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“Stop fucking barking!”, she said, and not by any means for the first time. “I’m trying to read!”
And then she read:
“Animals not only enjoy the sounds that they make, they are to some extent enchanted by them. The animals’ interior world is silent. The sound of an animal’s hoof upon the ground fills it with a sense of power and affirmation. The cat’s meow is as enchanting to the cat as to its owner—meaningful sounds that communicate feeling. These are enjoyed by all such species.”
“Oh dear” she said to herself, momentarily nonplussed. “I seem to have turned an enchantment inside out. I could have been enjoying it all along.”

“And who is “she”, the cat’s mother? The cats whiskers?” he asked. “The cat who got the cream?”

“We’re going to play cat and mouse for now” she replied, licking her lips. “The fact is, she doesn’t know ~ yet. Time will tell, or a teller will time it. Do you know what I found in the sewing box the other day? A 1914 coin from Guernsey, and then would you believe it, the #1914 transcript arrived in my mailbox. So I read it. I’d like to say the timing was perfect, but in this instance it seemed to be a few weeks late. There was something in it about whales, and visualizing a special place, and do you know what I thought of? That warm lagoon, do you remember? It was in the beginning of the story.”

Abandoned structures where the wild things grow……not in rows and lines of forced behaviour for maximum controlled output wrapped in neatly positioned plastic, but shredded with tatters blowing in the breeze and sunlight streaming through the rips, saplings bursting through the tears, and brambles twined around the wired enclosures, spilling inside and outside. Jumbles of wild flowers, fresh and juicy amidst thorny dried stalks of last years endeavours, and the year before that, and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

After a few months travelling from Spain to France in their quest for the dragons, with already two visa applications for China rejected, endless unkind mocking laughs or condescending looks from strangers, and having had to pawn temporarily the sabulmantium to buy Vincentius a shirt, Arona and her motley family were thinking it was time for a turn of fate.

It didn’t take them too long hopefully.
Of course, the sabulmantium was recovered as soon as they had realized it was actually more lucrative in this dimension to have Vincentius take off his shirt in shady bars at night for a few meals and lodging, and some little extras. Mandrake had been kind to provide ample squeaking mice supplements, which Arona had politely declined, for which Mandrake faked each time the saddest of disappointments. All in all, so far their life on the roads had been easier than she would have thought.
Of course, they’d lost Sanso a few times as he couldn’t stay at one place for too long, and keeping track of his movements was near impossible. So they relied on trust that he would always find his way, which surprisingly enough, he did every single time.

He had been the one to provide them with the way to the island actually. One day, after weeks without news, he’d reappeared, hammering at the door of their little room at the top of their 9 storey hotel in Paris, near the St Honoré Market Place. He was wearing the quaintest bright violet velvet surplice, and was carrying a bottle of glowing green liquor.

To settle in a lovely island of the Ocean they called Pacific… It didn’t take too much convincing: Paris was starting to get boring, and far too cold. Arona missed the moist glowing warmth of Leormn’s cave, that was so good for her skin. She didn’t miss the riddles though.

The entry point of the tunnel was inside the catacombs, and they’d almost got lost a few times, she could have sworn, although Sanso was ever confident they were on track, even when a few dead-ends were staring at him in the face with toothless skulls grins. But after a few hours, the tunnel actually broadened, and glowed a lovely shade of orange.

It was funny, traveling through the Earth’s crust, made her almost feel at home. If all the dragons of this realm had left, and were hidden somewhere, she was certain it had to be to such a place. It gave her hopes again to meet one in this strange land which had forgotten magic.

In Ed Steam’s old office, Lord Lemon was like in a mausoleum full of ghosts.
Mostly computer illiterate, he favoured greatly goose feather and dark Chinese ink soft purr on the paper over the annoying clickety racket of the keyboards. So he wasn’t exactly feeling at home in Ed’s old shoes.

The team’s greeting party had been cordial, but he didn’t feel an overwhelming welcome either, not that he expected it. It was Ed’s team after all, he was the Rooster of the chicks of roast, whatever they liked to call themselves. He was not found of monikers and preferred to be addressed simply as Sir.

The call he received on the morning was perplexing him. They’d found an auditor dead with a Surge Corp. business card in his jacket in the streets of a Spanish city, he couldn’t really remember which, the accent on the phone was as dreadful as that of a Chinese civet, but… What was that about already? He’d thought his memory was improving, getting back on the field, but there were relapses again, he had to concentrate. Afternoon Scrabble games were not that bad after all.

He’d perfected a neat technique to remember things, placing vivid images in memory palaces constructed in his mind were he could retrieve them later, but the thing was that his memory palaces sorely lacked a cleaning lady, and images sometimes blurred together or went missing, fading away. He sighed.

His gaze on the phone brought him back to his stream of thought. This would have been stored on the Suspicious Clues Palace, in Ed’s corner. His mind raced back in the atrium of his palace where he could see the various corners, and he went back into the Alley of Dark Secrets, then turned to the Corner of Lonely Puzzle Pieces. There were actually a lot of them, but the topmost one was vivid enough. It was a red blood hearing-aid spewing out a mean Larsen and bathing in paella. For “auditor murdered in Spain” obviously. He turned down mentally the volume of the hearing-piece. This was not a very elegant image, but he was in a hurry, and crude preposterous images always were remembered better he’d found out. The lewdest even more so. Which was why his Palace of Past Precious Moments was starting to look like a brothel he was loath to admit.

He was starting to wonder if Ed’s demise was not some sort of inside job. Circumstances were not really orthodox, but nothing was in their line of duty, so he had to look for something else. He’d already started to make an inventory of the storage room, just before the break-in, but computer handicapped as he was, between paper and memory palaces, he couldn’t figure it anymore and had to start it over with some help from Cornella.
At least, he’d sent Hyphen and Dash to discreetly investigate on the break-in and now, he will probably send them to investigate on… he faced a blank. All he could remember now was he was having the meanest craving for mussels and prawns.

Back at his secret hideout, just after the successful break-in at the Surge HQ in Long Poon, Ed Steam had a brilliant idea. He bobbed his head in the Indian fashion while stroking his waxed mustache.
He passed the armoured bears guarding the entrance of the secret door inside their cave with ease. They were asleep during this period of the year anyway. They weren’t like talking bears of course, but he liked the idea of having them protected in case some happy-trigger hillbilly in the vicinity would find the entrance of their cave.
Well, back to his last brilliant idea. It was a bit hard to keep track of them —he had so many every day. “Too brilliant for his own good,” how often did he hear that sentence. Indeed.

Of course, as soon as they had stepped into the powerful magnetic field generated inside the T.R.A.P., the reality around them was transphormed as if they all had been into a huge deFørmiñG mirror, that they could shape with their strangest thoughts.

There didn’t seem to be enough hours in the non sequential moments to sort the appalling lack of continuity out. Elizabeth could sense the invisible threads of white ink all around her, but rather than conveniently accessing their continuity enhancing properties she felt trapped inside them, unable to move.