the shores of Lake Flom, in the mild and temperate regions of central Spreal (later, much later, Spreal was referred to as Gondwana, but Snooter and Snettie didn’t know that. And they certainly didn’t know that the remains of their civilization was to disappear under masses of ice for so long that all memory of them was long forgotten, and that anyone mad enough to suggest that they once existed would be considered a bit of a nutter).

“Snettie, I think the time has come” Snooter said solemnly. “I think we have to go north. There’s only old Spagwan left here now besides us, and his daughter Illiofilly. We’ll never survive here with just four of us, even if it didn’t get any colder, and it is getting colder, every day. Why, the first four floors of all our buildings are iced up now for heaven’s sake. What happens when the ice reaches the top floors? Then what?”

“We’ll all be dead by then, Snooter” Snettie sighed “By rights we should probably be dead now. When we run out of furniture to burn to keep warm, then what? All the trees are dead and buried in ice.”

“We’ll come back though, when it warms up again. This can’t last forever, and when it’s over, we’ll come back.” Snooter said optimistically.

“How long do you think it’ll be?” Snettie asked her husband.

“Oh, not long, a few years at most. Don’t worry, you’ll be back home before you know it, but for now, let’s go and find some warmth and some decent food, eh?”

“Ok, but first I want to leave something, some message or clue or something, in case anyone comes back here before we do, so they know we’re coming back”

“Wise move, Al” Becky said conspiratorially “Very wise move to convert that text into code. You have no idea of the danger you might have been in!”

“Oh don’t be silly, Becky, what possible danger could I have been in? Danger of a tongue lashing perhaps, but not actual danger!”

“Don’t you be so sure, Al! Someone —and I don’t know who, it was sent to me anonymously— sent me this newspaper clipping , here, look at this:”

TOKYO: A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday.

“Sacrebleu!” exclaimed Al, with an involuntary shiver.

“What on earth is Al suggesting now, I wonder” mused Becky, who was catching up with the latest additions to the Reality Play. Frowning, she wondered how to handle it. It was often a challenge when one of the other writers interfered with her story line plans.

“Well, be honest, Becky” she said to herself “You were floundering a bit with all this boring tropical romance stuff, wafting around the Facility with nothing more interesting to do than sip cool drinks and wink at Gayesh.”

Becky put the sheaf of printed pages on the table beside her, lost in thought. The warm still evening air was beginning to be stifling, and she felt trapped, smothered in the blue velvet embrace of the night, sickened by the scent of the perfumed flowers and rotting fruit, and suddenly bored beyond endurance.

“I’m going back home” she decided. “I’ll leave a deposit of cells here, swap places with Becky Tooh, and she can come back here and take her chances with Gayesh and the clone experiment.”

Perhaps her babies and her lush of a husband back home would be more exciting.

“I can always swap back again later if it gets tedious in New Venice” she added, having a moment of trepidation at the thought of her responsibilities as a mother of triplets. She liked to keep her options open, keep an escape plan on the back burner.

With a light heart and a spring in her step, she grabbed the papers off the table and ran upstairs to pack.

“Maybe a stop over in Long Pong on the way” she decoded. “Oh look at that!” she said to herself “I meant to say decided and wrote decoded instead. Pfft” she grumbled “That must be because I’m worried about decoding all the other strange additions to the Reality Play that have been spewed forth lately. Sheesh, do Al and Sam honestly think I will ever catch up now? Oh bugger it all, Long Pong, here I come!”

Serendib Facility, Sri Lanka ~ (2035)

Becky had forgotten all about her new babies now that she had the handsome and charming Gayesh in her sights. During the hot lazy days at the facility while Gayesh was working, she passed her time idly, swimming in the pool, dozing on the terrace, or randomly roaming around the Internet. Sometimes she checked Secondary Clone Becky’s blog all about bringing up triplets and coping with difficult husbands but soon got bored with such mundane affairs. Occasionally she worked on the Reality Play, and often sent reminders to Tina about the Facility , hoping that she would decide to join her.

Perhaps I could entice her over here with the promise of a menage à trois with the delectable Gayesh, Becky mused, rather wickedly. I’m not sure I want to write about that in the Reality Play though, she thought, perhaps I could add it to my old journals, and then send Tina a link.

Tikfijikoo Island (continued)

(synopsis)

It starts with the Dr doing some evil tests on that remote island; he’s with the nurse Bellamy, whose forte is coconut tree frog-leaping, and Veranessesseesessesses with her impossible name (V’ass)
We then learn the Dr is mad, and his researches are financed by an occult organization, who V’ass is working for, to check on their assets; he’s mad but brilliant.

He’s a bit of a transvestite too (fullname Chris Bronklehampton)
The organization has given him a machine in which there is a crystal skull, unknown to him. This crystal skull seems linked to spiders somehow and his researches on spiders genome (blue bonnet), but we only know it’s coveted by many people. It’s all happening in our dimension, roughly at our time.

(Where Leo and Bea are renting Jose’s house and they are Dory’s and Dan timeframe ie: now)

The first experiences give dreadful results; there is Sasha (mummified by the doctor) who’s dead, and now speaks with the Dr; and there is Claude, who gained super strength and madness, and escaped the island facility.
Claude is one of those working with the Mad Baron ; he’s on a undercover mission to get the skull
(The false Viscountess —lady in salmon— at the auction was also working for the baron)

So Claude escapes but there is another mysterious person looking for the skull; it’s Madame Chesterhope, and she’s sent the magpies to steal it. The magpies are from another dimension, they are famous stealers.
Claude encounters the magpies on their mission. He’s captured in an energy labyrinth they have set on the island temporarily, to cover their tracks.

Meanwhile, Sha and Glo have arrived. Dory wanted to go but she couldn’t find the airline (bag lady)…
And Mavis later explains in a comment (555) how they all got involved in that adventure. She takes some time to convince her husband, and get to go to Tikfijikoo too. During the flight correspondence, she gets to know Paquita and Joselito.

On the island, the Dr is losing it seriously. He talks to the dead mummy, and had blond wig and stuff.
V’ass is reacquainting herself with the Italian of her secret organization, to report on the Dr. (insert steamy sex scene ) )

Dory is back at Gib, with Dan and young Becky and later, her friends Yurick and Yann came to visit; go see Salitre
She has knowledge of Leo and Bea (Fletcher) – at whose place there are skulls too.

On the island, everything starts to get crazy; since Sha and Glo arrived
The magpies are ready to strike as a cyclone is coming.
Claude has recovered his memory and is no longer mad; but he’s still trapped and tries to find an escape in a strange tree. He goes into another dimension, the giant spiders’ one.
In this dimension there are a few human survivors. There is young Anita, and her mummified parents, but still alive from a plane crash; and a stranded soldier from WWII, named “Akita”, who’s got a spirit dog with him he’d found on the spider island.
They somehow managed to survive in the giant spider’s jungle (the island is on top of a sort of Bermuda triangle).

Anita is in communication with our four essences, who can manifest easily in this spider dimension and our essences are aware of an dimensional gate opening (the cyclone).
All this people get together and succeed in escaping through the wortex.

So now, that explains the people around the campfire on Tikfijikoo. It was all relatively brief, during the storm, where the others were sheltered on the facility (thanks to V’ass who cared for the careless Sha and Glo)

Sha and Glo find out the magpies trying to pry the computer open where the skull is hidden; they crush the magpies with coconuts bra slings (exit the magpies in purple blood )
They find the strange crystal skull they mistakenly think is some apparatus like an UV lamp. They take it to the UV room and plug it; it starts to project all sorts of lights
They want to dance, because it’s like a disco.

Meanwhile, one giant spider has managed to sneak through the portal, and goes close to them, but she gets sidetracked by the lightened skull and gets shrunk to a small size… and gets crushed by Sha and Glo (they’re the heroines of the day, but they don’t know squat )

There is also a honeycomb subplot with a man named Jarvis on the island, with beehives.

Now: Sha and Glo are dancing, Mavis is going out attracted by the campfire, finding out the survivors (The campfire was there because it’s night, and Claude is wary of the island’s owners, because he was abducted and mummified). The Dr is mad as ever.
The skull is in the UV room, but they don’t know what it is — only Madame Chesterhope and Claude are knowing (possibly Jarvis and V’ass); but Mme Chesterhope is flung into the ocean crashing into Mahiliki’s plane recently

Oh, by the way, Gayesh….. Becky turned as she leaving his office. What about those babies? My babies, she corrected herself.

The babies will be fine, they will be returned to the father, ahem, to Sean, the husband, for upbringing, along with the clone.

Oh phew, said Becky, feeling slightly guilty for her lack of maternal feelings.

Becky, Gayesh got up from behind his desk and walked over to Becky and held her hands in his, peering kindly into her eyes. Maternal feelings are not a requirement you know, it’s merely a preference of some. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with choosing a clone to bring up your children. It’s not ‘wrong’ to choose a clone to live with a husband chosen in haste and in error…not that there are any errors! he chuckled. You will see how perfectly this will all work out. Trust me! Better still, trust YOURSELF!

You’re so kind, Gayesh! Becky gushed. And really rather attractive too, she smiled slyly. Did she wink at Gayesh? Maybe she did. Or maybe it was one of those eye twitches. Gayesh watched her saunter down the corridor, smiling.