Search Results for 'night'

They did only realize they got out of the tunnel when the dimmed blue lights faded completely. It was almost pitch black apart from a few braziers in a narrowing vaulted tunnel paved in the manner of a future metro line.
The passengers had noticed the transition from the smooth gliding gait of the zebras to the clopping of the hooves on the cobblestones. Sadie peaked outside of the carriage
“Have we arrived? Where are we?”
“Rightly so, darling. We’re under the grotto. Technically, it’s a chapel now. I did some adjustments underground.”
“Mmm…” Sadie nodded indecisively. She couldn’t find the least rude way to nod without letting her thinking it was utter rubbish show through. So she kept quiet for a moment and even refrained rolling her eyes. “So, we’re….?”
“We’re at the North Wing of the Palace, darling. It’s just nearby the Royal Opera House of the Palace, where your show will be held tonight, your e-flapper should have told you that. Don’t mind the construction work, it will give a steampunk feel to your show before it’s even invented.”
“Of course.” she said evenly. “The North Wing. Well, we all in need of sleep and refreshing before tonight’s show, so…?” trying to worm out meaningful words from Sanso seemed a futile attempt.
“Fancy that, darling, I have another delicate extraction of time stranders to go to,” checking a greasy paper from his shirt pocket,… “in last century or so, I can’t afford to be late. Let me help you lots out of here, leave it to Chair to take back those zebras to the Royal zoo and deliver that barrel of fine champagne, and you’re on your own.”

Before Sadie could tell the word rude, Sanso had folded the carriage back unto itself, pocketed it and disappeared in a wallmhole —leaving only beside herself, the mute Chair on top of a barrel of vintage champagne, four exhausted and pawing zebras, and three sleep-deprieved disheveled divas.

At least, the secrete cave of a Chapel is not overly conspicuous she said, trying to cheer herself up, remembering her training that light would prevail.

Queen Marie, Our Good Queen, as the little gents liked to call her, had not been as excited at the prospect of the salon since a long time.
She ringed the bell for the servant girl to bring more wood, as drafts of chilly air were coming from outside. Although quite modern and shiny, the palace was not as equipped for the cold season as the old castles from her mother land. Worse, with age and soft weather, she’d grown accustomed to being warm, and couldn’t bear the cold any longer.

The crackling sound of the pine wood inside the small chimney was comforting and brought her back to her thoughts. A salon, full of delightful witty people, with laughters and costumes, entertainment and champagne wine. She’d heard a special batch of barrels from la Maison Ruinart would be brought especially for the Royalties. Of course, she knew most of those were small favors for the King’s mistress, Reinette, but she didn’t care. Oddly enough, she didn’t mind the woman, who had been always very delicate and considerate towards her, almost affectionate. To be honest, she was a blessing, as the inextinguishable appetite of the King for the flesh and woman beauty was now too hard to bear.

But a party like this, ah… She reveled in the thought of seeing again monsieur de St Galle and the mysterious Comte de St Germain who always was the light of the party with his extravagant stories.

The servant had finished to dress her for the night, putting her new powdered wig on the parakeet shaped wig-holder. She’d bought the wig with its lacquered holder in the morning from a small shop in Paris, which was had quite an aura of mystery she’d heard. Naturally she’d wanted to see for herself.
The wigmaker was a gaunt and unassuming young man who notwithstanding made an impression on her. Jean-Baptiste’s wigs were simple and elegant, albeit not terribly inspired. His eyes, on the other hand, had a piercing yet soft gaze about them, and didn’t seem embarrassed to look at her, almost through her, as if she were a person, instead of the Queen surrounded by a retinue of bland people eager to please.
“Let me draw you some fingers” he’d said to her, changing abruptly the topic from his rambling about books he was inspired to write about symbols. He’d forgotten the traditional address of “Your Majesty”, yet wouldn’t be stopped —regardless of the shocked expressions on the people’s faces.
“You see, I love symbols, and when I draw people’s fingers, I can foretell events to come”.
So that was it, she’d thought, the reason why everyone was ranting about him. He’d better be more inspired at that than wigs, as her patience was wearing thin.
She’d had fortune tellers draw her cards a few times, but the fingers drawing part was curious enough to entice her into removing the glove off her eburnated fingers and letting him do his trick.
An eldritch feeling crept though her spine as he was uttering words for each of the fingers he drew on with a slight pull of his hand, just enough not to crack the joints.

In the bed warmed to a delightful temperature by the bouillotte, she began sliding into deep sleep, while a mixture of words half-forgotten or half-remembered danced around in her mind like the swirls of snowflakes dying on the warm window of her chamber: “funny moment, cold diversion, dream parade, house moustache pink, blue wonder carpets, possible king turned, green mirror travel, understand whole large parade”…

Sadie had guessed right, that there was something off, which was soon confirmed by her all-purposes e-zapper. The date and place were both wrong by a smidge. They were sent off in the Champagne area, a few hundreds of kilometers off Paris and their royalties, and the date was 1757, a hundred years or so later than expected for a musketeer adventure…
Different time, different Queen. They’d better hope to find a nice ride to get the treasure hunt going.

Good thing was that the Dragcorp had outlets posted in advance, they would probably have something ready for them.

“Listen ladies,” she said as they went out on the open to find out the night wasn’t ripe with opportunities in the little provincial town. “Let’s call it a night and get out of those garbs… “

Terry pointed to a sign in the empty cobbled street and rudely interrupted “CHAMPAGNE, champagne for everyone!”

The parcel had been delivered to her house, and not to her new friend and neighbours house just down the road, for various reasons mostly to do with efficiency, post offices and lack of specific house addresses. The parcel containing the music had been sitting in her kitchen for almost a week, which oddly enough was probably as long as the parcel had taken to travel from North Carolina.
Trove (for that was her name) and Dude (for that was her partners name) played a tile game of rummy, and it was an unusual game that night. Dude noticed missing tiles on the table on at least five occasions, and not altogether unsurpringly assumed that Trove should have been wearing her glasses, instead of placing incorrect sequences with missing tiles. Trove on the other hand, bearing in mind that she was not in the habit of doing this normally, insisted that the tiles had simply disappeared, or changed somehow.

“Finally the answer we need! Let’s release the damn bird and get back home now! Besides its cage needs cleaning and it’s starting to smell, and I can’t stand this place any longer…”

Funnily enough, she had wanted to post the daily random quote too because it seemed so significant, and in point of fact, it was awaiting in the comment box when she woke up. The previous night she had been about to post it, and then wondered if she’d posted enough already.

She recalled some dream snippets too, which was most uusual, and woke up almost smiling. There had been a big house and people, but the only clear recall was dropping an ecstasy pill on the floor, and it bounced this way and that and disappeared into another room, and everyone was looking for it everywhere. All of the dogs were bright cartoon colours and were all sitting patiently upright in a tree, a cartoon type tree.

She thought it quite amusingly significant that everyone was looking for the ecstacy, and just remembered that they did find a pill on the floor, a white one, but that wasn’t the pill they were looking for.

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.

You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can’t be sure…
Josephinella, the train station cleaning lady, was on night duty. And she was tired of waiting for that damned train with that irritating French accent in her ears, her lungs filled with the engines’ fine coal dust and her nostrils irritated by the pigeons’ smell.
But tonight was going to be her night, she would get drunk on fresh air, her hair whipping her face, bugs biting her eyes, while she would sing elated woohoos launched at full speed on the last commuter train left unattended by drunk Freddie. That was such a beautiful plan.

“ Another Dreamliner scare… and a train crash coming your way!”
“Sounds like a transportation surge to me!” Björk replied on the internal chatting system to her African Twa colleague Kiki Razwa. Björk was not her real name though —it was just a moniker given to her because she liked eccentric costumes. Her real name was Mæja Valbjörnsdóttir,… so ‘Björk’ was better for everyone in that international team, she’d tried to convince herself.
“Doesn’t internal policy says two makes a clue, three makes a surge ?”
“Oh, who cares… For me it smells dreamception transportation surge.”
“Better that than this Mercury retrograde crap, at least that’s more fun to hunt.” Kiki’s reply came up on the screen.
Björk had come to realize that she would probably have to cover for Mari Fe who was elsewhere but at her post. The last surge being in Europe, so she was in for a trip at the taxpayers’ expense… Not so bad actually, since nothing ever happened on her faraway island.

Interestingly, it seemed you had to be shrunk to be able to properly use the portable portal map, but once you were transported to your destination, there was no use of gum-bears or jelly babies to get back to your original size.
“How clever this is!” Pearl was the first to notice.

There was another marvelous property of the Universe that Mari Fe didn’t count on, or maybe only vaguely so, but which did come in handy, once more: the Universe responded to the energy of her intention rather than to her words.
When they appeared at their destination, in the dead of night, it was not summer— but still winter. Which actually doesn’t really mean anything, because summer doesn’t even exist in some place, of course, and when it does, it doesn’t even occur at the same time in all places.
Actually, the Universe, or Pedro, as some like to call them, was aware that what Mari Fe meant when she said (repeatedly) “I want to arrive in summer” was in truth “I want to be warm.”
And curiously, winter in that place, as in Russia, had been exceptionally warm, as her colleague Katarina had noticed.

His razor blade in left hand (he was ambidextrous with a slight favour for the left side), Ed suddenly remembered his future struggle with the daft cumbersome vermillion man, so he quickly turned off the portal. Then, against all common sense and years of procedures, decided to put it into his pocket.
Everything following came back at once, interspersed with bits of smashed objects and blurs. But something he distinctly remembered was that Mari Fe was in the apartment, although he didn’t remember bringing her home from last night. It was against company policy to sleep with subordinates, so it had to mean something fishy.
Recalibrating the portal using the failsafe code, he directed it to the secret headquarters where he had started to stockpile dangerous artefacts collected from previous surge control operations, deciding it was the best course of action before assessing who was to be trusted or not in his Chicks team…