Search Results for 'seemed'

Reginald gaped in amazement at the brainwave that had struck Sadie. Poor thing, he thought, she seemed to have these fits sometimes, where she would hang on a word, frozen in time for minutes, and then resuming as if nothing had happened.
He snapped his fingers in front of Sadie, but she remained motionless. Pity, he thought, there would be none of the delicious crocodile eggs poached from the Menagerie left when she would come back to her senses…

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.

Finding a time smuggler on such short notice was near impossible, Linda Paul soon found out when she hit the web. There were sure long lists of pages offering the services at seemingly attractive prices, but then never covering all the highly recommended options, such as the time collision waiver, and collateral time damage waiver.
She had a pretty good idea of what she needed to smuggle back and when, but all the time pathways simulations seemed to run into a dead-end.
After a stroke of genius, realizing that the one-timeway drop-off prohibitive surcharge may be the reason why she couldn’t get decent tariffs, she changed her simulation for a return.

“Time and item of origin/return…” she muttered as she typed “Queen Anne’s crocheted ferrets, 1625, Louvres Palace”.

Of course, going forward in time was easy, so she would simply need to give specific instructions to the time smuggler to pass on those bloody ferrets along the timeline.

A click here, accepting the long conditions with hardly a glance, “blabla, not covering extra temporal charge… blabla… ensured discretion, yes, yes, service cannot be used to leave historical artifacts protected by the amendment on the … or any incongruent item blabla… smuggling service comes with no obligation of results…”
The rest was piece of cake.

She already had the perfect time mule in mind for the delicate mission of reintroducing the crocheted ferrets where her dragqueen competition was now held.

When Nicole du Hausset, widow of a poor noble man, one of the two femmes de chambre of Madame de Pompadour, first hear Madame talk about her first encounter with the Count in 1749, she remembered immediately about her mother, and grand-mother’s secret instructions.
A few nights later, she wrote down in her diary “‘A man who was as amazing as a witch came often to see Madame de Pompadour. This was the Comte de Saint-Germain, who wished to make people believe that he had lived for several centuries.”

For some reason, she was to find a way to give him two scrawny century-old (and quite frankly smelly) crocheted ferrets, as a token for the Queen.
She still had seven years or so to make it happen, that was time ample enough to do the deed, if the Good Lord would grant her enough life, or else she would need to pass the burden to the next of kin.
She’d never known exactly why this was significant, but she’d been told that her family’s past riches were due to the success of this task, passed on to the next generation until 1757.

It didn’t take very long. An elaborate and convincing lie did come easier to her than she would have known, and the Count swallowed it hook and sinker. Next thing she knew, she’d glimpsed the plush beasts in the midst of the menagerie of the Queen, and felt relieved of a life and generation-long burden.
She could now return to a simple and uncomplicated life, although she would sometimes wake up at night in cold sweat, having had dreadful nightmares that the ferrets had disappeared before the date.

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.

Linda Paul had not expected the whole time displacement, and even as he accepted it with a healthy je ne sais quoi of nonchalance, he’d started to notice strange effects. Déjà vus and double occurrences seemed to happen, he wondered if Sanso and Sadie had not unwittingly started to shift their time-space continuum…

“she felt some security as her companions seemed composed about the journey.”
hire car drivers ~ city driving
“The ocean was not as deep as she had anticipated. Even though the water eventually came up to her shoulders, she found she was able to walk the whole distance.”
shallow ocean waters of Sanlucar

“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.

“Stop fucking barking!”, she said, and not by any means for the first time. “I’m trying to read!”
And then she read:
“Animals not only enjoy the sounds that they make, they are to some extent enchanted by them. The animals’ interior world is silent. The sound of an animal’s hoof upon the ground fills it with a sense of power and affirmation. The cat’s meow is as enchanting to the cat as to its owner—meaningful sounds that communicate feeling. These are enjoyed by all such species.”
“Oh dear” she said to herself, momentarily nonplussed. “I seem to have turned an enchantment inside out. I could have been enjoying it all along.”

“And who is “she”, the cat’s mother? The cats whiskers?” he asked. “The cat who got the cream?”

“We’re going to play cat and mouse for now” she replied, licking her lips. “The fact is, she doesn’t know ~ yet. Time will tell, or a teller will time it. Do you know what I found in the sewing box the other day? A 1914 coin from Guernsey, and then would you believe it, the #1914 transcript arrived in my mailbox. So I read it. I’d like to say the timing was perfect, but in this instance it seemed to be a few weeks late. There was something in it about whales, and visualizing a special place, and do you know what I thought of? That warm lagoon, do you remember? It was in the beginning of the story.”

The fourth-age interim authority of the Team had given new directives. They were clear enough. The new wave was in full bloom and required utmost attention, so all the operatives in action had to temporarily suspend their missions pending review.
Madame Li, for instance, was again in the middle of a food and water scare surge in Shangpoon, where bloated floating glowing gloating piglets were found roaming freely in the river of the city’s main water supply. And that was the least of those she had to corner these days in the most populous city of the country.
Simply enough, they were required to pay attention to what they paid attention and gave importance to… Which wouldn’t solve most of the surges, most of them had sniggered when they heard the speech.
“Or are they suggesting we are the ones creating the surges to get a rush of adrenaline, maybe?” Skye sighed.
A bit of unwanted leave in all this craziness wasn’t something they all were used to, especially under the previous management, but for all that was worth, they seemed to all relish a bit of pressure release.
“Relish that, old horseradish,” Pearl said “now I’m pretty sure they did overdo that religious stuff…”

“Oh no, not Korea yet, it’s minus 18 degrees there!” Yann was busy throwing darts on the world map patafixed to the blank wall after a fashion.
He’d spend the last hour trying to find a suitable and close enough destination to fly so as to activate his last one-month coupon-visa due to expire at the end of the month. But most of the attempts seemed to follow an unknown logic he wasn’t ready to go along with.
“It’s starting to snow again in Paris, and it’s too far. Taipei or Kyoto don’t look much better than here…”
He marked a pause, and breathing slowly, emptied his mind, following the tradition of the Güt lineage of Libetan alpacas. Then the solution to his predicament appeared to him as clear as broad daylight.
“Alright then, Long Poon it is again the safest choice. And I could be back the 23rd, isn’t it great? Let’s just hope the booking will go easier than last time !”

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.