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Interestingly enough (or oddly enough one would say), in such reality, the bodies alone were reproducing while the heads had to constantly find out new bodies to cling to — when they felt the desire for movement, that is.

At least, that’s what the Forehead was thinking while shaving — as it did not have enough appendages to be able to meditate while defecating, which was by far, it was told, the best method of enlightenment known to Peasmen and other sensible beings.
Anyway, how odder can it be, it thought again. It may well be time to shift all of this a bit — why would each head need such a renewal of bodies and thus incarnations (or more properly, “embodiments”) without itself changing. Funnily enough, the alien bodies had in fact no need for heads. They actually had more than one: one for each of the sensory tendrils coming out of their shoulders. And according to them, Peasland bodies could very well start their ®evolution just now.

Messmeerah started to carve the name of all the funny bunch on a huge jamón from the fifth leg (the meatiest) of a jelly boar of the steppes, starting with her own —name, not leg— as a reminder of the good time they had all together. She was thinking as well that it would taste lovely with some of these Jiborium’s truffles.

She was sad to had to let them go, but frankly her old routines were starting to get too scrambled. For one, she didn’t quite remember if Minky was still a redhair rat in her hair (now she thought of it, breeding tiny shrews in her attic didn’t really work so well), or was now back in his human form with a secret revenge of his own on his mind. But that would be maybe a slight stretch. And gosh, did she abhor stretch marks, even on her lovely brains.

— “Oh come on, dear,” one of the motley participants, a cheery big-boned and outrageously made-up of make-up woman said in a bizarre Lizabethian accent, with a hint of bossiness that showed she had not been used to being contradicted much in her life. “Join us on that trip to Mr Jiborium’s, you shall find yourself a use or two.”

Taken aback by the turn of the events, Messmeerah, also known as Winky, took the jamón under her arm, and against all common sense decided to join the crew —thanking the Mighty Mungibs for the improbable feat of continuity that had appeared as a sign.

— “Well, if you don’t mind…” Yikesy was starting to object, but realized some things are best left unsaid, and it would be easy enough now to slip out of their sight (and off the rapacious motherly attentions of Mrs Janet, the big-boned tasteless-bags lady with an accent.)

The leaves were dry. They’d started to change to a brownish hue at the tip, then rapidly withered. They’d hoped it wouldn’t affect the whole crop, and when the first tea bush went down, they quickly uprooted it, for fear it would spread to the whole hill.
But despite their best efforts, the tea bushes went down, one by one, as though engulfed by a deadly plague. He and she were worried for their next year income, as their tea field was their main source of revenue. The highlands had always been favourable to them, and it seemed such an unlikely and truly unfair event given that the beginning of the year had brought an unexpected bounty of huge tea leaves.
What had happened? He was quite the pragmatic about it: disease, pests, too much sun, over-watering, over-pruning… nothing extending outside the visible, the measurable. She was the mystical: core beliefs, did she worry too much about that sudden wealth and made it disappear, the evil eye, greed and covetousness, celestial punishment.

It never occurred to her she could reverse it as easily once she understood what it was all about.
Well, she almost started to get an inkling of that thinking about warts. How efficiently she got those growths when she was so troubled about them, and how they all disappeared when she forgot about them. How not to think about something that’s already in your head? In that case, distraction never worked; it was a rubber band that would be stretched then snapped back at the initial core issue.
Snap back at yourself.
>STOP< – She stopped. Time to read that telegram delivered to oneself.
Everything still, for a moment. Dashed.
She started to look around.
The air was still, hot and full of expectation.
Almost twinkling in potentials.
Like a providential blank page, in the middle of a heap of administrative papers full of uninteresting chatty figures.
The pages are put aside, only the blank page is here.
She can start to populate it with colours, sounds and life, anytime. Lavender maybe. Soon.
But not yet now.
She wants to breathe in the calmness, the comfort of the silence. Even the crickets seem to be far away.
She was alone, and impoverished…
She is alone, and empowered, … in power.

[link:leaves]

“Do leaves really talk?” she wondered as the smoke of the herb tea dissipated off the kitchen’s mirror credence. “Let’s see about that,” she continued, carrying the tray with the cup of tea and the scones to the computer room, from where a few oink sounds were beckoning her.
Probably her friends asking for a chat, some random rubbish or the last juicy news about the president’s wife who happened to be visiting in the area. In truth, she wouldn’t have even known, had it not be for her foreign friends. The local neighbours really couldn’t give a fig. That was figuratively speaking of course. The fig trees were already full of green fruits, that if odds were good wouldn’t turn up as half-sodden half-rotten food for snails on the cobblestone pathway this year.

She added a zest of fresh lemon to the tea. She liked it bitter. The leaves were starting to settle at the bottom of the cup while she lit up a cigarette, throwing a cursory glance at the tens of messages waiting for her to peruse. Which was more interesting? She could figure out wavy things as feeble and changing as her cigarette’s smoke in between the leaves patterns, as well as in between the lines of haphazard messages from all the contacts. But those she loved the most were the pages she leafed through her books.

Yesterday, she started to do something purely daft, as she liked — a sort of challenge, if you will; or perhaps, a strong repressed desire. Sometimes it takes you years to do things you were thinking about when you were but a child. The moment you allow yourself the pleasure to indulge and overcome the resilient beliefs that it’s something forbidden or insidiously wrong is all the sweeter.
And she was tasting it like a sour sweet, with a touch of forbidden and the zest of excitement. Or more like horseradish. Ooh, does she live the green stuff too. Prickly at first, going up to your nose, and living you crying but begging for more. She makes a note to buy some next week (note that she’ll probably forget).
So what did she do? She took some of her precious books and started to tear up and cut through the pages. A blasphemy almost, for someone like her who revered books. Of course, at first she only took the bad ones, the romantic rubbish and the dog-eared now useless kitchen books, but then realized, what would be the point of gathering new information by assembling random pages cut off from a variety of books, if it wasn’t made from quality ingredients. Well, it surely stands to reason, even though her culinary reason had been on voyage the last twenty years as far as she knew. Anyway. Those leafs were starting to talk better than any bloody tea leaves could.

[link: talking leaves]

With a temper he may have inherited from his mother (albeit adoptive), the shanghaied boy was proving to be quite a hassle to contend with. Minky was exhausted.

First Yikes (that was the given name of the boy) had cried, pouted, and when gagged enough so that he wouldn’t be heard, he had then refused to walk, and even threatened to hold his breath till he would die. Good luck with this one, had laughed Minky (who had tried it before, but it never worked, and bossy old Messmeerah had promptly kicked him back to work). Actually, he was more annoyed with the refusing to walk kind of tantrum, because that meant he had to trudge with the boy on his back or on a luge, all the way to the evil lair —which wasn’t that evil, by the way, if you managed to focus away from the bloody stained altar…

But there was something more serious he was quite anxious about —besides his bossy and irritable, though everlastingly beauteous, boss. He feared a certain purple dragon was on their trail…

If I were you, came the ruffled sound from the makeshift luge that wouldn’t be the dragon I’d be worried about… Yikes was inwardly beautifully laughing (a trait he may have inherited by osmosis from Arona) thinking of how terrible Mandrake could be if asked to fetch something —a task he was too proud to refuse, and yet that he loathed to accomplish, as it was more fit to a canine than to his subtle feline standard.

After his failed attempts to gain control over the Land of Peas, and his being thrown out of the Majorburghouse body first and framed head second by an angry mob of infuriated Peaslanders (which was something to be noted, since Peaslanders were usually quite the happy bunch), the Majorburgmester now bereft of anything but his will, was thinking it was high time for a u-turn in his carreer.

His dear blubbits had apparently mostly vanished out of sight, some said trapped in a blinking giant spider’s cobweb blinked out of Peasland, some others said suffocated under shiny duct tape, and even some said baked in ashes and almonds — those last obviously were the maddest of the lot.
It seemed like all the Dimensions had conspired to his defeat.

Now hardly a Majorburgmester, the title having now been offered by the cheerful crowd to the raucous and unexpected hero (after they hesitated for a good hour if it should be given to the herald of the liberation, that stupid Gandfleur whatever its name of a dog), he was now again known as B. Weazeltweezel (the B. standing for Bartabous, his mother having a fondness for names in “-ous” like Precious, his elder sister, and Pulpous his second sister; a chance his father was a man of more common sense, otherwise he surely would have been named Houmous himself).

The newfound venture didn’t wait long to manifest. In the not so distant past, he had already suspected something fishy about Lady Fin Min Hoot and now he knew. She was a high member of the Bridge Tarts Order, and though it was a secretive and feminine order, he had always loved a challenge.
He felt he could muster all the tartiness and bridginess needed to be granted access to their secrets.

Galvanized as he was, were he to successfully infiltrate the order, he knew he didn’t really stand a chance without something else. By nothing short of a synchronistic chance, Fwick, the saucerer had given him the leftovers of a potion he didn’t know what to make of.

In a gulp (and a few gargppls) Batabous was rapidly changed into a rather convincing dame matron, with slight mustache and ample bosom.

Tarty Bridgies, here I come… he said in a falsetto voice that needed work. … soon everybody will know about Lady… Bartaba

Messmeerah (Winky) Maymhe, High Priestess of the Pendulous and Loose Otherworldly Threading, was going for a bath into the Pool of Rejuvenation. Her ineffable beauty had started to show the early signs of time tampering —signs she’d learnt to notice as soon as they’d appear. Luckily, the moons were in perfect alignment for the rituals of Spring Beautusk*.

News were good, very good indeed —which would certainly help in maintaining her perfect brow and forehead in pristine smoothness.
News were so good that she’d sent her minion Minky fetch the boy just right after her white crow Saggin had came back with news of finding him… after all those years (not that years did matter to her anyway, she prided herself on that).

It’d been close to an eternity, and she weighted her words… (in actuality it was a few teens and futile years at most) that she’d been trying to recover the boy, but the dwarfs had played her, and had managed to hide him from her sight.
She had not thought he could be concealed by anyone powerful enough, and it was surely not by the magic of that headless Malvina and her pesky dragons. In fact, the boy had been concealed even after Malvina and her menagerie had left the boy and his caretaker. She was thinking the caretaker in question had a concealment charm far more powerful she thought could exist.

But Minky would surely take care of that.

—

• It should be said that one of the effects of the rituals of Spring Beautusk were a slight stiffness of the overall face (and other dipped body parts), which earnt Messmeerah the cute and albeit ironic sobriquet of Winky, as she hardly managed to blink and was often victim of bouts of winking when she tried too hard.

“Well, bugger all that good sense my lads! Eighties, here we come!” Pee Stoll exclaimed (quite bravely we shall say, although a bit foolhardily) after the bird’s singing had opened the Old Portal in front of them.

“Maybe we’ll soon learn how to cure Peasland of our blubbits misery!” sighed Auntie Looh —short for Dolores (de la Cabeza).
“Well, good thinking you’ve got me to remember anything of the cure, if it exists at all!” snickered Auntie Toot —short for Patou (Mac Assar, née Patou Tsweet).

Seeing his aunts started for another longwinded and pointless argument, Pickel took his S’illy sister by the hand, and jumped headfirst (in a manner of speaking) into the transparent liquid film which had appeared at the birds’ summoning.
Pee seeing that he could not place it any politer, kicked the ladies’ way through the Buttal… err Pothole, aaah Portal! then followed with the bird which closed the gate again, leaving Bentworth Sadnick all panting at the unusual and exhausting amount of activity the day had brought to him.

After five years of training of the dragon twins, Irtak was to do for the first time an act that would finally make him not just a dragon rider, but a dragon breeder in his own right. He had to part ways with them.

It was harder than he’d expected. He knew that if he wanted to bring more dragons into the great stream of the Duane’s life, he couldn’t only focus on the two buoyant twins. It’d taken them that long to manage channeling the intense energy of the two, and balancing their thirst of discovery with patience and adequacy of action.
Parting now was almost heart-breaking for him, even though the dragons had been reassuring they were only longing for new adventures with new companionship.

In fact, they were so longing that they would have almost gone with any stranger, or perhaps even just on their own —reluctant as they were to admit they also greatly enjoyed human’s company. However, Irtak wanted to make sure they would be taken care of by not just anybody; as powerful as dragons were, the two were almost innocent and very young for that race, and they would greatly benefit from some wise tutelage.

Now that Malvina had left the cave, he didn’t know who to turn to for advice, and was feeling a bit forlorn, though his glubolin was still working fine. He’d been thinking about it for quite some time, and realized that some travel would really do him good, so he finally began packing.
The Southern Shores of Lan’ork would make a great destination to find a proper owner for the twins, and an interesting starting point for new adventures.