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For a moment, Granola felt in a dream world. It wasn’t the first time it happened, so she relaxed, and let her consciousness focus despite the distraction from the shimmering and vibrating around the objects and people.

She was in another mental space, but this one was more solid, not just a diversion born from a single thought or a single mind. It was built in layers of cooperation, alignment, and pyramid energy. A shared vision, although at times, a confused one.

The first time she’d visited, she thought it was a fun fantasy, like a dream, quickly enjoyed and discarded. But then she would come back at times, and the fantasy world continued to expand and feel lively.

It slowly dawned on her that this was a projection of an old project of her friends. The more striking was how people in the place looked a bit like Maeve’s dolls, but she could see the other’s imprints —Shaw-Paul’s, Lucinda’s and Jerk’s—, subtle energy currents driving the characters and animating everything.

It felt like a primordial fount of creativity, and she basked in the glorious feeling of it.

Once, she got trapped long enough to start exploring the “place” in and out, and it all became curiouser when she found out that the places and the stories they told were all connected through a central underground stream.
Granola had been an artist most of her life, so she understood how creativity worked. Before she died, she had been intrigued the first time her online friends had mentioned this collaboration game, creating that mindspace filled with their barmy stories. She didn’t believe such pure mental creation could be called real at all.
Maybe that was the kind of comments that let her friends forget it.
If only she could tell them now!

“You could, if you’d hone your pop-in skills, dear”, a random character suddenly turned to her and spoke in the voice of Ailill, her blue mentor.
“But how can you see me? I’ve tried and the characters of these stories don’t ever see me!”
“That’s what popping in is all about, justly so!” Ailill had this way of making her mind race for a spin.
“Now, will you stop hijacking this person, and tell me why you’re interrupting my present mission?” Granola turned burgundy red, increased her typeface a few notches, and pushed her ghost leg vigorously at the story character.
“Oh, you are right about that. It is a mission.” he smiled, “I think you’d want to go find certain characters, or avatars. Your friends personae are always shifting into new characters, but they hide themselves and don’t progress. Actually, some of them are trapped in loops, and those loops are not happily ever after. You can help free them, so they can recover their trapped creativity.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound like an impossibly vague mission at all!”

She was about to continue ranting, but the pop-in effect was gone, and the character was back to his routine, unperturbed by her ghostly agitation.

Next on her list was Shawn-Paul. Or at least, she liked to think she had a neat ordered list and a method to her travels, but truth was she would often be propelled to the oddest places by random idea associations and would then pop-in to less than savory spots.

Not that she didn’t like to see through the eyes of an hideous little teddy-troll made of orgone. Granola had always hated orgone with its trapped garbage in clear resin, sold a million bucks for silly woowoo purposes. It didn’t prevent her projecting into it for one. She was actually wondering if it wasn’t actually working and enhancing her capacity to get irate.

When she started to feel everything vibrate, she forced herself to slow her thoughts down, and tell the particles trapped in the resin of the orgone teddy-troll to also slow down and breathe with her.

Now. She had a good view on Shawn-Paul who was strolling along the aisles of the oddest of minerals in the crystal & fossils market. The heat was making the asphalt sizzle at place, and the warm air was making her view blurry in waves of mirages. She tried to send some pop-in energy to get him to notice, but either he was too stoned by the heat, or lost in his thoughts as usual… Of course, there was so little chance that he was simply appalled by the orgone display on the shelves.

“Focus” she thought, trying to channel her giant essence into the tip of the figurine, she pushed her energy towards SP’s direction.

The orgone teddy-troll started to wobble and dance precariously above the ledge of the shelve, starting its slow motion fall to the ground.

The excitement made Granola’s consciousness suddenly untethered and leave for another mental space. She moaned as she couldn’t see if the figurine had landed and successfully drawn the attention of SP…

Mandrake love of chasing pigeons almost got the best of him, but he managed to keep on track in the whirlportal that opened doors within places.

The Cat had gone for errands to the Doline, the only place that the Voodoo witch’s portals couldn’t reach. Only the underground streams led to it, as some sort of enchantment protected it and kept it hidden.

The swamps of the bayou were well connected to such otherworldly places, but it still took him much more time to get there than he’d wanted. The pearls from the Doline were the price for a tracking spell that the Voodoo witch he was going to had promised him so he could find Arona.

There was something oddly off about the new store where Jerk was assigned.
It’d taken him a few weeks to start realize it, as he was trying to get accustomed to the new environment.
The more he looked, the more the feeling was getting reinforced. There was for one, this door to the other storey that was blocked by a sort of impregnable charm. Did he unwittingly blocked himself out of this place? Unlikely, as he was usually given the keys to all sorts of places.
This was definitely annoying as much as it was unusual.
It was like the neighbours, who’d seemed friendly enough, and despite that, there was something that was missing in their interactions.
A flaming giraffe for instance, he would have understood the appearance, but a slow smothering of unbridled creativity was a first.
Where did the fun go?
They’d said at the last Worldwide Wisdom (a.k.a. Woowoo) Convention that they were done with the Tranche of Truth, and now entering the Tranche of Rules.
Seems like someone was playing with the rules of the Reality Firewall, and that was not enjoyable…

That, and those cravings for granola cookies, dreams of roasted marshmallows over a firecamp and red balloons in an elevator… Where was it coming from?

“Finnley, pssst!”

The maid looked tersely and visibly annoyed at the lanky unkempt guy with the crazy eye.

“Do not bloody psst me, Godfrey! I’m not your run-of-the-mill hostess, for Flove’s sake.”
“Alright, alright. Come here, and don’t make a sound!”

Finnley clutched at her broom, which she’d found could make a mean improved nunchaku in case Godfrey’d forgotten proper manners.

“Don’t sulk, dear. What I’ve found here is nothing short of a breathrough – pardon my typo, I mean of a breakthrough.”
“Oh Good Lord, spit it out already, and I mean it metaphorically. I haven’t got all day, you know,… places to clean, all that.”
“Look at that!”
Godfrey handed her a pile of typed papers.

“Well, what’s about it? It does look a bit too neat and coffee-stain free, but the style is unmistakable. Long nonsensical babble, random words and characters, illogical sentence structure and improbable settings… That’s all you have psst ed me for? Another of some old Liz garbage novels?”

“That’s it! Isn’t it genius?” Godfrey looked at Finnley with an air of sheer madness. “You know Liz hasn’t written in years now, nothing fresh at least. You’ve be one to endlessly complain about that. Something about needing the paper to clean the window glass.”

“Of course I remember.” She paused, considering the enormous improbability that had just been hinted at. “Do you mean it’s not hers?”

“Ahahaha, isn’t it brilliant! This is all written by a clever AI. I’ve called it Fliz 2.0 !”

Finnley was at a loss for words. She didn’t know what was more terrifying, the thought of another Liz, or of an endless inexhaustible stream of Liz prose…

Godfrey looked pleased at himself “and to think it only took Fliz 44 minutes to spit the entire 888 pages novel!”

“Funny how time goes or seem to not exist at all, when you are popping in and out” mused Granola.
It felt a few seconds since she’d left the sheen of Ferrore wrappings, but with her mind racing in all sorts of places, she’d somehow would appear in another tranche of life months apart from the last sequence she was in.
Truth be told, she had almost forgotten about the past circumstances, or how the story was unfolding, like waking up from a dream, and barely remembering the threads of the night’s activity all the while knowing you were totally absorbed by them a few blips of consciousness ago.
If she’d learnt something, that was to go with the flow, and start from where she was. Clues would light the way…

Since they’d moved him (promoted, they said) to the new store in the posh suburbs, Jerk’s job had taken a turn for the worse. One thing was clear, they put him in charge because they had clearly no idea who to put there.
He’d liked enough that the thing basically was running itself, and he didn’t have much pressure to perform for now. But honestly, these parts of the city were much less exotic to say the least. More drones consumers, bored mums, noisy kids, all day long…

With the new schedules and the commute, it wasn’t as easy to have a social life; not that he cared too much, but he’d started to bond a bit with the funny neighbors some time ago. With the return of summer, he was thinking of having a rooftop party at their appartment’s building, but for some mysterious reason, time was passing without having even set a day for the event.

“Less planning, more doing”, something said in his ear, or so he thought.

“Couldn’t agree more” he said, taking his bag discreetly as he made an early exit for the day.

“There it is” he pointed at the worn-out dusty book he’d found after turning around the whole library. “Techromancers appear at the seams between realities. They possess technologies to divine outcomes beyond conventional means of the place in which they appear — in a word, they are from the futures, always, whenever the period they were found in — a reason for which scholars have surmised they come from a unique convergence point of the infinite lines of time in a real projective space of time, hinting at the nature of an all-connected roundabout timeline. Although them popping in existence at awkward places is not unheard of, they tend to stay discrete for fear of the Timeline Riots Impeachment Police.

“T’isn’t that helpful now, is it” he said dusting a peanut from the floor before cracking the shell open. “And doesn’t tell us why Finnley is so emotional now. Or where is Roberto. If I were to worry, that would worry me more…”

It was still raining clumps of wet sand when Rukshan, Olliver, Fox and Twee arrived at the oasis.
The light had dimmed and there was a feeling of hope mixed with dread in the vicinity. Only a mud brick wall no higher than a man’s waist was surrounding the village; and despite the infelicitous weather, standing here were a pair of sentinels so covered in sand clumps that they almost looked like a pair of stone wyverns guarding the entrance.

“Sسلام Salum’ friends. We are simple merchants, passing through, please allow us some shelter for the night” explained Rukshan using what he could remember of his rusty Nomads’ old tongue.

After a long silent glance at his strange companions, they shrugged and nodded him that he could go through.

Rukshan signaled to the others to follow him. The central paved road was leading the the market place, which would constitute, with the masjid, the centre of the city, and the most likely place to find answers on their quest.

Everyone seemed to have retreated to their places, in caves or the homes built on top of the caves from excavated materials. It was rather quiet except from the occasional thump noise made by the rain.

They were about to enter an alley when they heard someone loudly call them.
“Stop right here, Plastic Ban Police! – show us your bags and IDs.”

“Tagada” said Margoritt to Tak, after feeding him the last spoon of the red clay paste mixture he had to take daily for the past week.

Glynnis had mixed a fine clay powder with the yellow flowers of the prikkperikum that grew in the nearby woods. It would little by little absorb the effects of the potion, and hopefully neutralise that garish greenish color off his face and fur.

Meanwhile, Glynnis had perfected her own treatment by analysing the leftover salvaged from the lotion. Tak, with his sharp olfactory senses when he turned into a puppy, had helped her identify the plants and minerals used in the potion, as he felt bad about the whole thing. She’d liked to spend time chasing with puppy Tak after plants into the mountain woods, the nearby plains, and once even as they went as far as the heathlands where a evil wind blew… too close to the heinous machinations of Leroway to desecrate the land of old.

Thankfully, this time, she had properly labelled the lotion, with the cute picture of a skull adorned with a flower garland, under a smiling full moon. She wasn’t sure it would be of much use to ward off gluttons, but it put a smile on her face every time she looked at it.

With the full moon a day’s ahead, she started to grow restless. Even Eleri had noticed, and she wasn’t one to notice subtleties. While she’d encouraged Hasam’ to start to work at something outside with his hands, like building a magic rainproof dome — working with his hands was something the God would find himself endlessly bemused at — she’d started her plan to glamour-bomb the forest with placing at the most unusual places hundreds of concrete statues of little fat men wearing doilies. Something Gorrash obviously felt he was the inspiration for. In truth, it wasn’t far from it, as she’d taken the opportunity of a bright day of his stone sleep to make a plaster mold of him, and then artistically adjust postures and decorum to get her little fat men done. Gorrash had felt so appreciative of the likeness, probably encouraged in that thought by the rest of Rainbow’s babies dancing around him, that he even helped her ferry the heavy cargoes to the oddest destinations.

Rukhsan was ready with his package, the plan, the backup plan, and all the disaster recovery plans they would never need to do their journey to the west.
All of this preparation was starting to make him antsy, and he hoped everyone would make it in time to start the expedition.

Eleri had promised to be back in time, but she had that tendency to… forget things even more since her bout of illness. Glynis’ ginkgo leaves tea had helped a little, at least for the memory thing, not really for Eleri’s stubbornness to have them wait for her return — such assertiveness that was a sure sign of her recovery she’d said.
She’d gone already for weeks, and tonight’s was the departure… He had to trust everything would line up.

Right now, there was nothing to expect… but the unexpected. All carefully laid out plans would never stand a chance once on the roads, he knew that. It gave him some small comfort to just be aware of all the places and manners where the camel’s back would break.

Pricking up his ear in the still evening, he found out that this time, it seemed to start from the kitchen.

The dinner had already started, the roasted chicken half devoured, and Fox turned redder when he saw Rukshan’s dismayed look. The Fae seemed much too rigid at times.

It was a good and cheerful assembly, and Lahmom the traveller of the high plateaus, with her adorned cowboy hat always proudly put on her golden locks of hair, was telling them of the shamanic practices of the people of those far-away places she had seen in her voyages.
It was all fascinating to hear, she had such a love for the people that she beamed though her sparkly eyes when she was telling them the tales of those shamans, and how they would drum in circles and be able to communicate with their group spirit…

“We should do that sometimes” a surprisingly talkative Gorrash said, as he munched his way though a large ear of maize. He seemed almost drunk on the fermented goat milk that he had found pleasantly attracted to.

“Oh, I’m sure we can find some old skin somewhere around my stuff” Margoritt said, amused at the idea of the challenge.
Lahmom winked at Tak who was hiding behind his plate, but not missing any word of the lively exchanges.

“In all your travels, have you been to any of those places?” Lahmom asked Yorath who seemed distracted.
“I’m sorry, what?” he wasn’t paying too much attention “Has anybody seen Eleri?”

You’re a fool, Olli

His mother’s voice, even now kept haunting him. Olliver was a bit of a fool, far too credulous at times.
People would think him a simpleton, and, at 17, he would still arch his back when he was around others, maybe a little more now that he’d grown so much, always feeling awkward and unsuitable for anything.

He wasn’t so clear how the foolish plan had hatched in his head, honestly, he wasn’t very clever. Maybe he was guided. There was no other explanation.

Slowly, slowly his mother Ethely would exhort him, when he struggled to explain so many things in his head.

There was the house first. They had come early in the day, paint it with the white triangle in a circle. That meant it was to be demolished soon. The Pasha wanted to remove the ugliness of the town, the old bazar and the cows and chickens pens out of the town’s wall. He wanted a nice clean pall-mall place for his games, with boring clean white walls, and fake grass, his mum told him.
What is fake grass made of? he asked at the time. It was all he could think of. He hadn’t imagined they could tear down their neighbourhood, or their old familiar house.

So first, the house. Then the precious package. He liked it, the gilded egg with the strange difficult name. Rukji (that’s how he’d told him to call him, it was more easy) had left a note for him. He didn’t write much, in large big letters for him to read slowly. He remembered the stories Rukji told him about the egg. He used to forget a lot of things, but the stories were always very clear in his head, and he never forgot them.
Rukji said the egg used to transport people and things to distant places, at the speed of thought.
Olli had laughed when he told him that, he’d said his thoughts were not very quick. Rukji had smiled, with his nice and a bit sad smile.

So, he’d thought, maybe the egg could send his house and mum to a safe place, before they remove the house.
He’d tried to think of it, touch the eggs and its gilded scales, but nothing happened. You’re a fool Olli his mother said, while she was gathering their few things in a large cloth and wicker basket.

Then there was the tower. He’d thought Rukji would be there, still. He could tell him the secrets surely. But the stern man at the clock building told him he had gone.

Olli didn’t trust the man, and went from the back-entrance he knew about, up in the tower, to see in case he was there. But he wasn’t.

It was only the stroke of the 7th hour. And one of the mannequins from the tower moved as he would do, four times a day. Alone, at 7 in the morning, and 7 at night, and with everyone at noon, and midnight.

Olli had recognized the god of travel, with a funny pose on his plinth. He called him Halis. He had trouble with remembering names, especially long names. Ha-sa-me-lis. Sometimes he would say the names out of order. Like Hamamelis, and that would make everybody laugh.

That’s when something happened. He’d prayed to the god, to help his mother and their house. But the golden egg with his scales touched the statue, at a place where there was no pigeons stains. And zap! that was it.

Black for a moment, and then he was in the forest.
And he wasn’t alone.

“Free! At last!” he’d shouted.
Then he’d said “Ain’t that unexpected rusty magic… You tricky bastard managed to zap me out of my concrete shell! now, pray tell, where in the eleven hells did you send us, young warlock?”

What a fool you are, Olli, you got us all lost he could hear her whisper in his head.

There was one inn he knew about, the last one before the haunted bamboo forest. It served a solid but plain mountain meal, enough to be worth your coins, and carry you through the rigours of the cold ahead.

He doubted the oiliphant would carry him further through the thickly planted bamboos, so he would have to let her go for now, let her return to one of the secret entrances to the Forest, and be one again with the wild and her own.
Already the little crowd following them was getting thinner and thinner. After a while, the spell of novelty wore off, and they would realise where the enormous beast was walking toward. Very few wanted to have anything to do with the place. Rukshan wasn’t sure how such legend had spread about the bamboo forest behind haunted, as he would as a youngling find the crackling and wooshing sounds in the large plants rather soothing. Of course, as of all places, it was dangerous to venture there mindlessly, but he’d found the spirits dwelling there usually rarely ill disposed towards visitors, unlike deeper and higher in the mountains were some evils would ride the wind to great distances.

Not without feeling a small pinch in his chest, he said a last goodbye to his oiliphant friend, and went in the direction of the inn as the sun was already low on the horizon. The distinct sound of the bamboos could be heard from miles away, and there was only a few people left looking at the beast. His goodbye seemed to have lifted the last of the trance, and they suddenly woke up to where they were, some with an instant recoil on their faces. After a few minutes, he was alone once more.

Strangely, the fence had continued for longer than he’d thought. It wasn’t very high, more like a little nuisance really, but the complete oddity of its presence was enough to grate his nerves. He was reminded of something his master had told him For every inside, there is an outside, and every outside, there is an inside. And though they are different, they go together. The secret of all insides and outsides is this – they look a different as possible, but underneath are the same, for you cannot find one without the other. It made him realise that he couldn’t tell where the people who’d built the fence were from – the city or the forest. He’d immediately assumed something, while it could have been easily the reverse.
Now he looked at the fence itself, it was quite an ingenious piece of work, trying as much as possible to reuse local and discarded materials. Maybe it was more a tentative of a connective tissue rather than a fence…

It was in this more peaceful mood that he reached the inn, just an hour before nightfall, as he could tell from the sun. Lanterns were already lit outside of the inn, and although he’d expected it to be empty of customers as often was the case, it seemed to have another guest. He wouldn’t mind a little company, maybe they could enlighten him about the nature of this new boundary.

“My name is Lhamom” the traveler said to him with an inviting grin and slim beaming face. She wore a deerskin hat, and a patchwork of tribal clothes from villages around the mountains in the manner of an explorer of old times. She was already drinking the local woolly goat butter milk tea, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy every mouthful.
Rukshan would only bear it with enough spices to soften the strong taste. Nonetheless, he took polite sips of the offered beverage, and listened to the pleasant stories of the nearby and faraway countries she would eagerly tell about.
Now, curled up near the burning woodstove, enjoying a simple meal and simple everyday stories, after a lovely day riding above troubles, he would already feel complete, and closer to the magic he sought.