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  • #4091

    “This Yannosh!” Quentin erupted when he saw the packed up mess in his suitcase.

    “How can this guy always muddy up the simplest things! I wonder why Tina likes him so much.” He eyed the suitcase and seeing the neatly packed shirts and trousers, he finally laughed at his outburst.
    “Yeah, that explains it!”

    He picked the first clothes out of the pile, and got out of the room to find the breakfast.

    The air was still a bit chilly in the morning, and the grounds seemed almost deserted. He wondered were the rest of the staff was. It was supposed to be a luxury resort, and beside the eccentric Barbara with her beehive hairdo, he had not yet seen many people.

    “Well, no bloody wonder it’s called the Hidden People Spa! Nobody’s up yet or what?” Quentin turned at the familiar voice.
    “You look in great spirits this morning dear” he greeted Tina “How was your night’s sleep?”
    “Can we skip the formalities Q, I’m already bored. Let’s have a tartine of rúgbrauð at the Þorramatur, shall we? I’m famished.”

    #4002
    F LoveF Love
    Participant

      “Who d’ya think yeeeeer are’?” Finnley slurred, jabbing a finger into the pile of chisp magazines. “Gerroff me!”

      #4001
      TracyTracy
      Participant

        “Back so soon?” inquired Liz, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, I say! Had too much to drink, have we?”

        Finnley lurched into the wall, knocking a picture of Big Ben onto the sideboard, where it landed on the domed carriage clock, which started to chime hashazardly.

        (Liz couldn’t help chortling at the spelling mistake, if not the irony)

        Trying to regain her balance, Finnley ricocheted into the sofa, ending up face down on top of a pile of old Chisp magazines.

        “I was enjoying a quiet night thread sitting alone, as a matter of fact,” Liz sighed. “ I’ll ring the bell and have someone come and remove you. Before you pass out, have we got any more staff, do you know? Who shall I call?”

        #3820
        TracyTracy
        Participant

          “Oh Patty, you naughty ratty!” exclaimed Bea, as she trundled into the kitchen to make her morning coffee. “I left you your marie biscuit on top of the microwave as usual and you haven’t even touched it. But look at my banana!”

          The banana had been dragged from atop the bowl with the oranges, across the kitchen counter to nestle between the greasy gas cooking rings, the skin neatly opened in a perfect square cut.

          “I was going to have that banana on my toast this morning,” Bea grumbled crossly. “You are overstepping the line now, Patty Ratty.”

          “But Bea,” replied Patty, “I’m a new age ratty, a healthy ratty and a global warming conscious vegan ratty, and I do prefer a nice banana to a lousy factory made cheap biscuit, don’t you know.”

          At least, that is what Bea imagined the rat might say, if it could speak. Everyone knows rats don’t speak. And notwithstanding, the rat had retired for the day and wasn’t in the kitchen anyway.

          “I’m a raw food vegan gluten free health food rat!” shouted Patty from under the wood pile just outside the kitchen door. “You’re trying to kill me with that crap food!”

          Momentarily speechless at the audacity of the uninvited guest, Bea struggled quietly with her roles and responsibility beliefs. Should I serve the food the uninvited guest prefers? Or should the gatecrashing rat be grateful for the food it was given?

          #3803

          In reply to: Mandala of Ascensions

          Lord R’eye, the one-eyed ruler of the known universe, was known by many names, a great lot of them completely forgotten by the masses. He had to constantly reinvent Himself, borrow new disguises, create factions, sprinkle in a few miracles, create order ab chao and voilà.

          He owned a few bodies, strategically placed here and there, one of his favourite in Geneva, quite involved in banking affairs. His bodies were a rare indulgence, and he couldn’t stay too long either, as his massive energy could easily get stuck with the lot of them, down to density.
          Overall, he was much more comfortable managing his immense wealth “up there”, in the cosmic realms he had helped shape. So many underlings were ready to carry on his biding, and apart from a few small number of very close ergo very dangerous confidants, many of the minions didn’t even know each other, or that they were, for the most part, owned by Him, and part of the same team.

          This was a cut-throat business, He had to admit, and everything was based on it. Manipulation and deceit, coercion, coaxing, anything necessary to control and manage the Empire.

          One of those confidants, Lord Apex had been summoned and appeared almost instantly.
          He had this charming archangelic halo and aura, but Lord R’eye would have none of it. A correction was in order, the latest results were extremely concerning.

          “My Lord?” Apex asked in his mellifluous voice.
          “My dear Apex, remind me what responsibility I gave you last century?”
          “Of course my Lord, the Innovation project, the Great Disclosure and Holographic Contact projects, amongst other proj…”
          “And how much progress have we had with those?”
          “Well, my Lord surely knows that so much herding is delicate. The interference with Lord Bael’s projects too, you should know…”
          “The Desert and Green Revolutions projects, indeed. A great success, so much pain and anguish! That’s what I’m talking, you should learn from Bael.”
          “But my Lord, that has caused quite a conundrum with the Mars simulation, which, by way of fractal holographic recurrence, could well impact the whole delicate matrix we weave…”
          “Stop your angel speech, Me’dammit. Plain Anguish, so I can understand every word. The Hell pits cannot wait to have you, so you better give some good explanation.”
          “I mean, my Lord, that were the sheeple able to glimpse that the Mars experiment is but a reflection of a deception of grander scale in the cosmic realms, that the aliens saviours, or whatever saviours or… masters of any genre, are just ways to fleece them off their power… “
          “Everything would unravel like a pile of dominos.” Lord R’eye’s voice made very clear that he had full grasp of the situation. “So,” he continued with the nicest menacingest voice “you better make sure that doesn’t happen.”

          He dismissed Apex with a wave of a thought.

          If the net of illusions unravelled before they have time to create the Earth 5th Dimension in time to double their profit, it would certainly be a disaster.

          A few humans lost through the gaps were a hard to accept reality, but so long as they could cut the losses, it was not dramatic. But they were talking another order of magnitude. It could be a definitive blow. It always had been an issue when the net of illusion became too big in the past. They had bigger and bigger holes. So they had to start again, destroy, and recreate civilisations.
          Stupid humans, if only they knew that Ascension was not the way out.

          #3623
          EricEric
          Keymaster

            Finnley’s tirade stirred something in Godfrey.

            He may not have completely given voice of the thought in his head, but it made him realize that the thought of quitting for something different had been here all along.
            He liked Elizabeth well enough. To be honest, such caring for an ungrateful and volatile lady was borderline devotion, but still, it wasn’t about that.

            I wanted to change the world, and Elizabeth vision of greatness and madness alike was, for a time, something he could fall in line behind and support with passion.

            Through visionary books, to open the minds of the pleb to the realms of possibilities, ah! no matter how deliciously delirious and quaint such possibilities seemed. That was a grand epic in budding.

            And then, after so many years of relentless editing, copy-writing, and of course maid after maid interviews, all there was left? Unbridled madness and tyranny from the well of grandiose ideas that Elizabeth had been, and to some extent still, was.

            In fact, Godfrey had stifled his own creativity by falling in line behind the writing giantess. There were timid attempts at writing his own story, and only piles of old notebook to account for it.

            Purpose, Truth, Action those were the magic words…

            “Oh, bugger it Liz’. I quit.”

            How’s that for action? Another thread would do me good. Like to see what life’s brewing on Mars.

            #3579
            F LoveF Love
            Participant

              Finnley looked up guiltily from the Lemololol novel she was surreptitiously reading under the table. In an effort to give the impression she had been listening, Finnley read the first line her eyes fell on.

              “You know Elizabeth, I always say you need a good smoking pile of manure to grow bigger cucumbers.”

              Elizabeth gasped in admiration. “You are so wise, Finnley. We may have had our differences in the past — I have such strong inner values — and I may call you odd behind your back, but manure and cucumbers, that is just brilliant! That sums it up precisely. Let me make you another cup of tea.”

              #3438

              A man on a donkey making his way through the dust and rubble of the crumbling city elicited no attention, it was a common sight that attracted no attention. Sanso covered his hair and face with a blue shawl, more to keep the acrid cement dust out of his eyes that for purposes of concealment.
              The destruction was appalling, but wonderfully symbolic ~ there were buildings still standing like lone sentinels amid the piles of smashed grey blocks and mangled steel girders, but the huge gaps where the great wall had been allowed a view of the rolling plain beyond. The heat shimmered across the golden dry vegetation, silver grey olive trees gnarled haphazardly on the gentle slopes, and far off a milky haze rose above the distant sea.
              The donkey picked his way nimbly though the wreckage, scurrying figures clutching babies and assorted items rushed towards the holes in the perimeter wall, where the ragtaggle crowds fanned out as they ran through to the other side, as wild shouts of jubilation ~ as well as plaintive cries for loved ones lost in the chaos ~ ricocheted through the gutted buildings.
              The donkey stopped at a site of devastation indistinguishable from all the others, and indicated to Sanso by bucking him off his back that this was the ruined tile factory, and then Lazuli shapeshifted back into his usual human form ~ short but stocky, black haired and brown eyed, with eyebrows that met in the middle ~ for ease of communication.
              “Over there, look!” Lazuli pointed to wisps of dust rising from a depression in the rubble.
              Shading his eyes from the glare of the sun, Sanso could make out four bent figures searching the debris, pulling out stones and tossing them aside, evidently searching for something.
              Fanella! I have come back for you!” Sanso cried, stumbling and banging his shins as he rushed over to her.
              “And I have come for you too!” added Lazuli, following Sanso, and hoping to make a favourable impression on the girl, smitten with her long golden hair, elfin features and slender body.
              “About bloody time, Sanso” said Lisa tartly, easing her aching back into an upright position. “You may as make yourself useful, and help Pseu find the tile she’s looking for and then we can get out of this godforsaken hellhole. Jack will be wondering where we are.”

              #3406
              EricEric
              Keymaster

                Seeing her protégés risking being horribly crushed under piles of rocks, Pseu immediately teleported an ant and decided to queen it to ensure it would successfully thrive and farm those wooly aphids to halt the wilting process.

                #3377

                “What does it say, Sanso?”
                The four travelers had arrived on the island in patchy swirling fog in a field full of cucumber plants and sundials. The sundial nearest to Sanso had a letter tied to the handle with blue ribbon.
                “If that’s not for me, I don’t know what is,” he snorted, untying the letter as Lisa looked at him in amazement.
                “Really, Sanso, that seems so implausible,” she said.
                “What does it say?”

                bq(Quote).“And we start to hope that if we keep on digging,” Sanso read, “All the way to the core, if we don’t stop, if we perforate the land like a honeycomb, if we make it as flimsy as silk, maybe it will suddenly collapse in on itself. And then, like a tray piled with cups of coffee and cookies that crashes to the floor in a mess of crumbs and glass, it will all mix together.

                The upper part and the lower part will blend. And the rules will change. And we’ll be able to say with a sigh of relief: Here is a piece of sky mixed with a cracked piece of sea; here is Shujaiyeh mixed with Sderot; here is Zeitoun mixed with the Mount of Olives; here is compassion mixed with relief; here is one human being mixed with another. above, and with them build a new land.”

                “Oh my,” said Fanella, “Are you sure we’ve come to the right place?”

                “And an entire people will rise to the surface of the earth,” Sanso continued, “ Pale and faded, blinded by the sun that beats down on the land. And we will stand in silence, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the light. And as we stand there in silence, the fear and anxiety will gradually creep into our heart, that while we were finding refuge in subterranean Gaza, the land above took its own life, was left behind and emptied out.”

                “Gorden Bennet,” said Lisa.

                #3342

                “I don’t know!” Jeremy shouted at the guy with the round spectacles and the Chinese traditional garments full of intricate Chinese button knots.

                The guy showed no sign of losing patience although they’d asked him the question whole morning long.
                “That is unfortunate, Jeremy” the guy in charge said slowly. He was stroking Max in long broad stokes, flattening the ears with his palms, while the cat was purring like an engine oblivious to the danger in the room. “As you know, there are many ways to skin a cat…”

                “Don’t you dare harm Max!”

                “So let us recap from the start” the Chinese man said. “You told us you don’t know the man, or his companion. That they appeared and disappeared in a rag, to destination unknown.”
                Jeremy nodded, trembling of rage at the way the man was holding his cat.

                The Chinese man gave a brush of hand, which all the goons in the apartments took as a cue to leave them two alone.
                When they were all gone, he tightened his grip around the cat’s soft neck, and leaned closer to Jeremy:

                “My friend, the trace we left in our fugitive’s stomach led us to your place, so there is no doubt he was there. How he disappeared again is a mystery you will help us solve, whether you want it or not.”

                Jeremy looked at him quizzically “so why don’t you use your trace to locate him again?”

                “The problem is, by now, either he’s digested and dumped it somewhere in a hot steaming pile of shit, or he’s managed to cloak the signal. Those things were to be expected. I guess he went to you for a reason. He wasn’t able to locate our thief’s location without your help. So now, you will help us do the same.”

                Jeremy protested “But we tried it already, with the cucumber and all, but it didn’t work!”
                Somehow, a thought came with brief and intense clarity to him. The Chinese man noticed the glimmer in Jeremy’s eye and smiled thinly.
                “What is it?”
                “The map was working for him, as well as the cucumber, for some unexplainable reason. But not for you or me, it doesn’t mean anything! Of course! We have to try something different, focus on finding the person or thing you want, and let me draw another map.”

                Cheung Lok was starting to feel closer than he had been in months. He untied Jeremy, and gave him the cat. “Do it, do it now.”

                Jeremy lifted Max, tenderly wrapping the cat’s soft body like a scarf on his shoulders. He reached for the wall and took a coloured pin off the cork-board.

                While the Chinese guy was busy calling back his goons, Jeremy quickly started to draw on the skin of his arm a symbol with swirly lines, and going in a trance, started to dance into a swirling vortex.

                “He’s escaping!” Cheung Lok shouted in Chinese to the others, “Catch him!” he said, striving, but only too late, to catch the youngster who had just disappeared with his cat inside the vortex which was already rapidly closing around them.

                #3279
                TracyTracy
                Participant

                  Consuela’s eyes were as round and big as life savers as she tried to absorb everything she was seeing in the underwater cave. Every tile, every key, every shell contained layer upon layer of images and information like great piles of slippery transparent slides. Multiple luminous trails floated from each layered image, intertwining with other layers. Her three dimensional land vision struggled to hold on to something familiar, something to balance, and failed. Consuela lost all sense of direction and perspective in the cacophony of data, knew not which way was up, or down, or sideways or any of the other directions presenting themselves. She started to tumble and roll, gasping and flailing and snatching at the water but there was nothing to hold on to.

                  #3259

                  The early morning sea mist was evaporating as Fanella strolled around the village picking up dog shit. She reminded herself to fully appreciate the damp coolness, before the scorching summer sun enveloped them in a bone warming blanket, and then reminded herself to appreciate the bone warming effects of the full sun later. As she retraced her steps she noted how differently everything looked on a return journey, how piles of dog shit had escaped her notice while going one way, but were obvious on the way back. It reminded her of something she’d read recently in one of the books that Lisa insisted she read to improve her English ~ A Field Guide To Getting Lost . Hah! Had there been a cruel irony in that choice of book? Fanella had felt lost ever since she arrived in 2020. But according to the book, getting lost wasn’t a bad thing, not at all.

                  To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

                  Fanella sighed. All sounds very philosophical, but I’m still stuck in the wrong time zone.
                  Another passage from the book popped into her head:

                  We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

                  Fanella gazed up at the sky ~ the blue of longing was taking over, as the white wisps of clouds dispersed.

                  The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle…. how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly….No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

                  Charming, Fanella thought, just bloody charming. Rotting soup of change, that just about sums it up. No wonder I wake up every morning with my bones feeling like mush.

                  #3144
                  EricEric
                  Keymaster

                    Jean-Pierre Duroy couldn’t get his day going. There was a royally nagging problem of loo clogging that he couldn’t get solved. Apparently there were bugs in the microsoil under the soft underground, or was that the network of pipes he couldn’t tell. No amount of boiling water or any of the extravagant chemical concoctions by the Count of St Germain would seem to have any effect whatsoever this fine morning apart from making the matter worse.
                    It seemed that the removal and construction over the Grotto had not gone as well as planned when it came to plumbing.

                    There were more pressing matters however, notwithstanding that the royal defecation could well impact the mood for the day and maybe the whole country, so there was nothing light about it.
                    Such matter was to oversee the decoration of the main part of the Opera House which was already complete. Construction work had slowed during winter, and cement would take longer to settle, so there were still piles of tiles, gravel and other rubbles left lying around, but Madame de Pompadour was very eager to get a performance tonight, and had been so intent on it that she’d ordered for champagne, fine draperies, and even the newly fashionable toile de Jouy to drape inside the alcoves.
                    What she had not anticipated however was the inordinate amount of candles which were needed to light all the place brightly enough during the night.

                    The Royal beehives being unable to provide enough beeswax, they had to source the material from nearby hamlets, and already a throng of carts full of candles driven by some petite gens eager to sell theirs was lining at the entrance of the Palace pending security clearance.

                    #3138
                    TracyTracy
                    Participant

                      “What on earth are you doing?” asked Cedric, watching with amazement as Pseu suddenly ran off towards the piles of construction materials near the Royal Opera House of the Palace.
                      “Shhh! I’ll catch you up in a minute.”
                      Pseu had received an urgent message from one of the other characters on her chaptershiftwatch, a young fellow in Grenoble called Jacques Coctuit. Jacques, like many of his friends and neighbours, was crouched on the roof, throwing tiles at the soldiers below. When Jacques ran out of tiles, his burning desire for more tiles blasted forth, and Pseu registered the request, and simultaneously broadcast a request for tiles.
                      The heaps of doubly fired tiles scattered around the building site of the new opera house would be perfect, and although their disappearance would be noticed, it would not create as much fuss as would any new materials disappearing. Nobody would mind much if a pile of rubble to be discarded went missing. Quickly and efficiently, Pseu teleported the tiles to the roof Jacques was sitting on, who noticed merely that there were more tiles than he thought, and would only later, after the adrenaline had worn off, wonder at how they had appeared in a pile by his side.
                      Pseu had one of the tiles diverted to The City as a memento, to add to her collection of Key Incident Link Tiles (or KILTs for short) for the new Teleport Folly at the Estate.

                      #3071
                      TracyTracy
                      Participant

                        Stonehenge had moved. Standing stone circles don’t usually move, but this one did. For the reason that nothing is cast in stone, I suppose. Not quite sure yet where to reposition it. There are four standing stones, now, and not five. Or you could say there are now six instead of five, but two are quite short now. After the branch pruning days (some pruned by the wind and some pruned by chainsaw) (when is a fig branch not a fig? when it’s a prune), today was a digging and planting day in the less shady garden. A previously unusable area was now liberated from permanent shade, and a particularly good crop of seedlings meant that it was immediately usable. Hence, the unceremonious removal of the ceremonial stones. The stone circle was now a pile of stones, a stone heap without a plan ~ but with endless possibilities.

                        #2980
                        TracyTracy
                        Participant

                          Mari Fe managed to find the earplugs, and gave them to Katarina. “Shove these in her ears will you, I need to calm down and catch my breath.” By this time Pearl was catatonic with Meloncholy, and Katarina had no trouble inserting the earplugs.

                          Mari Fe pulled a carpet off the pile, threw it down onto the shop doorway step, and flopped down. She automatically pulled her ephone out of her pocket, and without thinking found herself checking in to FBF2. “She’s done it again!” she exclamined, jumping up. “ Tanit! She deactivated her FBF2 account 2 days ago ~ at exactly the same time as Elza reactivated her surge team location chip and took the Moscow case.”

                          “Is that relevant?” asked Katarina, who was gently slapping Pearls cheeks, trying to revive her from the effects of the hypnotic melancholy choir.

                          But Mari Fe didn’t reply. She was following the other two ladies, who had disappeared into the back room.

                          #2971
                          TracyTracy
                          Participant

                            Katarina knotted the scarf under her chin and grinned at her reflection in the mirror. The disguise was comfortable, colourful and effective. The carpet shop was located on a coordination point in an alley off Fountain Square, easy enough to find with a CP nav ap. There were several ordinary carpets hanging in the window and piled up near the door, in case any unsuspecting normal tourist chanced on the CP, but the new stock of old flying carpets was ready in the back room, awaiting approval from the Surge Team representatives, ready for the flight to Moscow.

                            #2945
                            EricEric
                            Keymaster

                              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…

                              #2925

                              Sanso rubbed his sore head.

                              “Oh well, just one of the hazards of the job, I suppose.” he said philosophically.

                              “Okay, coast is clear,” he whispered into the portal.

                              One by one, Arona, Vincentius and Yikesy piled into the small bathroom.

                              “Don’t forget me!” hissed Mandrake.

                              “You know,” Mandrake continued, snootily, “there are some who will say we should not be here. There will be some who will be tsk tsking for all they are worth.”

                              “Positive energy, please Mandrake.” smiled Arona. Mandrake rolled his eyes.

                              “It will be fine, just remember: nobody must know who we are or why we are here, and positive intentions at all times.” Sanso was tremendously excited. It was a long time since he had had such an exciting mission.

                              “Why are we here, again?” asked Vincentius, in his deep melodious voice.

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