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Minky suggested they continued their trip on camelephant’s back, a somewhat surprising mix between camel and elephant. She said her uncle had a special breed in a farm nearby and that she would be happy to take some news.
When Yickesy heard that, he thought that maybe they could jump on the occasion and maybe leave silently when Minky would be busy with her uncle.

Arona was too busy with her chippendale tea set and mumbled something unclear that Minky took as a ‘yes’, and Vincentius rolled his eyes, as someone had to do it at that moment.

The tunnel, dear mindful reader(s), was used by the members of the Distortium for covert operations into the Claritorium. That was the original purpose of the tunnel; however, it had been such a long time since anyone had visited the Claritorium that the very idea of Clarity had been forgotten, and the tunnel had been misappropriated for other less clarifying purposes.

{link: clarification}

Just in case there are any mindful readers, and for further clarification and continuation, let it be noted that Alfred eventually realised he was not trapped at all. An old tunnel, once used by members of the Distortium for clandestine purposes, had an opening in Alfred’s yard. He was able to use this tunnel make his way out of his yard and continue his journey to the library.

{link Distortium}

“Well, it clarifies one thing, if nothing else” Frond, the curator of the Murganian Distortium, said drily, “Cleary, this is nothing but a pack of seeds.”

Alfred, preoccupied with worrying about his overdue library book, entered the door of the Murganian Distortium by mistake, which was next door to the Murgatorium Library.

{LINK: CLARIFIED, SEED}

Blithe, affectionately known as Blinky, had to admit that the very idea of anyone licking Arona’s toes was too bizarre to comtemplate, notwithstanding she had been unable to get the image out of her head since she first heard the rumour.

“W-a-t-e-r-f-r-i-n-g-i-n-m-e-l-o-n … yes still way too short!” Yikesy wasn’t really the party type and felt ridiculous wearing a bowler hat. While the others were engaged in general merriment precipitated by the arrival of the champagne, he surreptitiously removed the map from Minky’s backpack.

He scanned the map till he found what he was looking for.

Meanwhile ….

Arona giggled. “Look at that sign! Waakaawaakawaawaawaawaawaawaawahuhun! I want to go there!”

Mandrake raised an elegant eyebrow. “I suppose it is as good as anywhere, considering we have no idea where we are going.”

“I will run ahead and make sure it is safe.” announced Vincentius melodically. “You rest Arona, and eat these delicious sandwiches I whipped up earlier.”

“And shall I lick her feet for you while we wait?” asked the sarcastic Mandrake.

“Splendid idea. Thank you Mandrake!”

Three Murganians, now full of burnt cake, were passing by and heard Alfred’s piteous cries for help. Fearing the worst, they quickly devised a cunning plan to get themselves out of earshot. For if they could not hear the cries for help then clearly they were under no obligation to offer assistance.

“Roll!” shouted one of the Murganians. They tried to roll as fast as there bellies would carry them, but the burnt cake was heavy and it soon became obvious that rolling was out of question.

“Help!” shouted Alfred. “Is someone there?”

{link – rolling Murganians}

Alfred, the clockwork Murganian, suddenly remembered he had an overdue library book.

He picked up the dusty book from the oven, took off his coat, rolled to the door and pulled a key from his shoe to let himself out. It was such a very long time since he had been out and he was most surprised to find that the seeds he had planted in the sky some time ago had grown to such an extent that his pathway was no longer accessible.

What to do? wondered Alfred. He wondered for a few minutes then realised that wondering was getting him nowhere and action was called for.

“Help” he shouted.

{link – key}

Minky pondered for a long moment before coming to a decision.

“Right then let us all go to Watermelon and cavort with Mr Jib and the Consortium! “

Yikesy sighed loudly. Normally good natured, his patience was beginning to wear thin. Having counted the letters between “W” and “N” and, even making allowances for a degree of “give or take”, he didn’t believe that Watermelon could possibly be the secret destination where they would find Mr Jib. If indeed they even wanted to find this Mr Jib, whoever he may be … and was Watermelon even a destination?

“Cheer up!” encouraged Minky. “Mr Jib is a delightful gentleman. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have the odd truffle in his pocket either.”

“Hark is that a knock at the door I hear! asked Phlora, “Flowyn must have forgotten his key again.”

However when she opened the door she was surprised to see 3 emaciated strangers.

“Forgive us for the intrusion,” said the skinniest of the trio. “But we are hungry Murganians and we smelt burnt cake. Burnt cake is our favourite.”

{link – Murganians}

“Oh I have burnt the cake! So occupied was I reflecting upon the joys of home, and now the blessed cake is ruined!” exclaimed Phlora. “And soon Floywn and Hywrik and the family winged horse will return, no doubt hungry as Murganians!”

But the sunflowers did look so very pretty and Phlora was not one to be downhearted for long.

{link – home}

Suddenly the green fairy burst into tears. Yikesy wondered what to do however continued to smile in the meantime. A crying green fairy was unlike anything he had encountered before.

When the snail rolled her eyes Yikesy felt close to tears himself. It reminded him so vividly of Arona, who was taking such a very long time to rescue him.

“Last one to the emporium buys us all bowler hats!” shouted Minky, hoping to revive the morale of his motley tour group.

“I don’t want to go the emporium and I am not crying!” exclaimed the green fairy indignantly. “I have some bowler hat fiber caught in my eye”.

“I believe Mr Jib’s emporium is currently closed anyway,” interjected the parrot wisely. “I follow Mr Jib on Flitter and it seems he is part of a consortium currently cavorting in a secret destination which begins with the letter W and ends in the letter N and has 35 letters in between.”

“I am confused,” said the lost and confused Yikesy. “Are Mr Minky and the green fairy one and the same?”

“Hahahahahahahahaha” laughed Shelly, surprisingly loudly for a snail. “We are all confused! None of it makes sense so why bother trying. What good is sense anyway? Would you like them to be one and the same?”

“I don’t have an opinion either way really on that one” retorted Yikesy. “I suppose the less names I have to remember the better. What I would really like is a glass of pineapple juice and a dish of black truffles.”

There was no place like home, notwithstanding that home could be considered to be anywhere at all. Home in this case was Blithe’s patio one balmy September evening. Citronella candles flickered on the table, and coloured fairy lights strobed in strings along the facade of the house. A rosy glow emanated from the bedroom window and Blithe took a snapshot, noticing later the fly screen visible, overlayed onto the bedroom scene. Not only was the view of the bedroom limited by the width of the camera lens, it was also limited in the sense that the wire screen was obscuring almost half of what would have been visible if the photograph had been taken from the other side of the screen, or, with no screen at all in between the lens and the view of the room. However, despite having such a partial view of the whole, the remainder that was viewable was still identifiable as a bedroom.

Blithe wasn’t about to remove the screen however, because it was doing its job of screening, or filtering out, the unwanted insects. That wasn’t to say that she was denying the existance of those insects, or that they weren’t welcome on the other side of the screen, just that she was selectively screening the unwanted items from a particular scene. If, for example, the room was full of insects, Blithe might have been preoccupied with them, to the exclusion of whatever else she might have preferred to focus on within the bedroom. Out on the patio, however, the insects were, if not always entirely welcome, appreciated. The praying mantis and the dragonfly were welcome, and the butterflies and moths were always welcome, because Blithe had associated the energy of those insects with familiar welcome energies. The wasps, flies and ants were not translated in the same way, but were appreciated for entirely different reasons, being an aid to exploring such issues as irritation (and occasionally, pain). Blithe had to admit that despite the praying mantis and dragonfly being welcome, it would not be true to say that they were welcome in the bedroom, however.

There had been times when Blithe wished that the whole patio was enclosed in screens, but the trouble with screens was that they tended to filter out everything of a certain size, although perhaps that was more a beleif about physical screens than anything else. Was it possible to filter out flies and wasps, but allow dragnflies and butterflies? Possible surely, she thought, but perhaps not with physical wire screen devices and associated beleifs.

A few days previously Blithe had cleaned the mesh filter on her kitchen tap, unrestricting the flow. Coincidentally, her friend had also had a tap mesh restricted flow incident, and had removed the mesh filter altogether. Another friend had removed a window screen for cleaning, and had chosen not to replace it, as she was appreciating the allowance of much more light. And then another friend had mentioned a dream, of dragonflies under a screen that was covering a pool. She had lifted the screen in the dream, to allow the dragonflies to escape, and yet some of the dragonflies chose to stay under the screen.

Intrigued with the words screen and mesh, which meant the same thing in one respect, but not in others, Blithe investigated the definitions. To screen could be to filter out the unwanted, but to mesh was to weave together. But were they so different, really? A screen was also a blank place on which to project images ~ meshed and woven selectively screened and filtered images, perhaps.

{link ~ weaving}

While Yuhara and Sylvestrus were exploring Second Life worlds (Frolic Caper~Belle was still on an extended leave of absence), Blithe Gambol, although she didn’t entirely realize it at the time, was exploring First Life worlds on the Coast of Light.

Blithe and her partner Winn set off for the drum festival in the late afternoon heat, with the intention of reaching the Light Coast before sundown. The strong low sun flickered on and off as it hid behind trees and hills, and the hot dry wind whipped Blithes hair into her eyes, leaving the heavy heat of the Coast of the Sun behind and tranforming it into a light bone dry atmosphere that seemed to suck the air out of Blithe’s lungs. She filled the vacuum with smoke, listening to the words of the music playing ~ must be a reason why I’m king of my castle….king of my castle…it reminded her of Dealea’s story about King Author.

When they reached Vejer de la Frontera they made a wrong turning, although they were well aware that no turning is a wrong one. The new direction took them in a circle behind the Vejer promontory, through the umbrella pines along the coast. The sky was golden yellow behind the black sillouttes on one side, with a periwinkle sea on the other, rocky pale grey outcrops blushed with pink paddling in the gently lapping waves.

As they entered the village of Canos de Meca, they slowed to crawl behind the inching cars, as tanned people in brightly coloured clothes wove in and out of the traffic, and in and out of the exotic looking bars and restaurants. Blithe remembered the Second Life worlds she had been exploring earlier that day, and wondered if Second Life came with the smells of sardines barbequeing on the beach, or a warm breeze wafting past laden with snatches of laughter and conversation. Visually, certainly, Second Life would be hard presssed to beat the visual appeal of Canos de Meca at sunset on an August evening. There were plenty of opportunities to observe the people and the hostelries, as the traffic got progressively worse until it eventually came to a standstill. The narrow lanes were lined with parked cars, and throngs of people carrying coolers made their way to the sand dunes near the lighthouse.

Eventually, after several slow drives past looking for a miraculous parking space that didn’t appear, Blithe and Winn found a restaurant in between the coastal villages that was strangely empty of people. Even Winn, who was much less inclined towards fanciful imaginings than Blithe, remarked on how surreal the place was. It could have been anywhere in Spain, so strangely ordinary was its appearance in comparison to the Moorish beach hippy style of the villages. They ordered food, and relaxed in easy silence in the oasis of calm ordinariness. Blithe wondered if the place actually existed or if she had created it out of thin air, just for a respite and a parking place, and a clean unoccupied loo. Another First Life world, perhaps, constructed in the moment to meet the current requirements of ease.

At 11:11, after another two drives through the crawling cars and crowds, Winn turned the car around and headed for home. At 12:12 they reached the Coast of the Sun, shrouded in sea mist, and at 1:00am precisely, they arrived home. Later, as Blithe lay on the bed listening to the drums playing on the music machine, she closed her eyes and saw the sunset over the Atlantic, and felt the ocean breeze of the fan. She projected her attention to the dunes of Trafalgar ~ which, incidentally, didn’t take two hours, it was instant. In another instant, she was back in her bedroom, sipping agua con gas on the rocks and chatting to Winn. Seconds later, she was in a vibrant nightclub overlooking the beach, dancing in spirit between the jostling holidaymakers being served at the bar. She imagined that one or two of them noticed her energy.

Clearly, teleporting from one place to another had its benefits. The question of parking, for example, wouldn’t arise. But Blithe wouldn’t have wanted to miss the late afternoon drive to the Coast of Light, and the golden slanting lightbeams flickering between the cork oaks making their cork shorn trunks glow red, or the ocean appearing over the crest of a hill. And if she had arrived in an instant at the location she was intending to visit, then she would never have encountered the sunset from the particular angle of the approach via the wrong turn. Variety ~ and impulse, and the opportunities of the unexpected turns ~ was the weft of weaving First Life worlds ~ or was it the warp?

link: weaving worlds

Whether or not Arachne was actually better at weaving than Athena is still a mystery, or perhaps it is a moot point and no mystery at all. Weaving is by no means a solitary endeavour, as Blithe found early one summer morning. The river mist was rising and the air itself was dancing in droplets. It was hard to determine if the droplets were falling or rising, or simply milling around on the air currents. Hard green oranges (clearly oranges had been named in winter, or they would likely have been called greens) were festooned with silver threads, linking orange to orange, orange to tree and tree to wire fence, and back again. It was debatable whether or not the individual spiders were aware of the grand overall design of the early morning web links of the orange groves, just as it was equally debatable whether or not the inhabitants of the various Gibber realities were aware of the network of waterpipes that connected the other inhabitants to themselves and each other, and to the other Gibber worlds. Individuals were individuals, whether they be spiders, or Gibblets, and individuals generally speaking were focused on their own part of the tapestry (and often those of their immediate neighbours). Spider 57 on the east fence might be positioned to catch the first rays of sunshine in the mornings, but Spider 486,971 over near the dung heap was in a better position to catch the afternoon flies. And so on, as somebody famous once said.

As Blithe prowled around the orchard capturing potential clues on her Clumera she inevitably became part of the laybrinthine web of sticky threads herself, as they attached themselves to her hair and clothing. All of the gaps between the solids in the field were joined together with spun filaments, just as the Gibblets were joined together with fun spillaments (although leaking waterpipes were sadly misinterpreted as not-fun all too often, despite that they could be used as an opportunity to view the connections of the Waterpunk more comprehensively.)

The individual spiders lacy parlours were framed in wire squares, several hundred, if not more, along the perimeter fences. Not every wire fence square was filled; there were many vacant lots between established residences ~ whether by practical design or mere happenstance, Blithe couldn’t say. Many of the individual webs were whole and perfect, like the windows of Lower Gibber whose inhabitants kept their lace curtains clean and neatly hung. Many of the webs on the wire fence were not perfect in the symetrical sense ~ some had gaping holes, and there were those that appeared to be unfinished, despite showing great potential. Others appeared to be abandoned, hanging in shreds, not unlike many of the residences in Upper Gibber.

The wire framed residences of the field (and likewise the peeling paint framed residences of Upper Gibber) that appeared to be defunct were not quite as they seemed, however. They were simply being viewed from a different timeframe. It was quite possible to view each wire or peeled paint framed en-trance side by side, notwithstanding that they were, so to speak, located in varying timeframes. All that was required was a more flexible viewpoint, and an ability to view more than one timeframe simultaneously. It was all a question of allowing an entrance to en-trance ~ which was, after all, its function.

{link: misty morning; entrance}