Search Results for 'travel'

By the following spring, Trustinghampton had fifty seven inhabitants. Under the leadership of Leroway, all had comfortable homes and enough to eat. There were numerous workshops, a bakery and communal brick oven, vegetable gardens and a traveling scavenging team with a mule cart. It was Lobbocks who had suggested a distillery: what we need now is a pub, he’d said. Somewhere to party.

And that is how Leroway became the Lord Mayor. When the first spirits and wines were ready, the villagers held a party. The scavengers had found, among other things including additional wines and spirits and party drug stashes, a vast collection of clothing of all kinds, and so they had a fancy dress party. For fun they had a competiton of the best costumes, and Leroway and Jolly won, with their royal robes and tiara crowns. Eleri won second prize for her fetching maids outfit.

Lest anyone be confused as to the nature of the workings of the village, there was no hierarchy and no laws. It was a mutual cooperation under the obvious and natural leadership of Leroway. The villagers were fond of him and grateful for the part he played, and Jolly was popular with everyone. The First Party was such a success and everyone loved their costumes so much that they continued to wear them, and play the parts. Thus, Leroway and Jolly became Lord Mayor and Lady Teacake, and Eleri played the part of their maid, although nobody was dictating to anyone else as it was just a game.

It was the maids outfit that led Leroway astray. Try as he might, for he was devoted to his wife, he couldn’t subdue the flames rising in his purple clad loins. Eleri deftly avoided him as best she could, for she too was devoted to her friend Jolly. Had she fancied Leroway at all, she might have considered approaching Jolly with a view to an amicable ménage à trois, but the fact was, she didn’t. She had eyes for the latest arrival, the mysterious Mr Minn.

It had been many years since Eleri left the service of Lord and Lady Teacake to make a life of her own in the woods, but she continued to visit Lady Jolly from time to time, arranging her visits to coincide with the Lord Mayor’s trips abroad. It was not that Lord Leroway wouldn’t have made her welcome ~ rather the reverse ~ in fact he found it hard to keep his hands off her. Eleri had no reciprocating feelings for the old scoundrel, but a great deal of affinity and affection for the Lady Jolly, a kindred soul despite their seemingly different stations in the life of a small rural township.

Lord Leroway Teacake had not been born a noble, nor had the Lady Jolly. Leroway had a dream one night that he had been made the Lord Mayor of Trustinghampton in the Wold, and in the dream he was asking his teenage neighbour, Jolly Farmcock, for advice on what to say to the villagers in his inauguration speech. It appeared that the pretty girl with the curious eyes was his partner in the dream, and the dream was so vivid and real that he set his sights upon her and courted her hand in marriage. Jolly was bowled over by his ardent attention, and charmed by his enthusiasm. Before long they were married and Leroway was ready to continue his dream mission.

Leroway was tall and broad shouldered, and prematurely bald in an arrestingly handsome sort of way. Despite his size, he had a way with intricate mechanisms; he had the manual dexterity of a watchmaker, and a fascination for making new devices with parts from old broken contraptions. Had it not been for the dream, he would have happily spent his life tinkering in the workshop of his parents home.

But the dream was a driving compulsion, and he and his new bride set off to find Trustinghampton in the Wold, as the feeling within him grew that the villagers were expecting him.

“Where is it?” Jolly asked.

“We will know when we find it!” replied Leroway. “Hold on to my coat tails!” he added a trifle theatrically. Jolly smiled up at him, loving his exuberance. And off they set, first deciding at the garden gate whether to turn right or left. And this is what they did at every intersection and fork in the road. They paused and waited for the pulling. Not once did they have a difference of opinion on which direction the drawing energy came from. It was clear.

They arrived at the newly populated abandoned village just as the sun was setting behind the castle ramparts. Wisps of blue smoke curled from a few chimneys, and the aroma of hot spiced food hastened their steps. A small black and white terrier trotted towards them, yapping.

“We have arrived!” Leroway announced to the little dog. “And we are quite hungry.”

The dog turned and trotted up the winding cobbled street, lined with crumbling vacant houses, looking over his shoulder as if to say “follow me”. Leroway and Jolly followed him to the door of a cottage with candle light glowing in the window.

The dog scratched on the cottage door and yapped. Creaking and scraping the tile floor, the door opened a crack, and a young woman pushed her ragged dreadlocks over her shoulder with a grimy hand, peering out.

“Ah!” she said, her face breaking into a smile. “Who are you? Well never mind, I have a feeling you are expected. Come in, come in.”

The door creaked alarmingly and juddered as it scraped the floor. Leroway scowled at the door hinges, suppressing an urge to take the door off the hinges right then and there to fix it.

“My name is Alexandria,” the woman introduced herself when the travelers had squeezed through the opening. She kissed them on both cheeks and gestured them to sit beside the fireplace. “We haven’t been here long, so please excuse the disarray.”

Noticing her guests eyes on the bubbling pot on the fire, she exclaimed, “Oh but first you must eat! It’s nothing fancy, but it is mushroom season and I must say I have never had such delicious mushrooms as the ones growing wild here. Let me take your coats ~ I say, what a gorgeous purple! ~ sit, do sit!” she said, pulling a couple of rickety chairs up to the table.

“You are too kind,” replied Jolly gratefully. “It smells divine, and we are quite hungry.”

“How many people live here?” asked Leroway.

“Twenty two now, more are arriving every day,” replied Alexandria. “Eleri and I and Lobbocks were the first to come and we sent word to the others. You see,” she sighed, “It’s really been quite a challenge down in the valleys. Many chose to stay, but some of us, well, we felt an urge to move, to find a place untouched by the lowland dramas.”

“I see,” said Leroway, although he didn’t really know what she meant by lowland dramas. He had spent his life in the hills.

He tucked into his bowl of mushroom stew. There was plenty of time to find out. He was here to stay.

Eleri tried harder to focus on what Yorath was saying but she couldn’t keep her eyes off his red silk jacket. Eventually he realized the problem, and slipped the jacket off his shoulders, folded it neatly, and placed it in his travelling bag. Noticing Eleri’s widening eyes following the jackets movements, he zipped the bag closed and the tantalizing colour disappeared from sight.

“As I was saying,” Yorath continued. He now had Eleri’s full attention. “Don’t ask me where I procure it from, because I can’t divulge my sorcerers, er, sources. But I can promise a steady, if not unlimited, supply.”

“More tea, dear?” Eleri refilled his cup. “I’m very interested in the antigravity properties because you see, this stuff is so darned heavy. The heaviness has it’s benefits, in fact the weight of stone is one of the attractions. But during the creation process it could be extremely useful, not to mention the transportation aspect.”

Yorath smiled, nodding agreement. “Indeed, not to mention the expanded possibilities and abilities of the finished products.”

“The thing is,” asked Eleri, “Can it be programmed? There are times when heavy is entirely appropriate, and times when the anti gravity component would be welcome and beneficial.”

“The Overseer has been working on it, but he got in a bit of a muddle with it. You see, it’s a delicate combination of technology and magic. The combination has to be just right. Not too much technology without enough magic, but neither too much magic and not enough technology.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Eleri. “I’m afraid my technological know-how is nil. Well, almost nil,” she added. She knew how to mix colours, for example. Was that considered technical? She didn’t know, but felt despondent now about her ability to use the new ingredient.

“All that’s needed is a little more tinkering with the programming, and with a bit of luck,” Yorath snickered a bit at the word luck and continued, “I should be able to find just the right spell to go with it, to activate the technology.”

“I don’t know, Yorath, it all sounds beyond me, when you start talking about scientists and Heavy Ion Research it daunts me, you know?”

“Even though Elerium represents the hopes of a generation, the dream of a united world, and the struggle for human survival?” Yorath asked with a twinkle in his eye.

“Well, if you put it like that, how can I refuse? How soon can you acquire the right spell to go with it?”

“Leave it with me,” he replied.

Eleri hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Yorath for several weeks, not since the last supermoon.. Her stocks of elerium were depleted, but she knew he would return in time. What was time anyway? The timing was always perfect, that was really all one could say about time.

When the timing was right, she knew that the right people would be drawn to her crafts. It was not a matter of advertising her magical wares in the usual way, no, it was a matter of allowing the magnetic pull. She was a magician after all, not a salesman, and her creations were not for everyone.

Her suppliers of materials were not the usual ones, although she did use ordinary common or garden ingredients as well from the local builders merchant. Yorath had appeared as if by magic ~ it was true, these things did happen ~ just at the right time. Her method had been perfected, but the recipe was missing one vital ingredient although at the time she had not known for sure what that ingredient might be. Then her old friend Yorath appeared, returning from his travels in the greenly mist drenched mountains of the far east.

“I thought those temples had claimed you forever, dear one,” she said. “How good it is to see you! And how fetching that red silk is,” she added, eyeing his jacket. “I must give further consideration to the colour red. That really is a most appealing shade of cherry.”

Yorath smiled his famous smile, the smile she had missed so much. “I have something for you, Eleri, something more fascinating than my red silk jacket.”

And that was how it started.

“Oh. how ridiculous!” exclaimed Elizabeth, throwing a transcript at Godfrey.

Deftly catching the paper being tossed in the whirlwind of a forceful exhalation of Liz’s cigarette smoke, he raised an eyebrow but remained silent.

“She had a dream, you see,” continued Liz. “A dream about a writer and her maid. She mentioned it to me because she had one of those funny feelings it was about me, and when she told me, well the first thing I thought about was, well, you know….”

But Godfrey wasn’t listening, he was winking at Finnley who was reading over his shoulder. The maid stifled a giggle.

“So then I said to her,” Elizabeth explained, “‘I wonder what she’s been up to, left to her own devices?” and then she asked him all about it, and that’s what he said. Thrown me for a loop, I must say.”

E: (chuckling) Left to her own devices, she generates considerable intensity in extremes.

A: is this a character that has become a focus?

E: Reverse.

A: So it’s a focus that has become a character…. is there any information on the focus itself that I could offer her to play with that?

E: The focus is a past focus, but a recent past focus…a past focus in the timeframework of the 1940s…

A: in the Americas?

E: This focus travels, but I would express is based in Britain.

A: That makes sense.

E: And in actuality is involved with early computers…with large cables. LARGE cables…

A: [babble babble ohh ahh blah blah] …and she is female?

E: Yes.

“Now, young lady,” said John when Sue had left the room. “Don’t you go upsetting the apple cart. A bit of a chatter about travel and what not … well, that would be a good thing. But spontaneous jaunts and rambles after dark… that is another whole kettle of fish.”

“I just thought …. “ began Clove.

“That’s enough!” snapped John. “You watch yourself or you will end up the way of the other lodgers.”

“What happened to the other lodgers?” asked Clove nervously.

At that moment Sue bustled in with the tea.

“Here you are, my lovelies!” she said brightly. “A cup of tea is much more sensible this hour of night. Now I couldn’t remember if you had sugar or not but you can help yourself.”

“Thanks,” muttered Clove.

“Young Clove here was asking about the other lodgers,” said John, with a conspiratorial wink at his wife. “But I think that’s a story best left for another time. We’ve had enough upset for one evening.”

“What do you think of the new lodger?” asked Sue that night over dinner. It was Monday so dinner was fish pie. Monday, Wednesday and Friday it was fish pie and Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday it was meat loaf. Sue believed Sunday should be a day of rest so Sunday dinner was fried left overs.

John paused mid bite and considered the question.

“She seems alright, I guess. Doesn’t seem to have much in the way of interests … always locked in her room with the computer. I mean, she could at least join us for dinner. I was hoping for someone a bit more interesting this time … you know, a bit of interesting conversation.”

“Eat up, Jane. What were you thinking of, Dear?” asked Sue anxiously.

John grunted. “Oh you know … travel …. and what not. I dunno. What’s on the telly tonight then, Luv? Anything good?”

“Nothing much,” said Sue. “I might just have an early night. And anyway what sort of a name is Clove? It’s a bit unusual.”

“It’s a bit bloody odd, alright,” said John. “A bit odd to name your kid after a spice. It takes all sorts, eh. I think there is snooker on the telly later. I might stay up and watch that.”

“Oh, that’s great, Luv. I might sit up with you and do a bit of crochet then. The twins are out late tonight at bingo — they probably won’t be home till after 9pm.”

“9pm. That’s late,” grunted John.

Sophie looked dubiously at the shampoo bottle. It was smaller than the ones she was used to in the US, and It was written kókosolía. She had no idea what it meant but the picture underneath looked vaguely like two big coconuts.

She opened it, pressed the bottle to smell what was inside, then poured a bit of the white substance into her palm. No doubt there was coconut inside. She touched it. It was very oily. Maybe it was not shampoo after all. She looked at the other bottles. None smelled as good as the first one. She decided to give it a try.

After her shower she felt rejuvenated. It was like the old times, with her husband Bob they used to travel a lot and stay in all kinds of hotel. She always loved that moment when she was drying her hair and Bob would sneak in behind her and take her into his arms. She sighed. Nope, that would not happen today.

She almost jumped when she realized her hair was inflating. She had very thin hair usually and they were rather close to her head, but today it looked like they had a new life. She wondered if it would deflate as soon as she’d stop the hot hair. She hesitated but it looked almost done. She turned off the power and the hair stayed up.

She heard a knock at the door. She wondered who that could be.

“Sophie. It’s me”, said Connie’s voice.
“A moment said Sophie.” She put her old clothes on. She didn’t take much with her in her suitcase, she didn’t have enough room for clothes with all her apparatus. She checked her hair one last time, still up. Then she opened the door.

They looked at each other and said at the same time : “Oh! You used the coconut shampoo too.”
“Let’s have diner”, said Connie. “As for the hair, I bumped into other guests, and the ladies all seem to have the beehive haircut.”

Hilda regretted her decision to fly to the British Isles, now that she was caught up in all the Fuxit brouhaha. The mysterious plague doctor in Chester had turned out to be nothing more than a common madman, looking for a party to crash. The Mexican band with a wheelbarrow full of bricks welcoming the orange toupee’d buffoon from the west had been momentarily amusing, but was nothing more than another common madman looking for a party to crash as far as Hilda could see, and not worth further investigation, but the madness that had enveloped the country over the Fuxit was another matter.

Exit mania had swept the country ~ and not only the country, but the continent as well. Doors were falling off their hinges on buildings across Europe with the rush of people demanding to leave, or trying to keep others out. Irate women were pushing their husbands out of the front door and locking them out, while shop assistants slammed the doors shut on customers, exercising their rights to determine who should be allowed in, and who should leave. “Exit” signs on motorways were set alight and exit ramps barricaded, lighted exit signs in nightclubs were smashed. Herds of dairy cows smashed down gates and roamed the streets, and sheep huddled next to boarded doorways.

Itinerant builders were in high demand to fix broken hinges on gates and doors, and the memes about the population becoming unhinged quickly ceased to amuse in the utter mayhem.

Hilda decided to get a flight back to Iceland as soon as possible. As an investigative reporter, she knew she should stay, but justified leaving on the grounds that a wider picture was imperative. And frankly, she’s seen enough!

But leaving the beleaguered nation was not going to be easy. The airline websites had been closed, and the doors on the travel agents had either been boarded up or had been removed altogether, and nobody was staffing the premises. The motorway exit ramp to the airport had been barricaded. Not to be deterred, Hilda left her hire car on the side of the road, and dragged her flight bag across the waste ground towards the airport building. The place was deserted: the doors on all the aircraft had been removed, and emergency exit signs lay smashed on the tarmac.

“Then I have no other option,” Hilda said, “But to teleport.”

Disappointed at the lack of interesting activity in Iceland, Hilda made a snap decision to catch the first flight to Liverpool. The news of the mysterious plague doctor roaming the streets of Chester had piqued her curiosity.

Was it an omen or just some fool in a fancy dress costume? Maybe it was a time traveler. If so, it would be worth investigating further.

“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.”

Thither Perambulations

“There is a good deal of Spain that has not been perambulated. I would have you go thither.”

Hilda Astoria’s weekly travel column

wanted: secretary and cleaner.

apply within

Ever since she had read H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine” when she was 12, Sophie had been obsessed by the future. Now being a sweet old lady of 86, you would think she had used her share of the future and for most people her age it would be true. The trend would reverse and they would end up obsessed with the past.

But for sweet old Sophie, who was living in Eastend London, her interest in life was mostly fed by news of the future. She didn’t know how it was possible, but she certainly believed it was. And who better than a time traveller could send news from the future ?

She had been interested recently by an article about the telebeamer. They wanted to make you believe that in 2035 it was still impossible to transport yourself instantly from one place to another. She didn’t believe it of course. If time travel was possible, beaming yourself should be child’s play.

Sweet Sophie was not good at math when she was young, but she was good at puzzles. She had a knack with patterns and immediately see where the pieces fit together or not. The articles on that website were like puzzle pieces. All she had to do was sort out the facts from fiction and find her map to the time machine.

Now that she had found this invaluable source of information, she could plan her next move.

Hilda “Red-Eye” Astoria jotted down a few more thoughts in her notebook, and pulled a red pen out of her top pocket to dot the i’s. It wasn’t that she was old, or even old fashioned by nature: at 42 she was as tech savvy as anyone, and had not been in the habit of writing things with pens on paper since she was at school. But the notepad and pens were part of the game, as was the Panama hat and the camel coat.

After a quick perusal of the days notes, Hilda smiled and snapped the notebook shut. The interview with the eccentric artist from the Flatlands had been even more entertaining than expected. She would enjoy writing the article. The Riddle of the Polar Molar, a tale to get your teeth into. Or Weird Tales from The Tooth Fairy Dimension. Or maybe “True Story: The 21st Century Time Traveler and the Iron Age Dentist”.

Travel for the Ascended was usually as simple as intending your destination, however Floverley often found herself navigationally challenged. She usually ended up where she wanted to go, not where she was summoned.

Eventually though, after a pleasant stop over at an inter-dimensional art gallery to check out the latest works of a group of outsider artists—The Descended Impressionists— she managed to rally herself and align her conflicting energies by engaging in some stirring self talk and a quick visualisation of Master Medlik’s disappointed face.

Of course as soon as she did this, there he was, disappointed face and all.

Bugger, she thought. When will I learn? No bloody privacy around here.

”Don’t worry, Medlik,” she said with a composed smile. “I got the call and I am on my way there right now. I will do all I can to assist.”

Somehow, she thought, sighing at the thought of her gargantuan task.

“Interpretations are tricky,” said Medlik, laughing raucously. “Somehow means, in some manner. So it’s quite definitive, though the manner in which it is done is yet to be revealed.”

“Glod help us all when Jacques Schitt and Frank Diddley Squat turn up”, Glodfrey remarked with a heartfelt sligh.

After perusing the latest plot proposal he felt a strong need to know just how many characters were potentially on the move. His head swam with the ramifications, and he had a sinking feeling that there were far more characters than he could begin to imagine.
So he started reading, inwardly screaming “don’t make me count!”. At first he’d only considered the earth bound more or less human characters.

“Glod help us all,” he repeated, his eyed glazed with apprehension. “Who will we ever get to ploof lead all this now?

“You deplessing old flart, Glodfrey, for leavens slake, it will be sluch flun!” Lilith said, giving him a playful plunch on the ell bough. “The arrival of The Time Travelling Absinthe Pirates might coincide with the government alien disclosure programme, what a hoot!”