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“Just sniff it in!” said Finnley as she rolled her eyes expertly.

“Thanks,” said Bossy taking her cup of tea.

“So, tell me more about this evil fruit-loop doctor,” said Ricardo with an encouraging smile.

Bossy looked intently at him. “It’s no joke,” she admonished him sharply.

“Oh, no. No, of course not. I mean, yeah, I really want to know. It all sounds very … intriguing. And sort of creepy, to be honest. But definitely not a joke.”

Bossy relented and gestured imperatively for Ricardo to be seated.

“The doctor could best be described as a mad genius. He believed he had found the answer to looking eternally youthful but didn’t want to go through the time and expense of clinical trials through the normal channels. So he set up a testing laboratory on a small and relatively unknown Pacific Island. Tifikijoo, I believe it was called.”

“Uh huh. Actually I do vaguely remember something about that story.”

“We got the story first,” Bossie said proudly, “but there was a media ban on publishing some of the information, unfortunately. The Doctor managed to get funding for his tests through an undercover organisation whose hidden agenda was to hide an ancient crystal skull while at the same time providing them with a facility where they could continue their own secret testing into spider genomes. I can’t tell you too much about that — it was all hush hush. So, you wouldn’t have read about that in the news, I bet,” she added with a smug smile.

“Uh, no,” answered Ricardo, privately wondering if Bossy was the mad one. It was all starting to feel a bit surreal to him.

“Did the doctor know about the skull stuff?”

“No, the doctor was genuinely only interested in preserving beauty. Unfortunately, to this end, he killed one of his first guinea pigs. And tried to disguise his crime by mummifying the body. That’s when it all began to implode on him.”

“What happened to him?”

“He had some good lawyers and was found not competent to stand trial on the grounds of insanity. And the fact that all his clients had signed liability waivers helped a bit. He was sent to a high security psychiatric institution but managed to escape by reverting to his female identity—he was transsexual—and hiding in a laundry trolley.

“The doctor hated the way he was portrayed in the media and most of his venom was focused on our people. We had a guy working with us then, John Smith, and he covered the story with Connie. They got the brunt of the hate emails. John nearly had a nervous breakdown with the stress of it and moved to the country. Pity, he was a good writer.”

“So what makes you think Santa Claus and the doctor are one and the same?”

“Call it a very strong hunch. The Doctor was born in Iceland and had strong family ties there. And now I fear he has lured Connie and Sophie there in order to exact his evil revenge!”

John placed himself down on a crooked old chair at the table, with journal in hand, and stared out the window of his cottage. As he sat there, the imperfect glass of the window distorted his view slightly, but noticeably, almost unconsciously, and he swayed in minuscule displacements or perhaps shifted a bit to take a sip of his black coffee, giving the effect of a liquid world – to someone of imagination, of course. To those with no imagination, the window was rubbish and needed to be replaced.

It’s been a relaxing weekend for John, who, on his working days, finds himself as a writer. This is, of course, if you were to think of any days as those in which you might suddenly stop writing or ignore inspiration. In that respect, every day is a working day. However, this weekend was a special one for himself.

The writing that got him money was of the technical sort, dedicated to dry manuals and instructional fare. His passion, however, lent itself to the imagination. No doubt, he still adored the natural world and it’s workings, but he found himself nearly dead inside after completing a project for work. This, invariably, lead him to his personal expeditions.

Every few weeks he’d save up enough money to take a train or bus to another location, picked nearly at random, just so he could get away and bring color back into his life. This cottage, with its imperfect windows, was one such expedition.

So, he sat there for a moment, playing with his perception through the window, and then shifted his attention through it to world outside. A breath of beauty swept over him and he was inspired. In his journal, with no expectation of the entry living beyond those pages, he wrote:

The Wystlewynds (Whistle Winds) or Wystlewynd Forest

The Wystlewynds (Whistle Winds) or Wystlewynd Forest is a forested, mountainous area – if you’re apt to call these green, low laying perturbations in the Earth “mountains”. The cool-yet-comfortable south-easterly winds blow through the Wystlewood trees, whistling as it goes. Some would say the forest sings.

Wystlewood trees “sing”, as it were, due to the way the wind passes through their decomposing trunks. While alive, the trunks of the trees have a hard, fibrous outer wood, while the inner portion is soft and sponge-like, saturated in chemical that simultaneously grabs on to water and repels insects. When the trees get old and begin to die off, they tend to remain upright for some time as the inner sponge decomposes. This leaves a hollow void where a particular caterpillar takes refuge, unaffected by the repellent chemical that a fungus slowly decomposes into an edible source of nutrition.

These caterpillars leave behind a secretion that the decomposing fungus in the tree requires. The relationship between the caterpillar and fungus is symbiotic in that regard, both feeding each other. We call these caterpillars “Woodworms”.

When the caterpillars are ready to cocoon, they climb out to one of the old branches and hang themselves from a cord of twisted threads at least a foot long. When they are ready to come out, they bite through the cord, dropping themselves to the forest floor while still in the cocoon. The cocoon and all drops below the foliage of the undergrowth, where the moth can come out into the world under cover of green leaves and the shimmering violet flowers of the Spirit Flower – a color scheme that the moth shares.

The Spirit Flower is a rhizome with a sprawling root structure that tends to poke it’s way into everything. It has small violet shimmering flowers in umbels that in any other case might be white. The leaves are simple with a jagged margin, alternating. The stem is on the shorter end, perhaps a foot tall, fibrous and slightly prickly.

There are a few flowers that tend to dominate the undergrowth, Spirit Flowers being one. Sun Drops and Red Rolls are additional examples, the former a yellow droopy flower and the latter a peculiar red flower with a single pedal that’s rolled up in a certain way that would suggest a flared funnel with wavy edges.

The flowers and trees enjoy the soil here, a bit sandy and rocky, but mixed with a richness created by the mixture of undergrowth, fungi and bacteria. The roots dig into the soil, slowly stirring it and adding to it’s nutrients. The fungi eat the dead roots and fallen foliage and the bacteria eat the fungi and everything else, of course.

The whole matter leaves a note of scent in the air that cannot be described as anything other than that of the Wystlewynds. It’s perhaps sweet, with Earthy undertones and an addictive bitterness. The whole place seems to elevate one’s energy, sharpening the senses. You want to sing with the trees, or perhaps play along with a haelio (a flute-like instrument created with wystlewood).

The woman sitting next to me on the plane never stopped talking, she must have told me her whole life story, Aunt Idle wrote in her diary. It was a long flight from Australia to Iceland, I’m not complaining ~ it was quite an entertaining story. She said she came from Blue Lagoon campsite in the Adirondacks originally, although that was many moons ago, as she put it. Then she joined the army, but she didn’t tell me much about that, only that she’d been posted to Kenya and had taken to the place, always meant to go back and never did. She’s been married twice, once to a northerner called Bert Wagstaff, but that didn’t last long ~ nice enough guy, she said, but a bit boring. No kids. Then to Trudell. That was another story she said, but didn’t elaborate.

She said something about investigating fungus but the drinks trolley appeared. She asked for Blue Sapphire gin but they only had Gordon’s, and then she started going on about when she was in India. She had a book in her hands the whole flight, although she didn’t stop talking long enough to read much, it was The Rabbit, by Peter Day, with a picture of an upright man with a rabbit head on the cover, all in white, rather surreal.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t your hands,” said Tina. She had visited Quentin after Connie had left. Strange reporter that one. Kind of short sized with big eyes that never blinked. Tina snorted and dismissed the memory with a roll of her eyes, then looked at Quentin straight in the eyes, awaiting for his answer.

“What do you mean ?” asked Quentin. Tina didn’t expected the answer to be a question. She rolled her eyes as if Quentin had missed the obvious.

“The giant gouda ball, you’re lucky it didn’t roll on your hands.”

Quentin looked at Tina with a bit of concern in his eyes. She had been acting weird lately and making odd random connections between events and comments. He looked at his friend more closely. She had a bird nest on her head. With two eggs. It was a fake nest. He certainly hoped the eggs were too. He had no idea

“Anyway,” Tina said, “I won a trip to some island of the hidden people from the http://travellerofworlds.tp website. Wanna come with me, Quentin?”
He thought of his options. The most obvious response would be that he had no idea what a hidden people could be. If it was hidden it could very well be that it was hiddeous and needed to be hidden. On the other hand… Quentin looked at his other hand. It was empty.

“They say it’s on the rim of the realm,” added Tina as if she had read Quentin’s thought and need for a motive.
Now, he thought, the rim of the realm, that sounded quite an interesting unexplored territory to discover.
“When do we leave ? I need to ask Yannosh to pack my suitcase.”

“I don’t know, I just feel that connecting with each other is part of the fun,” mumbled Ricardo Prout.

“We have to start somewhere!” retorted Connie in exasperation. “Do some research! Find some connecting links!”

“One should never underestimate the behind the scenes idea prompts,” remarked Hilda, somewhat cryptically. “Relax, Ric. And for heavens sake buck up a bit! Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, you’re distracting me from my work, as instructed by miss bossy behind the scenes pants.”

“But I don’t get what the others are writing, if I want to join, the safest is do my own stuff,” said Ricardo sadly. “And I thought this job was a fun team job.”

Connie and Hilda rolled their eyes in unison. “He’s a newbie, he’ll get the hang of it,” whispered Hilda.

“Smart ass,” whispered Clove, rolling her eyes at Prune.

But he was not speechless for long.

“Or was he?” asked an irritating voice from seemingly nowhere.

Because as luck would have it, Funley the cleaner popped her head in the door to see if the bin needed emptying and overheard Evangeline’s ill-timed and thoughtless words.

Snooty tart and what a bloody mess there will be to clean up tonight after the party.

“Don’t worry, Mr Steam, I will untangle this tangled web of threads for you! And I can mop your sweaty brow,” she added sarcastically, rolling her eyes at Evangeline.

“Don’t push me,” snapped Finnley. “Yes Godfrey, I believe picking up rubbish is in my job description. Your job description … well buggered if I know what you do around here,” she said snarkily, perversely annoyed at being telepathically described as ‘the maid’. “Give me that rubbish immediately and I will deal with it,” she commanded, making a grab for Godfrey’s hand. “You go and help LIz with Roberto. And whatever you do, don’t let the blighter jump 3 times in the air and shout stickum lute putty. ”

“Who are you?” whispered Godfrey, keeping a firm grasp on the scraps of paper, aided perhaps by the fact that the honey was adhering them to his hand. “You are not the Finnley we know and … well, the Finnley we know. Is that cucumber on your face really a disguise? What have you done with Finnley?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Finnley, rolling her eyes.

“Help!” screamed Liz. “He’s trying to jump!”

“Devan!” called Mater. She couldn’t find the spell, and if they didn’t hurry, Idle would be lost, transformed into termitegranite forever.

The boy happened to be in the house at that moment. And he asked quite proud of himself. “What’s the matter Mater ?”
If she had had time to roll her eyes, she would have.
“I’m looking for a small package, it was hidden into the termite honey that your aunt swallowed.”
“Termite honey ?” asked Devan, “I didn’t know termite made honey. Are you sure it was not something else ? Like bees ?”
“Don’t play games, there’s no time. Look for a package, or a paper,” said Mater. I hope that tart didn’t swallow it with the honey.

“What a load of rubbish!” Idle exclaimed, disappointed that it wasn’t a more poetic message. She screwed up the scrap of crumpled paper, rolled it in the honey on the table, and threw it at the ceiling. It stuck, in the same way that cooked spaghetti sticks to the ceiling when you throw it to see if it’s done. She refocused on the honey and her hunger for sweetness, and sank her fingers back into the jar.

Roberto had just heard the end of their conversation. I want to hear about dear cousin Badul, the old tart had said to the maid. Something in his brain was triggered by that name, something he had been led to forgot by his handlyer in Vegas before… his mission. Yes he remembered now that he had a mission. But still all the little tickling wheels in his brain were catching up with the forgotten memories.

He looked inside the house. The old tart was handling what looked like a sheep skull. Was she doing some dark magic ? Was she a bruja ? He was not particularly superstitious or religious, but he had learned to fear the brujas of his village in the desert.

“Put that on the library between Byron and Baudelaire, will you?”
The maid looked at the skull, then at her mistress with the same rollling eyes. Oh it was subtle, so very sutble that the old lady had certainly not seen it, but he had been trained to read people’s faces… well he had read an old book of Chinese face reading that his grand mother had when he was living there… That’s why they recruited him.

The maid left with the skull, removed a few books from the shelf and put the skull unceremoniously in between. She shoved the remaining books randomly on other shelves and shrugged.
“I’m going to make a banana yogurt cake… without yogurt”, she said to nobody in particular.

A yellow monkey jumped from the top of the fridge onto Dido’s hair. She screamed like a beaver and dropped the ice cream jar she was devouring voraciously. Mater, who just happened to enter the kitchen at that very moment, rolled her eyes. When it was not curry cookies, it was icecream. If she continued to eat like that, Dido would soon puff up like a hot-hair balloon.

Geoffroy du Limon had felt confident that he had the skills to act the new role, considering his notable career in the theatre in the old story. He liked his new name: Miles Fitzroy suited him perfectly; and he anticipated resonating with London (although he would have preferred New Zealand: he’d heard that his old friend Francette Fine had been assigned a new story there). He found himself floundering, however, in unexpected ways.

The most unsettling factor was the absence of a back story. Without associations or automatic habits, he was unsure how to play his personality. Without triggers, where was the humour? There was simply nothing dramatic, comedic or tragic, nothing to make the play thrilling, exciting, or enticing, if everyone was an innocuous beige blob. A present beige blob is still a blob and not very interesting.

Roll up! Roll up! Come and see the show! Watch the cast focusing on themselves and not reacting to triggers! Nothing to judge here, folks, Roll up!

Geoffroy had no idea that having so few limiting guidelines could be so difficult. One had always assumed that it was the limiting guidelines that boxed one in, held one back, he mused, not the other way round. It was indeed a challenge, and he found himself feeling nostalgic for the old story.

“The key comes from a certain Dory”, said Becky with a puzzled look. “Does anyone know a Dory ? I don’t.”
“Have you been taking sleep pills again?” asked Tina in the brink of an eyeroll.
“Not at all”, said Becky briskly, bringing the letter and the key close to her chest. “I just don’t remember. It seems so far away.”
“It looks like a locker key, or maybe a safe key.” said Sam. “Look, there is a little monkey carved on it, and a number.” he said pointing at it.
Becky and Tina looked more closely.
“1495”, said Becky.
“Year 1495 (MCDXCV) was a common year starting on Thursday”, said Al. He was trying to solve a puzzle based on chaotic randomness theory and the evolution of the electromagnetic flux of sunspots in real time.
“There’s a little card with it.” Tina was holding a small square rigid paper with a name on it. “It’s written Tikfijikoo Island.”
“I remember the name”, said Sam, “I think it’s that place where they are building the Spider Amusement Park, or SAP.”