Search Results for 'intrigued'

Nora woke to the sun streaming  in the little dormer window in the attic bedroom. She stretched under the feather quilt and her feet encountered the cool air, an intoxicating contrast to the snug warmth of the bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so well and was reluctant to awaken fully and confront the day. She felt peaceful and rested, and oddly, at home.

Unfortunately that thought roused her to sit and frown, and look around the room.  The dust was dancing in the sunbeams and rivulets of condensation trickled down the window panes.   A small statue of an owl was silhouetted on the sill, and a pitcher of dried herbs or flowers, strands of spider webs sparkled like silver thread between the desiccated buds.

An old whicker chair in the corner was piled with folded blankets and bed linens, and the bookshelf behind it  ~ Nora threw back the covers and padded over to the books. Why were they all facing the wall?   The spines were at the back, with just the pages showing. Intrigued, Nora extracted a book to see what it was, just as a gentle knock sounded on the door.

Yes? she said, turning, placing the book on top of the pile of bedclothes on the chair, her thoughts now on the events of the previous night.

“I expect you’re ready for some coffee!” Will called brightly. Nora opened the door, smiling. What a nice man he was, making her so welcome, and such a pleasant evening they’d spent, drinking sweet home made wine and sharing stories.  It had been late, very late, when he’d shown her to her room.  Nora has been tempted to invite him in with her (very tempted if the truth be known) and wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t.

“I slept so well!” she said, thanking him as he handed her the mug.  “It looks like a lovely day today,” she added brightly, and then frowned a little. She didn’t really want to leave.  She was supposed to continue her journey, of course she knew that.  But she really wanted to stay a little bit longer.

“I’ve got a surprise planned for lunch,” he said, “and something I’d like to show you this morning.  No rush!”  he added with a twinkly smile.

Nora beamed at him and promptly ditched any thoughts of continuing her trip today.

“No rush” she repeated softly.

The seven little spheres had each a different colour. Gorrash looked at them with envy in his heart. He’d rarely seen colours as his life was mostly at night, under the moonlight or under the yellow tint of candles and gas lamps. However, the spheres had their own light from inside. And Gorrash couldn’t touch them as Rainbow was very protective, and it made the stone dwarf restless. He had tried once to take one sphere and he got a warning slap on his hand. Rainbow looked soft and gentle, but a whip is always soft and supple before it struck.

The whole week they had been on the hunt for all kind of potions from the shelves of the dragon woman. Glynis, she had called herself during one of her monologues in front of the mirror. Her sadness and frustration toward her appearance resonated more than once with his own condition. He had felt guilty about their little thefts, but he had soon realised that nothing would stop Rainbow.

The randomness of the creature’s choice of potions appeared to be not so random. Gorrash tried several times to help, picking up potions for his friend, according to the colours he liked or to the shapes of the phials that intrigued him, but the creature refused many times the offering.

The colours mattered to Rainbow, apparently. It would never take black, Gorrash discovered. Only colours from the rainbow spectrum, a voice said inside him. He had learned to recognised it as the voice of his creator’s memories infused into the core of his matter. One thing he wasn’t sure though was about the process of his birth. Has he been carved out from a stone ? Has he been assembled like clay ? That was not part of the memories trapped into his stone body.

Gorrash then tried to bring the creature colours from the rainbow, always glowing, never dull or matte. But then he discovered it had to be in a certain order. Everyday was different. One day it was in the order of the colour spectrum from red to purple, as his master’s remembered. Another day it had to begin with green or indigo. But always following the order of the colour wheel. If a colour was missing, then they had to wait until Glynis would manufacture it.

And then, one day… one night, as Gorrash woke up from his rigid sleep, the seven spheres were there, and Rainbow was watching over them. Like a bird over its eggs, said the voice. Except they didn’t really look like eggs. Eggs don’t glow with different colours. Eggs have a shell. Those were translucent, glowing of some very attractive inner light, and looked like water spheres. Does that mean it’s a she? wondered Gorrash who had always thought his friend was a male. He gnawed at his lower lip. Anyway, it seemed that the hunting days were over as Rainbow didn’t show any motivation to leave her strange progeny, and Gorrash had no way to go past the walls on his own.

Rainbow raised its eyebrows and looked at the dwarf who had come too close to the eggs for its taste. It gathered protectively the spheres which came as one in a big multicoloured moving spheroid. Gorrash could still see the individual light cores in it, they seemed to pulse like the growing desire in his heart. He swallowed. It tasted of dust.

— I won’t take them, he said.

His chest tightened as he saw suspicion in his friend’s eyes. Gorrash turned away feeling sadness and guilt. He needed to find some distraction from the attractive lights and the growing desire in his heart.

Aunt Idle:

Bert came with me. Usually one of us always stayed home to keep an eye on Mater and the kids, but now we had that capable girl, Finly, to keep an eye on things.

It was good to get away from the place for a few hours, and head off on a different route to the usual shopping and errand trips. The nearest sizable town was in the opposite direction; it was years since I’d been to Ninetown. I asked Bert about the place on the other side of the river, what was it that intrigued him so. I’ll be honest, I wondered if he was losing his marbles when he said it was the medieval ruins over there.

“Don’t be daft, Bert, how can there be medieval ruins over there?” I asked.

“I didn’t say they were medieval, Idle, I said that’s what they looked like,” he replied.

“But …but history, Bert! There’s no history here of medieval towns! Who could have built it?”

“That’s why I found it so fucking interesting, but if it doesn’t fit the picture, nobody wants to hear anything about it!”

“Well I’m interested Bert. Yes, yes, I know I wasn’t interested before, but I am now.”

Bert grunted and lit a cigarette.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant just outside Ninetown for lunch. The midday heat was enervating, but inside the restaurant was a pleasant few degrees cooler. Bert wasn’t one for small talk, so I picked up a local paper to peruse while I ate my sandwich and Bert tucked into a greasy heap of chips and meat. I flicked through it without much interest in the mundane goings on of the town, that is, until I saw those names: Tattler, Trout and Trueman.

It was an article about a ghost town on the other side of Ninetown that had been bought up by a consortium of doctors. Apparently they’d acquired it for pennies as it had been completely deserted for decades, with the intention of developing it into an exclusive clinic.

“There’s something fishy about that!” I exclaimed, a bit too loudly. Several of the locals turned to look at me. I lowered my voice, not wanting to attract any more attention while I tried to make sense of it.

“Read this!” I passed the paper over the Bert.

“So what?” he asked. “Who cares?”

“Look!” I said, jabbing my finger on the names Tattler, Trout and Trueman. Bert looked puzzled, understandably enough. “Allow me to explain” I said, and I told him about the business card that Flora had left on the porch table.

“What does Flora have to do with this consortium of doctors? And what the hell is the point in setting up a clinic there, in the middle of nowhere?”

“That,” I replied, “Is the question!”

In an effort to shake off the troubling feelings that lingered long after she awoke, Mirabelle went to find Jack to tell him about her dream. She found him hunched over his computer, frowning.
“Ah, Mirabelle, pull up a chair and let me tell you about the strange dream I had last night.”
Intrigued, Mirabelle listened, saving her story until after he had finished relating his.
“There are too many coincidences for this to not mean something ~ something important. The parallels are everywhere! Look!” he said pointing to the screen.
“Crumbling cities, structures smashed to smithereens and clouds of dust, facades of houses blown off revealing ordinary objects and furnishings in hideous juxtapositions, and crazy angles. And look here” he said, “ nothing as far as the eye can see but rubble, but one wall left standing, almost intact, with the map still hanging on the wall.”
Jack turned to Lisa with a tear in his eye, and with a shaking voice he said, “I dreamed of a city like this last night, with all the facades blown off the constructs, and all the people were faceless as if they were wearing masks, but no! not like masks, there were empty holes where the faces had been, like bottomless black holes that made me dizzy to look at them.”
“But it was just a dream Jack” replied Mirabelle, wondering if she was reassuring Jack or herself. “It doesn’t mean anything, probably that cheese you had for supper.”
“Lisa was in the dream” Jack replied. “And Ivan, and Fanella.”
Mirabelle shivered. “They’ve been gone a long time, do you think something’s happened to them?” she paused and then added, “I had a disturbing dream too. It was my parrot, HuHu. He was calling me, oh! he was calling and calling, but I couldn’t see him in the fog, as I tried to follow the sound of his squalking in the swirling mist, I’d hear him behind me ~ no matter which way I turned he was always behind me, as if I was always facing the wrong way.”
“Well” said Jack, squaring his shoulders. “Faced with these two dreams, and with the delayed return of Lisa, Ivan and Fanella, I think we should face up to it and send a search party to the island. Now, enough of that long face, Mirabelle! Run along now and find Igor, and tell him to prepare for teleporting. He can go with you.”

Lisa was lost in thought during the hours that they spent in the waiting room of the Processing Department. Among the many things she pondered was the nature of their beliefs that had landed them in this situation, the energy they were projecting, and the ramifications of the reflection. She was intrigued with the letter that Sanso had read out to them upon their arrival ~ underground cities had long been a particular fascination. What had been the circumstances leading to so many ancient underground cities being constructed? Nobody knew for sure, but it seemed to Lisa that they had been a means of escaping the surface. But why? Was it because of climate catastrophe, or some other disaster rendering the surface dangerous or inhospitable? Or had it been situations of siege, or hostile populations on the surface? Or had it been merely a curiosity to explore living in a different environment? An idea suddenly occurred to Lisa that she had been judging life on the surface of the planet as the ideal right way to live, the most preferable option, and life below ground as a second rate choice for survival purposes, but perhaps there were unimagined benefits to living below the ground.

Lisa’s meandering thoughts led her back to the summer of 2014, when the seige situation in Gaza had exploded as the population of the shifting world addressed restriction and shielding energy, creating an amplified imagery at one of the main coordination points. Interconnection was coming on strong, like never before, and individuals the world over, struggling with their own self imposed boundaries, sought for release en masse and joined together to support and encourage each other.

It had been an exhilarating time, but also a frustrating one. Interpretations of the words and messages of perceived authorities became mass beliefs, and for a time the restrictions increased. Those adhering to traditional authorities repeated the party lines, and the so called “new agers”, rooting for change but at the same time terrified of it, and in no small measure, terrified of other people and different cultures, created new mass beliefs based on their old fears. The strongest new age belief was a translation of channeled advice, construed from the vague “focus on the positive” to mean “ignore anything you can’t bear to acknowledge”. Rather than accept differences, initially masses of well meaning individuals criticized anyone endeavouring to acknowledge and accept the global situation, and pushed their advice to ignore the horrors, for fear that they would unwillingly bring anything unpleasant to their own attention. It was ironic to Lisa that the ones advocating not to judge, were the ones that judged her the most for her actions, and the activists judged her far less, while not advocating less judgement at all.

(a totally random one)

San Diego
– a mystery
by Ewrick

The cosy, Cornish town of San Diego holds a secret.

Gregory Khan has the perfect life working as a shopkeeper in the city and gyrating with his lovable girlfriend, Ruth Donaldson.

However, when he finds a tattered torch in his cellar, he begins to realise that things are not quite as they seem in the Khan family.

A Christening leaves Gregory with some startling questions about his past, and he sets off to deserted San Diego to find some answers.

At first the people of San Diego are courageous and helpful. He is intrigued by the curiously hilarious gardener, Una Grey. However, after she introduces him to hard sugar, Gregory slowly finds himself drawn into a web of decadence, sloth and perhaps, even mutilation.

Can Gregory resist the charms of Una Grey and uncover the secret of the tattered torch before it’s too late, or will his demise become yet another San Diego legend?

Praise for San Diego

“Who wouldn’t give up a life of gyrating with their lovable girlfriend to spend a little time with a curiously hilarious gardener?”
– The Daily Tale

“About as mysterious as finding a poo in a public toilet. However, San Diego does offer a valuable lesson about not getting into hard sugar.”
– Enid Kibbler

“The only mystery, is why did I keep reading after page one?”
– Hit the Spoof

“I could do better.”
– Zob Gloop

Eggwoot, rather bored by the meeting of the heads, rolled outside to enjoy a sneaky peagarette. He was startled to see a group of alien bodies in the distance making strange contortions.

“Are they dancing?” he wondered, intrigued.

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}

As soon as Yoland finished the flounder list, her phone rang. It was her mother, Gretchen, calling from Wales to tell her about the cottage in Dyffryn she was thinking of buying. Yoland googled Dyffryn, and was intrigued to find numerous prehistoric cairns in the vicinity.

From Georges’ account of his first encounter with Phoebe Chesterhope. Part I

On that bright sunny day of June, 1852 I was impersonating the heir of an American family involved in weapon industry… taking advantage of a business trip for my father, I was enjoying the night life of Paris and naturally got closer to a certain Catherine whose family’s wealth was quite substantial. The first part of the scenario was almost done… I had to make her infatuated enough to make her ask her father to lend me a big amount of money I was supposed to use it as an investment in our family business that was flourishing and quite.

As we were approaching a jeweller’s of the Saint-Germain district, my eyes noticed a woman coming from the opposite direction. Definitely not from Paris, something surreal in her appearance caught my attention. It was not something physical, and it was obviously something I couldn’t name at that moment. Intrigued as I was, I still kept my conversation with Catherine going on. I was quite trained to spot my next preys while I was still playing with the previous one, and with a stranger it would be even easier. She entered the shop.

I maneuvered quite subtly to approach the window without being noticed, and while my companion was raving about some of the finely made necklace and bracelets, I was observing the woman. The owner had made her sit on a chair near the cashier and was bringing her some tea. I couldn’t help but notice how she dismissed him harshly right away after that; apparently he wasn’t the one she wanted to meet that day. The man seemed somewhat offended but soon enough regained composure: there were other clients in the shop and he made sure his assistants wouldn’t daydream unnoticed.

“Do you want to go inside, darling?” I suggested to my mate, “I’m sure the choice is more interesting if we speak to the right person.”

I knew I wouldn’t have any problem to bring her into that kind of place, and the look in her eyes was quite validating. It took me a brief moment and a persuasive tip to one of the shop attendant to explain that I wanted Catherine to choose what she desired. I wanted a fine piece of jewelry suiting her beauty. All I had to do was let the clerk show her different set of jewels and and just look as if it was unfair to her beauty and let her look for another one. In between, I was free to observe the other woman sideways.

She was feeling blank. It was as if she had no memories of what had happened before. At least she had still the notion that she was a she… wasn’t she? It wasn’t really clear, as she had mixed up feelings. There weren’t any physical sensation in the place she was. Indeed, she was having difficulties finding herself. She began to wonder what was this feeling of her she was aware of. To what was it connected? And thus, she realized she was too focused on the question itself to get any answer.
The letting go released a dam of sensations and informations. She was overwhelmed by all that she was and all that seemed to be thrust upon her senses. But the resistance was what could create pain, she knew that from another time where she was living the same thing. Resisting the communication was like wanting to resist a herd of fleeing raghlors.
She was feeling a presence in all this mess, something familiar
Was that herself looking at herself looking at herself looking at herself looking…
Her memory of what she was trying to do came as lightning. The sudden realization of her numerous tentatives at this exercise made her cry… would she fail again?
She had to find these other aspects of her, put them into a common direction… but there were so many of hers! which ones should she call to follow her? Which ones would follow her, if any? She felt sudden despair coming from everywhen. Despairs that she was aware did not belong to her, but they were powerful, almost annihilating her will. Images of massacres of people she knew, of people that her other selves knew, massacre that she had perpetrated herself or that she was perpetrating… any sensation of time could fit.

Despair was imprisoning her and she knew she already had failed because of that. It was shadowing her motivation, giving her that hollow sense of herself, shielding her from…

Asiir, is that you? The energy was familiar and the name was a translation in her mind. It was an anchor point in all these mess of hers.
Asiir, help me!

The feeling was faint, so far away. But as she was focusing more on it, she noticed her different selves were intrigued and gathering around it. And there they were together. A feeling of ecstasy filled her up… and out of her body herself was huge. The presence was gaining in intensity and it was as if it was her who was allowing Asiir’s energy to be expressed toward herself.

HAHAHAHAHA a thunderous laugh.
Startled for a moment she almost lost contact with Asiir. But their bond was stronger this time. She was filled with joy and self-assurance.

At last, you are beginning to understand, Lola. We can go on and take the next step now.

She was truly riding her dragon, , it was wondrous.

Well, technically you are lying on the floor of the marshes of doooom, but…

All of a sudden, everything was gone, she was back to her body, Asiir looking at her and nudging her left arm with her snout.
WOW, what a crippled body! How many times did she tried? Would he kill her with that, bloody bastard… a feeling of anger was infuriating her, and filling her body up, heating it up. How could he possibly be so inhuman?

May I recall you I’m a dead guy? and furthermore, my focus wasn’t human… I just appear human to your eyes because you want me to appear like that. You have no representation of how my species could look like, but I may show you…
… soon.