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Godfrey was impressed. “Might be the wisest things you said ever, dear.” he chuckled.

Then, looking around, he whispered back with a mischievous smile
“What about the windows ? They do look a bit foggy, and there is this old bosun’s chair in the attic I’ve been dying to have tried for some time now…”

Second Journey ~ August 24th, 2014

Duration 24 minutes

Directions : Meet with your power animal, ask them to lead you to the upper realm to meet with your guide. Ask the name of your guide and what they will be likely helping you with. Ask them for your personal symbol and how you can use it. Then follow your power animal into showing you the potential development for the stories.

Accounts

Eric
My snake animal guide appears very fast, I see its eyes first. It shifts into a powerful cobra, and fans out its hood into multiple heads, like Ananta (Shesha Naga), and says I can call him Nagini (like in Harry Potter, that’s also the playful name I give to the plush snake at our doorsteps).
It wraps its multiple heads around me like a ball, and we woosh into the ground to what I guess is the underworld, it seems like a long coiled path around a sort of vortex, after a few moments in a sort of crystal cave, I’m a bit skeptical what we’re doing there, I catch a glimpse of a white horse from the back, so I guess Jib’s Conan is checking on us, and restate my intent.
I go though the light of one of the brightest glowing crystals, and the travel resumes, this time like the giant snake wraps ourselves in coils around a column of rocks, and we climb that high mountain very fast. It reminds me of Mt Meru in Buddhism or the Immortals palace in the Chinese Buddhist tales (like in the 2014 movie The Monkey King).
The place is like a beautiful platform/palace of giant proportions, with a golden light. When we arrive, the snake becomes much smaller, and golden too, and wraps itself around my left arm. It guides me to explore different places, a temple, a place over the clouds where there are dances, etc. I decide to rest under a tree and meditate and be open to possibilities.
The snake shifts around in various forms as if to reflect the nature of my mind, a giant parasol, or a stream of many paths at my feet. It connects me to a picture I saw of a Buddhist painting where the mind represented as an elephant is led by the monkey brain around a snake-like path. I realize the person I saw briefly earlier is the guide that helped Sunwukong (the monkey king) and seems to be the guide I’m looking for.
(I find the name later is Puti or Subhuti).
When I mentally ask for a name, the name Pachacamac comes strongly. He shows me many things related to my symbol. As a spinning cube with the floating feather in the middle and the arrow pointing towards the heart. The spin of the cube creates illusion within illusion, the arrow wobbles but stays towards the heart.
He shows me a chasm and how to create a bridge over the clouds, by showing me the mirror image in my heart chakra. The bridge is built inside. At the same time, I was trying to focus on the music to deepen the trance, and realized outside (one storey below) was Jib’s music played on the speakers, aligned with the one playing in the headset, although a few seconds off, the rhythm was perfectly in synch…
He also shows me another image, of a deep well deep inside the mountain that we can see from above the clouds. The image inside is dark and fluctuates with the water’s surface, and also reflecting quite a small portion of the beautiful landscape around.
He explains that the well is the world we create, the mind and the perception is the water’s surface. It’s the external world, while the heart is all that we perceive as we discuss.
There are other things shared at a subjective level.

Francie
After I connected with my power animal, we went to the upper world. We went through water to get there until we came to land.
I asked for my main guide.
I think I took on the characteristics of my guide. by that I mean I felt myself become a different being, and then switched back and forwards between myself and the other. It was very clear. The other was masculine, strong, very alert, very watchful, powerful.
I asked for the guide’s name and received the answer, Carlos.
I asked for the area which the guide would work with me. I have had a sharp pain in my left abdomen under my rib for half an hour. I felt my guide reach in and do something energetically in that area. The pain left and has not returned.
I asked for a symbol and saw what looked like a key-hole shape.
There was a key too.
It was a very particular shape.
There was a door. And the key hole was up very high in the door.
I had to reach up high to get to it. And I put the key in.
I wasn’t sure if those were symbols.
The key hole and the key were shapes.
I was tracing them with my hand.

Jib
I settle in myself and arrive directly in a kind of lava world. There are stalagmites and magma puddles, it’s very fiery and earthy. Then I call my horse who just nudge my left shoulder, he was already there.
I ride him first and take time to bond with him. Then ask him to take me to the upper realm to Michel. Without much transition I am there, I feel a definite difference of feeling and texture. I say hi and ask Michel if he can show me the use of my personal symbol or particular aspects to it.
The he focuses my attention to the octagon and the connection with the number eight. He shows me how it connects with the musical octave and sounds as a resonator. It can also be used like the shamanic drum. The coil inside is connected with the circle, the spiral and the labyrinth. My symbol is a kind of labyrinth with the diamond representing the central room where the graal is, so to speak.
He shows me other stuff that I don’t recall at the moment.
When I realize that it will be all, I ask my guide if he can introduce me to another guide that can help me with the use of my symbol. He sends me in a direction that goes up in a cave world. There are faceless figures, I don’t pay much attention to them. When I arrive, the guide sits me on the ground and a journey inside my symbol begins. With the octagon connecting quite strongly with the lava and earth again. I am in a lava world again, which is strange. I ask the guide what is his name and I suddenly understand it is Athumbra the Dreamwalker from whom I’m fragmented.
He shows me the connection of my symbol to the fire and earth, and the depth of the world. He suggests me that instead of focusing on the shape of the symbol I connect with how the different parts connects together and to other aspects of consciousness, and how they are representative of my own energy personality. Not try to look outside for an answer in a way at the moment.
So I begin to experience the shapes, and it turns like a clock, take different colors, etc.
This will be something I’ll have to do again.
Then I ask my power animal to show me what would be interesting to me to explore in the story now.
He shows me a nest and I connect it with the stork nests I’ve been talking about in the last comment and that I used in the quote of the week picture. Without consciously connecting the two. I’ve written the comment before making the picture.
It will have to do with how the nest is comfortable but don’t make you learn much about life and your potentials.
Then he showed me something related to ants and colonies, that I connected with Mars, the colonies of Mars. There is something about community and social network for me to explore.
Then I asked him to help me decipher the energy transmission Eric sent to me the other day, and it had something to do with networks again and how we create a space of something through our relationships, the space of love, the space of friendship, and we create fields and connective tissues that we nourish through experience and attention and involvement.
At some point in the beginning I briefly wondered what was happening with you guys and felt propelled into something like water and impression of struggling with current, there were two moon crescents holding together by their “backs”, and purple or pink colors.

Tracy
The Zebra walked towards me across a grassy plain then I circled him, floating, and we went down a slope through the trees, an old road paved with stones. We wound down and came to a great expanse of metallic pink water, like a wise (typo! wide) river.
There was a guy in much heavy stone coloured rough clothes on with a very old face who didn’t look at me, he was on a raft with a long pole for steering. Asked his name and got Frudo. (was slightly skeptical that I got the name right) The symbol was like a clubs of cards, 3 circles interlocking with an in flow of the stem part. Domain was water, flow and fluidity (and dams, apparently).
We went down with the raft on the wide pink river, and the pace increased and there were people of all kinds lining both banks, watching. The wide river came to an immensely steep and deep waterfall, but there were pools and much smaller waterfalls on either side of it. All the water was pink.
We navigated from pool to pool on the right of the waterfall mostly, each pool had people, some of the pools were dammed, and some were more open and easily flowing to the next pool. Some dams were high and some pools had people looking over the edge at the waterfalls below their pools.
In a pool on the right, a very fat pink baby was sitting in the middle, I picked him up and held him and asked his name and it was Ezekial.
Then a fly landed on my right shoulder and I looked to the right and saw a scrunched up face of my mother, with a tight smile. My breathing started to get constricted and I saw mustard yellow mangle of tubes like intestines in that pool.
Then there was a lot of fingers stroking and pulling threads out of the dam around that pool, like pulling soft pink wax. Breathing continued to be restricted, and some becoming vapour or mist stuff that wasn’t very clear or droplets leaping from pool to pool as an alternative route to surface pools and waterfalls….
Then went down down down into a vast pool of pink water, faster and faster towards a narrow tube at the bottom, and then flipped over onto my back and saw the sun far above and rose slowly floating towards the surface.
Several times I saw purple and light green.
The breathing thing was interesting if not so pleasant.
The personal symbol may be connected to the flow from pool to pool somehow.

The Zebra
“Zebra energy will help you to take the apparently conflicting parts of your personality and weave them into a pattern which is unique, distinctive and beautiful. As a zebra, the artist within you can live in harmony with the businessperson, the spiritual explorer with the secular decision-maker, the dreamer with the practical goal-setter, neither overpowering the other, each retaining its place of importance and full expression. The zebra will teach you to honor the black and white sides of yourself without compromising yourself into a dull gray.
The zebra will also teach you how to seek out others who are like you, finding comfort and company in groups, while maintaining your own unique identity, your pattern of stripes like a fingerprint, unlike any other. This combination of individuality within community will be a very powerful force in your life.

The zebra energy is also the energy of physical health, long life and great stamina. Breathe in this vital source of very real physical power. Feel how you are capable of running across the plains for hour after hour, each step filling you with vibrant earth energy, so that the more you exercise, the more energized you become. Then just kick up your heals with joy, for you are the zebra, vital and alive. How fortunate you are!”

Accounts of the Journey to the Lower Realm

Eric
I was at a steppe first, like I was meditating in the desert, then went through a forest entrance, and stayed under a tree. There were lots of sounds and animals life, flapping wings sounds, deers, ants, but the most vivid presence was that of snake, and I was a bit suspicious, but it came back very gently, inviting, and after I recognized it, it made me journey, travelling like a dragon or feathered multicolored snake to an ancient place.
The snake analogy with shedding old skin comes to mind, after accepting it, it makes a lot of sense.
I saw green and purple at times.
I felt a horse too but it was just a hooves’ sound.

Flove
I went through the entrance to a cave. I asked my power animal to come. An ancient tortoise came up to me. I asked if this was my power animal but i felt such love for the tortoise that i felt that was my answer. We explored energetically what the tortoise wisdom i need is. I put my hand around the tortoise neck and we swam in the water.
I wanted to cry, I loved the tortoise energy so much. And the protection of the tortoise shell.
I saw a snake.
The horse was the first animal I felt, right as I went in the entrance. I stroked the horse as i went by.
I saw a unicorn too, [and ]was surprised by the unicorn.
I didn’t sense many creatures. just the horse, the snake and the unicorn.

Jib
First I saw little white skulls, whistling like the shells of the guy in the video.
Then I become my shaman self and I have my magic cape. I find the entrance [to the lower realm,] which was kind of difficult at first as if there was some distracting energy.
I finally enter the lower realm and find my horse right away, he’s very excited and I ride with him for some time, just for the pleasure of being with an old friend.
Then I ask him to lead me to Abalone and show me whatever is interesting.
He leads me to see an old shaman, man or woman I don’t know.
The shaman makes me sit in his room and offers me tea, then tells me to relax and wait.
So I relax and I begin to project to Abalone as the Giant beanstalk, I begin to grow and grow and grow and have the city built on top of me. I am the whole island.
I have the impression that the beanstalk is in the center of Gazalbion or very close to it
Then I come back to the place and have the impression the Shaman wants to delay me, so I say thanks and ask my horse to show me the rest.
We go the the old Temple and I feel that there is something special there, once again he tells me to relax and just allow not look for things.
So I wait and feel that the time and space is weird that it flows around the stones in a particular way, like when you follow a certain path or corridor, you may go forward in time and another way lead you back in time. If you take a wrong turn you can end up in a loop.
Then the signal for the return begins, so I go back from where I come from and thank my horse.
It was cool and fun to be there again.
I projected at some point to check if everyone was ok, and felt like it was fine.
I saw a unicorn too.

Tracy
That was interesting, about half way through a zebra started follwing me, well on my right. I saw all kinds of animals, but they were all doing their own thing or turned away, except for the zebra, until the change of tempo and then I was swept up in a flock of cranes I think (or herons or storks but I think cranes), but then the zebra was waiting at the top. I could feel his warm muzzle sort of on my right shoulder.
First was a field full of unicorns on the left but they were just grazing, then a bison head who turned away, then the group of deer I thought, but the zebra walked over to me grazing. Me and the zebra waited for goats to cross our path.
The feeling of being in amongst the cranes was amazing and the zebra fell back while that was happening, but then at the end he was waiting.
I was surprised by the unicorns cos I don’t even think about them usually.
There were lizards sucttlign around under the cranes.
A couple of times I strongly saw purple and green, and thought of Jib.<i> not really ask [the zebra if he was the power animal] in words, but his presence calmly walking beside me with the feeling of his muzzle on my shoulder was comforting.
When the cranes distracted me from him he fell back, but he was waiting at the top.
The cranes feeling was marvelous, really, they were all flapping gracefully all around me on the ascent. So cranes and zebra stand out the most.
[At some point] I started going down old stone steps, at first me and FP were kids holding hands, with jib and eric behind us, then I thought, wait, I’m supposed to be doing this alone.
The unicorns in the very beginning were in a castle courtyard type place but they ignored me.
Then a bison head who turned away these were in niches in the stone walls
I ended up in a stalactites type cave, but there were mostly old old stone steps with stone walls along the sides.
There was a crowd of people, well a small gathering, towards the bottom, but they were, er, faceless. Innocuous.
I am quite amazed at how great that was! and how many creatures actually popped up
and how the feeling was of the zebra and the cranes.
The zebra was stoic and steadfast and comforting, the cranes were exhilarating and uplifting.</i>

The tunnel went on forever, forcing them to duck frequently and wriggle around in exiguous places. To make it worse, it wasn’t even fresh under, and the heat carried on as they went further inside. At times, Arona started to have anxiety flashes, as she was reminded of the labyrinthine tunnels of the dragons of old.

To give herself more heart, she put her efforts in continuing exchanging niceties and other manners of rude elaborate insults with the stranger, who surprisingly was a match to boot.

“Stop glumping, we’re almost there” he said to her, showing a final passage on a narrow ledge above crystal clear waters.

She was too exhausted to retort something witty, but took a mental note that he deserved one more of what she had.

When they emerged, the sun was almost set. The tunnel came out right at the rim of the floating land, and a tight network of ropeways were stretched under the tangled tentacles of the giant beanstalk, which kept the whole city and its neighbourhood afloat. More gymnastics in perspective she thought, but she was prepared for that.

“Don’t go too close, you’ll fall to your doom…” It was the first time the stranger’s voice hinted at some fear.

Arona smiled as elegantly as she could, despite being out of breath and red as a purpato. Lifting a limp Mandrake from the ground, she suddenly unwrapped her heavy cloak and lunged into the void below, the wind blowing in her strange mouldy wings.

“Follow me if you dare!” she shouted to the stranger, while struggling to navigate the downward spiral like an oversized flying squirrel.

If the sabulmantium was to be trusted, the beanstalk was a tangle of many paths, and the main and easiest accesses down its dangling twirly greenish tentacles were all outside of the city walls, in a zone where some lords managed to rule pockets of mass beliefs and a bunch of unattractive mongrel mobsters.

“Sounds potential adventure material” Mandrake had had the nerve to say when they’d packed.
“No it isn’t” Arona had said.
Then with more gusto “NO IT ISN’T” as though to convince all the sleepy tarts of the nymphouse below her rented room.

More doubts had sunken their claws in her tender heart, and a gulp of whatever astral cup didn’t seem in hindsight a worthy deal for all her troubles. Nonetheless, she was a woman of her word, which was probably why she wasn’t of many. Too much trouble being of all of them, whatever that meant.

“Honestly Mandrake, keeping you on track is worse than herding… dragons.”
She would have said sheep, but she wasn’t so rude yet. Mandrake could have taken that too badly, and he would again prove useful to distract the guards of the Southern Post. That’s where she decided to go, as with all the heat, it had to be the one less guarded.

Indeed, when she arrived, as planned, the gate was badly manned, and sleepy soldiers where reaching for the rare spots of shadow.
She decided to make a run for it. The soldiers didn’t look very fit. She started to go, thinking about zigzagging between the air bottles littering the plaza, when she felt a tug pulling her back by the cloak, almost sending her flying off her butt.

“FUCK!” she shouted as silently as she could. “You again! I thought I told you not to follow me! Mandrake, attack! Go for the balls!”

She was in a fury, but Mandrake licked his paw with a disgusted look on his face that meant “Hnhn, not going for that, sweetie. You’re on you own to herd that dragon, my lovely pooh.”

“Shhht!” the guy said with a bit smile.
“Don’t shush me, you… ninnyhammer!”
She didn’t know where the last word came from, but they sure felt good, although not quite rude enough.
“Oh, the lady is a pirate who knows her insults.” he answered with his cocky smile.
“Don’t mock me, you mooncalf”
“You were trying to sneak out, were you?”
“Why do you care, hobbledehoy?”
“The guards have aircon chain-mail and armours, see, look at those bottles on their backs… How could you beat them running with your heavy cloak?”
“Maybe Mr Snollygoster has a better suggestion?”
“Of course I have, if you care to follow me, Ms Mumpsimus.”

Arona was almost speechless. Not keen on following any stranger, she asked her guts, and they seemed to have a liking for the handsome fellow. It stirred old remembrance of going with the flow tactics, and when she did actually follow him, it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he and Mandrake were already ahead in one of the alleys.

“Oh, no, let him have the keys to some secret tunnel, I won’t go for another sewer escape!”
As if her guardien angel has heard her secret prayer, it happened that the stranger had some strange stone key in his bag, opening a secret wall entrance.

“Oh.” was all she conceded to the stranger.
Nonplussed he offered her his hand “George” he presented himself still with the same broad smile.
She took his hand haughtily, and entered the vaulted tunnel, not telling him yet her name, in case she felt like choosing a sexy and mysterious code name. She could trust no one…

“Traitor” she hissed at Mandrake who was purringly looking at the strangers’ boots.

King Artie had decided he would be George. That would be his adventurer’s identity, his nom de plume (if he ever gets out of his adventure alive and manages to write novels out of it, that is).

He’d packed in a hurry, taking advantage of the guards’ shift at midday to disappear from the castle unnoticed.
The bag full of his stone collection was getting heavy under the sun, and the exertion took his toll and dulled his usually quick reflexes so that he was taken by surprise when the girl grabbed him. A strong woman… Now he was smitten.

He’d noticed her leaving under the most peculiar of cloaks, taking her at first for a male adventurer —he had assumed being followed by a stray cat meant it was a fish-smelly adventurer too. Her gait sure wasn’t very feminine, but her face was pretty; even prettier when she looked angry was something he would have loved to tell her if she’d given him the chance.

He chose to ignore her last remark and continue to discreetly follow her. She knew her way around, and seemed headed out of town. At least she was a better bet than being under the thumb of the P’hope’s minions.

Arona knew she was being followed even before Mandrake started to psst her about the dark haired cloaked stranger.

She took a quick turn right (less perilous than left), and quickly grabbed the stranger by the throat when he came through, readying herself to punch him in the throat in a snazzy move she’d learnt from an old racoon-fu master.

“Who are you, why are you following me, creep?” She felt a rush of rudeness washing over her in a delicious arousing way.
The stranger had a cocky smile and a nicely trimmed pointy beard, and a set of gorgeous eyes of different colours. The right one was blue, and the left one green. His face had a golden tan, and she could feel his body was strong and lean.
Get a grip, Arona she exhorted herself mentally, sending the telepathic equivalent of a cold glare at Mandrake’s soft tittering.

“Well, you looked like one in search of an adventure, and I want one too. I need a guide from out of the city walls.”
“What about a magus, that would be an obvious choice, and a sure one?” she retorted, smelling something not entirely honest from him.
“I don’t trust the magi… And I don’t want people to….”

“Don’t care” she interrupted rudely, leaving him hanging there, quite sure he was not here to rob her of her bises. The rest wasn’t her concern, she was on a mission.

“Just don’t follow me, or you’ll regret it.” she said before hurrying Mandrake in the sunny alleys leading to the walls of the city.

She was stroking the black cat who was complained loudly at the unwanted massage, when the messenger arrived at her door.

“The King’s Chamberlain would like a word… in private” was all the footman had said.

“Doesn’t look a slight bit suspicious to you?” the cat told her, shaking and licking the human scent off its fur.
“Of course it does, don’t come if you don’t want to.” She replied smugly, wrapping her cloak around her despite the sizzling sun and the humidity.

She followed the messenger, wondering what required such discretion.

“A weighty matter indeed,” Downson said to her when she arrived at the rendezvous point under a vaulted passageway at a point where the sounds were cancelled out and voices could share deepest secrets in all discretion. “The P’hope has spies in many places… And at least I know of him, so he is not even the most dangerous one, I fear…”

She was not of many words. Seeing that, the Chamberlain’s continued.
“There are forces at play that conspire against the King’s rule.”
She couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.
“I know what you think, people should be self-governed, but you can see it another way, people’s leaders are also the expression of their beliefs. But never mind the philosophy… You are uniquely talented for a rescue mission.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know have powerful allies… tools,… and dragons too, if the tales are true…”
She tittered softly. The tales were true, all of it except about the dragons being powerful allies for some rescue quest. Dragons were lazy dreamers, or at least the ones she used to know. She replied with magnanimity “Let’s assume I’m the person you need for this mission… What is my compensation for it… And don’t serve me platitudes about the travel being all that matters. That grumpy cat needs to eat.”
The cat suddenly turned his eyes into the cutest kitty eyes he could do. It would have melted the heart of the most stone-hearted villain in an instant.
Well played, Mandrake she winked at the cat telepathically.

“Well, word has it that you are on a quest to astral, and maybe I could help with that.”
“Continue…”
“I could arrange an interview with the Fisher Count. As an entrusted Guardian of the Saint Amber Graastral Stone Cup, he could grant you a drink from it.”
“Tell me more about whomever I’m supposed to rescue?”

At the sound of footsteps, he stopped, and pushed her towards a column out of sight.

“Oh, it’s only a cat” the soldier said, continuing his round unaware of the two.

As soon as the other had left, Downson resumed his talk in hurried tone and quicker sentences.
“I have good reasons to believe a young girl with great desire to prove herself was sent many years ago to the Fog Abyss as a rite of passage, but she was tricked and left for dead there. The magi who were supposed to protect her only said they had lost her. But something else happened. Last night, one of them came to me full of guilt. He was visited in a dream by an apparition of the young girl and her guardian angel. Something horrible had happened, but she told him she forgave him and that she was alive and well. You need to bring her back to us, and be discrete about it. Somebody wanted her dead and buried, and will stop at nothing to complete the task if they find out she’s alive.”

Before the Chamberlain left, he turned back and told her:
“Better be quick to leave, I shall have all that you require prepared for you. And a word of advise… you can trust no one, Arona.”

King Artie was walking in the gardens along with the Chamberlain, on his way for a cooling bath in the rainwater tanks carved below the castle.

They stopped on the edge of the main courtyard, from which a large part of the land nearby could be seen. Plumes of steam where raising around the areas where the river’s water fell onto the land below. For the palace and the land were built high in the sky, believed to be latched upon an immense lump of earth, raised from the island by the roots of a giant beanstalk.

King Artie had never ventured outside of the castle. “Tell me Downson, is it true what they say, about that giant beanstalk? I’d like to see it sometime.”
The Chamberlain replied shaking his knuckle-less hand in the air. “Oh well, Majesty, a trip can be arranged, for certain. It would require some magi to guide us, but it can certainly be done. And of course, yes, it is true. Might not have been the case before, but you know, matter and reality sinks their roots deep into beliefs. Whatever the good people believes is, in fact,… actually true.”

But King Artie’s mind was already quickly gone to another topic, not being too fond on dwelling on the metaphysical.
“Any word from Parsifal? Seems to have a unusual high activity of lost souls in the fog down below…”
“No, your Highness, no word yet from the Royal Sentries. Indeed, there has been unusual activity. Some people, I believe with a very active mind and quite an imagination. We had to ask our Priests to conduct a mass to repair a huge hole that appeared a few days ago.”
“Good. You should ask them to have the good people pray for some rain too. That damn heat is unbearable.”
“Of course, Sire. But you know, the good people’s beliefs are fickle, and apart from the farmers, a lot of the townsmen would prefer endless sun and no clouds. Hopefully our dear P’hope Jube the Brave will pray some sense into them.”
“Indeed. Otherwise, a good fall down the Fog Abyss will sure clean up our mass beliefs of those heretics, I expect.”

“He’s escaping!” Cheung Lok shouted in Chinese to the others.

It seemed the scene had already played thousands of times in his mind, with various outcomes and different potential scenarios.

Cheung Lok was struggling to understand why his choice of potential had finally left him in that New York apartment littered with maps, instead of following Jeremy and his strange cat to wherever they had disappeared.
Somehow, it felt as if he’d been there, but had rewinded the action and chosen a different outcome.

Not afraid of a good Chinese puzzle, he’d decided to meditate on it. He’d sent his henchmen back to the Corporation, so there was no distraction in the apartment. The summer heat was receding slowly with the sun setting, and a soft breeze made the paper blinds rustle to an irregular tempo.

There was no point focusing on the tracking bug’s signal which he’d served in the sea cucumber dish to his guest, as its signal was now gone, and not even reliable. He even started to wonder if following such a fickle and capricious man was his way to the lost robot prototype.

The meditation was soothing, if anything else, and his mind felt at peace for a while. Gone was the pressure of performance and success, gone were the merciless and faceless bosses to whom he reported. He was at peace. With the world, with himself, his choices, and even his vanished adversaries.

When he opened his eyes, only a small ray of sunlight was left in the room, falling on a piece of lintel that seemed off.
He sprung to his feet with the agility of a leopard, and with a swift and precise movement of his hand, removed the piece of sky blue panel. Under it, well hidden in a dusty corner, he found a crumpled bit of green paper that was probably hastily placed here before his team rammed the door open.

Unfolding the paper, he smiled as it revealed a wonderfully drawn moving map.

Jeremy didn’t understand what “sorry about the Chinese” meant when Sanso and his near naked woman friend had left.
For one, it was a bit traumatizing to see them shrink again in the fat ugly mess of a cloth that was supposed to look vaguely like a doll of sorts, then disappear inside the map he’d been drawing for them.

He looked at the map. A precious detailed map of an island, he’d been encouraged to draw for them. As usual he danced in a trance to make it, holding a cucumber in his hand as an anchor, the loon guy had said.
Frankly, why he’d went along with their nonsense was now a bit beyond him. Probably seeing them getting out of Max had shaken his believability limit to a new level.

The map was beautiful, drawn in fine green isopleths ; looking like the finest intaglio printing he’d ever seen that seemed to shift and move in gorgeous optical illusion patterns. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy it, as he’d promised them.

There was a light knock on the door.
When he saw the man’s face with his round sunglasses though the peephole, it dawned on him what Sanso had meant with his cryptic “sorry about the Chinese”, and Jeremy already regretted, too late, not having destroyed the map.