Storyline: The Montenegran

He was a huge man, by the standards of big men, but even bigger than most of them would imagine a large man who they'd like to emulate to be, for he was even bigger than them.

A large, fattened and bulbous foot dangled over the side of the patchwork yellow life raft; toes like over-ripened plumbs dripped the fresh waters of the river Morava and "plunked" in its still surface causing small fish to skip across the water fleeing in fear for their very lives.

His forehead seemed as bulbous and ripend as his fattened toes, except for the rather odd looking wound that looks as if it were left by a tuning fork, or perhaps the odd death star.

The massive frame of Vardar Pannonianium could barely fit in the life raft...in fact, it looked more as if he were surrounded by children's water wings, or maybe floating in the intertube from the left front wheel of a 1957 Eireflite "Shopper" De Soto Station Waggon, the one with the 341 cubic inch engine and 4 barrell carbs...what a motor in such a body, and what a body, in such a life raft.

A dribble of water had run down from the scab on his forehead and he noticed with his good eye, the one that was slowly working its way back in its orbit to once again look forward, rather than up at the wound in his head, (he was becoming bored with the scene, and this a feat for him) he watched with that eye the droplet descend slowly down his bulbuous pig snout an then fall as if from a cliff down, down to his T-shirt below.

"Damn," he thought, "dees ees my good T-shirt".

Yes, a good T-shirt it was, as for once he had one that would cover down to his waste. It still wouldn't tuck in his britches, but most his T-shirts only covered the upper portion of his chest, just below the twin beer barrels that were his pectorial muscles.

"Vonder vhere I got dees ting? And das n dees headache...feels like dee time Vardar vus hit between dee eyes with zat arrow. Mmmmm....Cle...," he tried to read the letters that bridged his armpits from side to side..."Cleve...Cleeve...Clevland ROCKS !"

"Wow, vonder vhere dees came frohm?"

Vardar was pleased. Here he was in a River that he knew from his youth and no doubt on the Pannonian plains that were named for his ancestors and from whom he derived his last name - Pannonianium (which tranlates, roughly, from the Montenegran to "Mud Head").

"Zee last zing I veemember ees verking out in a Gym in America somevhers? St. Louis, I tink, or maybe Manhattan?".

And he was right, as what little senses he ever had were slowly beginning to return, like some dog that had been previously hit by a car, but who's sense of smell had slowly begun to return and so the dog tries to walk, and hunt and to run on its leg, only to find that its smell is much better than its ability to run on a single good leg.

Such was the case with Vardar, only he had all his legs.

The allusion was meant to point to the fact that Vardar, unlike most humans, operated on a single brain cell. One cell that controlled them all.

Well.

The author now ponders on yon reader with a raised brow.

"Hmmmmm...shall I break out the McGuffee reader? NO, I think I'll continue with the plight of dear friend, Vardar, and try and refrain from obscured reference to another's work."

A rather large piece of stone masonry was loosed from its mortar in the main pilon for the bridge.

Vardar's foot had managed to knock it loose as his raft crashed into the stone foundation.

Fortune was always on Vardar's side.

As a boy of ten, it was noted by all the other town's people of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina that the lad was "special". He was a dear boy, slow to anger and quick to help all in need.

Some local "toughs" known to all as the "Hapsburg Boys" had been marauding town, tossing paint on the farmer's barns, and lighting piles of hay on fire. Fearsome they were, and quite the marauders.

One day, Tisza Rusyn (known as "teaser", the worse of the worst), the leader of the Hapsburg Boys had the extreme misfortune of capturing in his bare foot a thorn from a wild rose bush that had been lying in wait in the cold Winter rye. Well, this of course brought a tear to Vardar's eye, who had been watching from the freshly painted barn above.

"Hold on zar," bellowed the beheamouth (for even at ten years of age, Vardar had already achieved the size of most giants).

Vardar rushed to young Tisza's aid "I'll get zee thorn," boomed Vardar.

Of course, Tisza was almost in tears at the thought of what the monster would do to his foot.

"Be careful Vardar, or I'll paint your Mother's garden shed."

"Oh Teesa, you ahhh such da Teas-uh - ah, ha, ha, ha, ha."

Vardar, thinking on his one good cell, found a needle on the floor of the barn and picked it up in his teeth. He used the needle, his massive teeth, and the unique postioning ability of his eye (for his eyes had never been straight, even before the incident with the death star in that American Gym) to remove the thorn.

This would prove fateful for Vardar, and for Tisza Rusyn.

"Vardar, what the hell are you doing in that raft? Don't you know that Winter is not a good time for a cruise?," Tisza yelled from above on the bridge.

"Get out of that damned water and get up here in my waggonere and get dry."

Tisza Rusyn had recieved his education from the graduate program in development in a collaboration between Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies. His concentration was in "Complimentary Politics", which he was advised to take after almost being expelled for painting the woodshed behind the Dean's home on campus an appropriate shade of brown.

Complimentary Politics, it was thought, might calm the spirted boy down and get him to focus on his studies.

He had finally accomplished his life-long dream of saving enough money to buy the 1957 Eireflite "Shopper" De Soto Station Waggon he had always dreamt of. With its unique design, three on the column gears, 341 cubic inches of raw power, it was a force to reckon with, especially given the two-cyliner SAAB's that most local police in Vojvodstvo; AND, it was two tone (red on white).

"I would ask rather nicely that you get your rather large rear in gear, climb that river bank and get in the back of the waggonere, Vardar. We have an appointment with Ugrin Čak, and we mustn't keep Master Čak waiting."

Vardar climbed the bank as Tisza recommend in such polite, dare say "complimentary" fashion.

He adjusted the life raft which he was now wearing over his shoulders and wrapped around his neck like a big, yellow suit, his arms "fitted" through the floor of the raft after dreaming that he had been hugging his pet Python, Slinky.

He climbed in the back of the waggon and away they sped, chased by young local toughs trying desperately to flick paint on Teaser's waggon.

"How did Vardar get in dat reever?," Vardar asked in usual quixiotic fashion.

"Vardar, my dear boy, do you not remember when the military picked you up in the Lean-firm Gym in Little Lima-Lima, Ohio? Our good friend from Greenback, Mr. Lester Dong and a cadre of his choicest cadets arrived there not long after some sort of altercation had transpired. All they could find were a couple of dead pallookas, some ultra-thin (and quite tiny cigarillo butts) and you, muttering something about "I deeden't see dat coming", with a damned death star sticking out of your thick skull like a hard pecker.

"According to Dong, there were 9mm shells from a glock all over the place, and some poor bloke had a set of numbchucks sticking out of his ass".

"Dong thought it looked like the work of some Frenchman. Kiss-a-blow or something," related Tisza.

"Zat vould be Quisleau...Herve"

"God bless you !," relayed the most polite Tisza.

"No, no, I deedn't sneezle, hees name, hees name is Herve," said Vardar.

"God bless you !", again confused.

"Herve Quisleau...dat eeze dee name of dee mon in dee Lean-Firm Gym...hee ees dee man dat give Vardar dees headache. He a very bad man.", spouted the enlightened, single-brain celled Vardar.
"Well, we have a mission now," said Tisza. "Let's get ourselves to Greenback."

*********************************

Lester Dong revved the props on the old airplane. Yeah it was vintage WWII, but so what. It crossed continents and oceans, and it would carry them back to Greenback.

He looked at his watch. 9:30 pm.

Tisza was supposed to be here with the giant no later than nine.

He took another "pull" from the whiskey. It reminded him of home. His mom would always serve whiskey at breakfast.

He looked again at his watch...9:35 "Damn, where are they?", he thought.

The ramp from the belly was extended down to the tarmac and awaited the arrival of the station wagon. He'd transport the whole shoot'n shabang back to the states.

Back to Greenback, where they all belonged.

**********************************

"Hold onto your life raft Vardar," Tisza exclaimed.

"We are up for one hell of a ride".

The waggonere belched fire as she zoomed up the runway, into the belly of the bird. Its pistons clamored like Usorian sleigh bells, and fire flew from her ass like a Bačkan whore after a night with the huns.

Ugrin Čak and Lester Dong now awaited them for their debriefing.

They explained to poor Vardar that they had rescued him from the Gym in America and were administering first aid on the flight back to Vojvodina, when he awoke, exclaimed "Vyoule neva take me alive, you commie peegs", grabbed a life raft, pulled the inflate string like a rip-cord and jumped out the door of the plane yelling "YEEE-ron-OH-MO".

"Our prayer was that you'd hit the river," said Čak. "And it looks like you did !".

They all had a good laugh.

This contingent, now reunited, soared across the dark Croatian night and with them carried a new day across the planet and to Greenback beyond and their peerless leader, Platu.

Storyline: The Mushroomy Transformation of Juan-Henri Mcgill, continued.

Sterquilinium

Juan-Henri found himself in a dingy backroom of Wong's Fungi, sitting across the table from the muttonchopped man. For a couple of moments, "Muttonchops," as JH thought of him, said nothing, only staring evenly across at Mcgill, who stared back. Finally, after an interminable silence, Muttonchop spoke.

"Do you know why you are here?"

"Let me guess... it's because I asked for Loppy-tan mushrooms."

"Oh yes... yes Dr. Mcgill. But it's so much more than that."

"What do you mean? And how do you know my name? And how do you know about the doctorate?"

"We know a great deal about you, Doctor. We've been following your studies for some time."

"Studies?"

"Yes. And now let me ask you: Does the name Artie Schopenhauer mean anything to you?"

Mcgill paused. He felt a rushing sensation at the back of his skull, as the humiliation and degradation of his Yale days came rushing in upon him. Finally he answered.

"Yes. OK - so you know about the whole Kierkegaard/Schoppenhauer thing. Big deal."

"Quite an embarassment for you, wasn't it?"

"Let me answer you this way... suppose you had just completed your doctoral dissertation on Kierkegaard's delight in the traumatic descents of the elderly, when you happened to look up the event in Philosophical Anecdotes, only to discover that it was Schopenhauer, not Kierkegaard, all the time? How would you feel, you muttonchopped limey bastard?"

Muttonchop seemed unperturbed by Mcgill's vitriol, and merely replied,

"But, Doctor, what if you found out you were right?"

"Right? Don't toy with me."

"Let me put this a different way... we would like to hire you, Doctor."

Juan-Henri was stunned. Why would they want to hire him, knowing his great error. He thought for a moment.

"Why would you want to hire me, knowing my great error?"

"Again, Doctor, as I said before, it is not that you are wrong, but that you are right."

"Now I know you're some crazy mushroom addict... I'm wrong! Dead wrong! And not just about Kierkegaard, but about everthing! Neil Simon did not write "A Doll's House," it's not Heisenberg's Special Theory of Relativity, and Shiela E is not the drummer for Rush!"

Muttonchop pushed a paper across the desk at Mcgill. After scanning it for a moment, Mcgill's eyes widened.

"Can this be true?"

"Yes, Doctor - it is true. And it is one of the great secrets of Philosophy. Though Schopenhauer was born twenty-five years before Kierkegaard, their lives overlapped. In fact, as you know, Kierkegaard died five years before Schopenhauer. But the real trick came fifteen years after Schoppie's own demise, when a polish graduate student named Gherkin Mahamot transposed their names in his own doctoral thesis. For some reason, which our organization has never been able to uncover, the entire literary and philosophical establishment was in on the conspiracy, and every extant copy of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer's works were edited to reverse responsibility for this one anecdote."

Mcgill sat in silence. If this were true...

"You see, Doctor, where you have gone your whole life thinking that you are cursed, it is in fact that you have a rare gift. It is called meta-gnosis. A secret, hidden knowledge of truth, even when all evidence is to the contrary. So you see, it was, in fact, Heisenberg that divined the special theory of relativity, and it is in fact Shiela E who plays the skins for the Canadian power-trio."

"So... what do you want me for?"

"It's simple. Our organization, Her Majesty's Royal Mounted Marines Special Urban Combat Commando Squad, needs men like you. Or not just men like you, for there are indeed no others, but you in particular. We are in the midst of the most terrible conspiracy, a world-shaking enigma whose twists and turns confound the most gifted of logicians. Disinformation is everywhere. Have you ever heard of Earl Platudinor?"

"Who hasn't? My graduate advisor Dr. Menlo has even met him. He's Warren Buffet's financial mentor, and the guy who told Steve Jobs to start Microsoft."

"Precisely. Now, a second question. Do you have any idea why your employer, Taibachi-san, would send you into Kalamazoo for a load of Loppie-tans?"

"No."

"Are you familiar with Sentosa Island in Singapore?"

"Yes - it's a sort of garden island across from the port. If I am correct (and I never am), it's also the only home of the Spindly Legged Wombat."

"Exactly, and do you know what is the only food for the Spindly Legged Wombat?"

"Let me guess," Mcgill said quickly, "the Loppie-tan mushroom".

"Again, precisely, Doctor," Muttonchopped answered, in a satisfied manner. "Now, Doctor, let me fill you in on current events. Four days ago, we discovered that the last remaining Loppies had been destroyed by a one-armed, red headed scandinavian named Hansel Daggerfjord. This is unfortunate, not only because it threatens to extinguish the Spindly Legged Wombat from the earth, thus damaging our biodiversity, but because an excretion from the Spindly Legged Wombat's pituitary gland is the primary ingredient in the deadly nerve agent XZ-27."

"I see... but why do you want me?"

"Look at yourself, Doctor. You are the perfect weapon. A man who is the sole avatar of meta-gnosis, who also holds degrees in philosophy, sociology, and psychology, as well as an undergraduate degree in quantum physics. A man who is skilled in Brazilian Judo, Tai-kwan-do, Jujitsu, and Karate. A man who was a demolition specialist in the Navy SEALS, and who pilots experimental aircraft as a hobby. In fact, your only weakness is a lack of experience with corporate accounting."

Juan Henri coughed, and Muttonchop looked at him suspiciously.

"Have I missed something, doctor?"

"Well," Mcgill said reluctantly, "I suppose I should tell you that to bring in extra cash, I have been moonlighting doing compliance audits for Arthur Andersen."

"Perfect!"

--------

Two hours later, Muttonchop was on the phone.

"He bought the whole thing."

"Excellent."

Her Majesty's Royal Mounted Marines Special Urban Combat Commando Squad had a new recruit, and Sultan Zhpat had a new minion.

Storyline: The Mushroomy Transformation of Juan-Henri Mcgill.

Sterquilinium

Dear reader, you are a patient soul! Waiting vainly for the several authors of this tale to take up its reins anew, and weave its sundry threads into the fabric of resolution. We left you on the precipice, with Crystal Silverloin bursting into flame, and Da Bomb sinking toward a watery grave; a deflating end to his five thousand years upon this earth.

And yet, there is a thread that has remained unwoven, its flaxen dispersion tauntingly out of reach, until now.

For we must now take you back to April 3rd, 1987. Not to Sentosa Island, where Hansel Daggerfjord was rescued by his Malasian lover, or to where L'il Timmy Rompkins was counterseducing Angelista Rasmussen of the Central Twillings Oil Works. But rather, to a more prosaic location, to take up the unlikely tale of Juan-Henri Mcgill.

JH, as he was known to his friends, was, on April 3rd, 1987, on vacation in Piqua, Ohio. A strange place to take a vacation, for the only prominent feature of Piqua was the Lion's Club, and that was only prominent because it had working plumbing. Piqua was, indeed, nowhere. But it was just that nowhere that Juan-Henri sought to get away from the pressures of his job.

And what pressures! How could a man fall so low? Juan-Henri was no philosopher, though he held a doctorate in philosophy from Yale. In fact, he hated philosophy, having been bored to tears by every knobby-headed wise-guy from Plato to Kierkegaard. In fact, thanks to his doctoral dissertation on Kierkegaard's amusement at the stairway accidents of old-people, Juan-Henri would go into a violent rage whenever he was introduced to someone named Soren.

Yet despite this execration of philosophy, JH had recently come to two philosophical opinions. The first was that in life, as in fiction, one can only hear the word "pimento" so many times in a day before becoming mentally imbalanced. And the second was that Indonesians loved pimento cheese sandwiches.

Both facts were unfortunate realities for Mcgill. In his job as short-order cook for Taibachi's Nipponese Sandwich Shop & Deli in east Detroit, Juan Henri found himself slinging hash in the midst of the largest Indonesian population in the Western Hemisphere. Those damn Indo's (as he called them) would come sliding into Taibachi's day after day, leaving smeared stains upon every glass surface, and ordering platters of pimento cheese sandwiches. Mcgill wasn't due for a vacation. In fact, he'd only worked at this job for a week. But he couldn't take any more and he told old man Taibachi that it was either go on vacation or go crazy.

Crazy was an apt term for Taibachi-san. Perhaps the second richest man in Detroit (being the inventor of the under-head cam engine), Taibachi-san was eccentric. But in the one week of Mcgill's employment, Taibachi had come to love him as a son. He had advised Mcgill to either take his vacation or commit ritualistic suicide, and Mcgill had chosen the former.

So here he was in Piqua, staying in the Knight's Inn. The hotel room wasn't much: a couple of dingy twin beds, a curtain that didn't close, a fungal air conditioner, and a TV set that only played MTV's 24-hour marathon of Guns-n-Roses' "Paradise City."

Then the phone rang.

"Hello"

"Juan-Henri Mcgill?"

"Speaking."

"This is Dean Clummox of Columbia Law School. I'm glad I reached you. I was hoping that you woudl reconsider..."

"How did you get this number?"

"Your employer told me where you could be found. Now, about our offer. Department Head is nothing to sneeze at..."

-click-

Mcgill hung up. Hell, if he'd wanted to be department head of philosophy at Columbia Law School, he would have taken the job the first five times it was offered. No thanks!

Then the phone rang again.

"Hello."

"Juan-Henri Mcgill?"

"Speaking."

"This is special agent Curtiss Stone of the Central Intelligence Agency. I was hoping we could..."

-click-

Another job Mcgill didn't want. And so it went on. In the next hour, the phone rang a half-dozen times. Job-offer after job-offer. Everyone wanted Mcgill.

"Damn Taibachi!" Mcgill swore, and took the phone off the hook.

--------

For the next four days, Mcgill avoided telephones. He wandered aimlessly on the streets of Piqua, smoking Magna-light cigarettes and swilling Genessee Cream Ale. Finally he had calmed down enough. Stepping into a telephone booth, he placed a collect call to Mr. Taibachi.

"Herro?"

"Taibachi-san?"

"Speaking."

"This is Juan-Henri. I'm ready to come back."

"O! Hoolay! But befow you letuln I have ritter job fowl you..."

------

Juan-Henri could make no sense of it. In the week that he had been at Taibachi's Nipponese Sandwich Shop & Deli, he had gained an intesive knowledge of every recipe and dish that was offered. In none of them was the Loppy-tan Sentosan Mushroom a key ingredient. And yet Taibachi insisted that Mcgill return to Detroit by way of the Kalamazoo Mushroom Market to pick up a pound of Loppies (as the mushrooms were known in culinary circles).

So here he was, parking his Chrysler LeBaron in front of Wong's Fungi, having driven through Kalamazoo's sprawling mushroom markets. As he stepped out of the LeBaron, he was eyed up-and-down by three Taiwanese homosexuals in Def Leppard T-Shirts. He gave them the finger, and sauntered into Wong's.

It took him a while to gain the attention of a clerk. As the sour-faced clerk stepped up to the counter, Mcgill simply said,

"I'm here to pick up an order of Loppies for Taibachi's, Detroit."

Now, Mcgill was no student of human nature, although he also had a masters in Sociology, and another in Psychology, from Oxford. But he could tell that there was something odd about the clerk's reaction. "Old Sour-face" dropped the crate of portobello mushrooms that he was carrying. The crate broke and spilled out over the dirty floor, and the clerk backed out of the room saying "oh no.... Oh No!"

Mcgill stood there for a second, tapping his fingers on the counter. He looked up suddenly as another man came to the counter, a tall, muttonchopped blonde man wearing a khaki shirt with an emblem of a smiley-face being smashed by a hammer.

"Juan-Henri Mcgill?" the man queried.

"Uh... yeah." Mcgill replied.

"Come with me."

Storyline: Barbarossa's Teats

Sterquilinium

L'il Timmy Rompkins was born in the Summer of Affection, August 1966. One year before the Summer of Attraction, two years before the Summer of Infatuation, and three full years before the Summer of Love. L'il Timmy was, like everyone else born that summer, a sort of victim of zeitgeist. Had he been born three years later, he would perhaps have ended up being a commercial real estate agent with a summer house on Martha's Vinyard. But instead, like everyone else born that summer, he had become a research scientist, and a respected one at that.

L'il Timmy's first memories were of dappled green lawns, replete with metal toys in a time when metal toys were enjoying their great victory before the onslaught of cheap plastic shit. Some would say that L'il Timmy's mind was like a metal toy. But those shortsighted fools would be wrong. Dead wrong. For L'il Timmy's mind was far more like a spear of brocolli than any metal toy. Uncannily similar to a spear of brocolli, in fact.

He often thought that it was odd that his first memories should fixate on those robust Tonka trucks and metal robots of gears and wheels, instead of on his beloved older brother Big'un. For the remainder of L'il Timmy's childhood was lived in a sort of orbit around Big'un, an orbit that could not be described fully by the considerable impact of Big'un's physical gravity. And this was most unfortunate for L'il Timmy, for Big'un, while a genial enough fellow, had from an early age been afflicted with an affinity for the occult. Big'un's first real toy was a simalcrum of Thomas Edison's "spiritphone," a device that purportedly allowed one to dial into the phantoms of "Dimension X". In fact, Thomas Edison's "spiritphone" was an early experiment in toymaking by Platudinor Enterprises, and rather than connecting one to the spiritworld, it played a scratchy disk recording of "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers" over and over again.

For hours a day, Big'un would ponder the meaning. What were the spirits trying to say to him? "Their tops are made out of rubber"... was this a metaphor for the elasticity of the mind? Did it refer to people wearing rubber hats (like the plastic helmets of hippy motorcycle riders or the American troops in Viet Nam?) And what about "Their bottoms are made out of springs?"

L'il Timmy, though, was content to sit in Big'un's presence as his older brother pondered these imponderables. And in that long detatched observation, L'il Timmy acquired the patience that would serve him well in becoming the world's foremost authority on biogenesis.

Storyline: The Sole of Whitt

Sterquilinium

Warto McConkey stared in horror as his fiancee Crystal Silverloin burst into a pillar of flame.

Storyline: The Secret of Da Bomb

This entangled skein must now begin to be straightened, the knot loosened, the ball of paperclips unhooked piece by piece. Who could not have seen the eternal figure of Platu even in his modern guise and known we are dealing with one of the eternal figures, a living totem, and incarnation of the Sophic spirit? His alignment was with Ceres as indicated by the mystical representations of Greenback tower and the placement of one of the stones within his possession. The force of agriculture, the civilizing force, covering and growing upon Gaia.

The first mask is shed, the first face revealed.

Yet still the face of Da Bomb as it bobs about in frothy waters made turbulent by his own frantically beating arms remains unclear. Black and inky water, the void within, the eternal hollowness, this is the alignment of Da Bomb and the pit-temple, the bottomless grail, the pathway to the hidden telluric power, untapped within. Enigma, paradox, riddle and contradiction. His art is a half-smile, his number an endless sequence. Yet in itself an unsatisfying answer.

That was one of his many names.

His symbols are the wheel and the lever, coincidentally made flesh in his body now, as it was suspended, semi-buoyant, with arms and legs flailing in useless pinwheels, describing arcs and ellipses. His own words mock him "Epur si muove."

He was Dionysus, another primal force - art and culture and tradgedy. He was the madness that pulled Nietzche down to his grave, the hand that held David Hume's pen as it joyfully anihilated both God and the universe by narrowing the knowable to the infitessimal of immediacy. Da Bomb was god to the modern age, but a god who could not save itself from that dreadful substance that fills voids, substance that began to suffocate him.

Big'un had watched him for a moment with a silent curiosity. He reflected on how he had once seen a hummingbird whose legs had inhumanely pulled off. The bird had thrashed about just so as it tried to find a way off the hard earth. Big'un turned his back and walked off just as Da Bombs head slipped under the oily water and disappeared.

A cry from the guards, they brushed by Big'un as they sprinted towards the sea wall. It was deep there. Twenty-five feet of sheer rock to water at least again as deep. The guards wore body armor and were in no position to attempt a rescue. They called out desperately to the men of a nearby dredge. But the distance was too great and the sound of the BRU machinery too loud for their voices to reach the workers.

Da Bomb sank down into the murkiness, the overcast sky permitted no faint beam of light to reach him, yet looking up, the polluted water seemed to have the crimson cast of an ancient vintage he had once drank. That was of course, before he went out into the night.

Storyline: The Mobius Nexus

Sterquilinium
Hansel Daggerfjord looked into the perfect circle of his cup of espresso. The thin khaki froth had worn away to the very extremes of the cup, leaving a mirrored black surface that reflected Daggerfjord's eye back at him in a sort of masonic symbology that a practiced master of semiotics would have presumed meant that the Rosicrucians were on the warpath.

But Daggerfjord couldn't even spell semiotics. Nor had he ever read Kierkegard, Eco, or Percy, who seem to be the sole proofs that such a thing as semiotics is anything more than a farce-science used to pad the blurbs on obscure author's dustjackets. And it was a damn good thing Daggerfjord was not a practitioner of that most dubious of sciences, for it would have distracted him from what was, for him and for us, a pivotal moment.

For, you see, though only a character in a story, that Jagger-lipped gypsy somehow sensed the End of The Exposition, even through the thick curtain that divides fiction from creation.

And though he felt it as something of a brief ennui or even malaise, he had the strangest subconcious awareness that suddenly things would begin to come together, that a profusion of characters would begin to wane, and that many threads left dangling would either be snipped away by the shears of the merciless fates, or would be woven into a tapestry that would convert this chaotic panolpy into a semiotic panorama.

And thus it was, that at the very moment that Daggerfjord tore his eye away from the espresso cup, one of the collaborative authors of Storyline declared:

"THIS IS THE END OF THE EXPOSITION! THO WE ARE FAR FROM DENOUMENT, AND THO THE CLIMAX SEEMS NE'ER SO NIGH AS IT WAS WHEN WE COMMENCED, NEVERTHELESS I SAY THAT THE EXPOSITION HAS DEPARTED! LET NO MORE SUNDERED CHARACTERS ENTER OUR TALE! LET TIMELINE AND STORYLINE BECOME ONE, LIKE AN ARAB HUMPING HIS TEMPORARY WIFE!"

And so it was written, and so it was done.

Storyline: Some real dung, man...

You may now beckon from yon memory, yea reader of wall-eye and ice-pick wit, a vision of a time and a place that you may have confused with some other time and place (but then, it is really not your fault, the wall-eye and all)...but to wit...beckon if you will that memory of that place that is so blue, yes reader, blue!

Ah the connotations of that word...so many meanings. One may be blue for the unrequited love, or blue from too much breath beheld (beheld?). One may be blue from reading too much Chaucer, or Capote, or Kerouwac... "blue in the face", that is.

Which leads us, reader with the far-away stare, to that place of the face of blue, that devastatingly handsome place with the mug (putz) of blue - that's right, numbskull, Putzenbleu (bethcha didn't see that comin', you wall-eyed freak, for what else am I to believe of one who digs in dung?).

Warto McConkey and Crystal Silverloin had first met here back in ought-ought. They were both in town for a convention having something to do with their respective occupation du jour, that is, they were both in the exciting employ of that thrill-a-minute industry, Cable Television advertising sales.

They were trying to work a deal to wire up everyone in Greenback, Tennessee with Cable TV. She had just developed a new gimmick for impressing Cable TV execs by wearing a catwoman costume to her sales pitches. The patent leather really showed off her more than adequate physique, and she had a quirky little way of punctuating her advert patter with a little game show modelesque move she commonly referred to as "getting the points across".

Of course, those pesky advert execs of the cable capitol of the world, Putzenbleu, France, were always receptive to any "œpoints" she might offer.

Little did she know that on this day she'd happen across the man who'd change her life forever.

Warto McConkey had heard about the â"interesting" costumes that some comely young Cable TV advertising sales reps were commonly using to get that almighty advertising dollar. He decided he'd get his share.

Donning a bow tie and form-flattering (for his manly physique truly resembled an hour glass, or perhaps a peanut), khaki outfit complimented by leggings that covered completely his stilt-like legs, Warto was quite the sight.

This time, this time he would woo them. Lester's Radiator Shack on Highway four-eleven was counting on it.

Lester really needed the attention of those six families in Greenback who were now wired with cable, to wit, the Sax family of Wiggle Planes, the Platudinors of Black Philo Hollar, the Ying family of Burmese Dachshund Way (who made their money dealing in Spider Butt Silk from that infamous nemesis of the silkworm, the Yongtze-Provence Butte* Spider (*Butte, in the Greenback dialect translates to "Butt"); the Boar-Dong family of Ham Head Hill, the Grinders of Sausage Flats and the Jones family of Common-Name Lane - all members of Greenback's elite, effite and always replete "Apex" society - a group of Greenback upper-crust.

Warto was pumped. He had it all over the rest of those maroons in the waiting room. One guy looked like Captain America, and another was done up like Art Linkletter.

With his "connections" back home, and his dynamite get up, he was sure to win an account for Lester's Radiator Shack.

Yeah, this khaki spandex was just the ticket. And the bow tie...man, a gentleman of upper-crust appointment (ee wuz I tell ya).

And if it didn't work out, he could always wear it as a disguise when he traveled.

It was about then that his bubble truly burst, for she walked out of that office with her account in cat's claw clutch, and his heart was forever lost only to reside behind that shiny, bulbuous breast, (ah, what the heck, BREASTS – this ain't a family show).

They were in love at first sight; it was a union that would be the pride of all of Greenback.


Menlo and Platu had just “gotten to the good parts” in watching the Democratic National Convention's tribute to the Roman Emeror Caligula entitled “Caligula: Blueprint for a Modern President” on the “Misery Channel” when the show was interrupted by a special announcement from Lester's Radiator Shack on Highway four-eleven.

Lester, it would seem, was having a special come Saturday. REAL special.

Radiators were not the only thing on the cheap at Lester's. Radiators were the front for the real operation out back in the junk yard. You guessed it reader. Ol' Lester was selling stink bombs, and a certain family from Ham Head Hill was buying them up left, right and center (did we really have to put the right in there with those “other” two?).

Anyhow, it was about this time that Menlo turns to Platu and says,

“Did you ever hear a rumor that ol' Lester was kin to the Boar-Dongs?”.

To which Platu replied,

“Uh, yeah. Intersting you should ask. Lester changed his name after becoming involved in some nasty infringement case with a national supplier of electronic parts and gadgets. Seemed he truly sensed that their high-priced corporate lawyers really had him on the ropes, so he changed the name on his business license from “Lester” Baby-Nap Dong to Lester Grinder's Dong (Grinder being his Mother's maiden name), to thus throw off the scent of the Federal investigators involved in the case (for this was back during a less than intrepid administration). It was all quite sordid, and difficult for most, but the really super-genius (albeit horrendously naive) or completely stoned (but real sharp when it comes to coupon clipping)consumers of news to really understand. The typical consumers of news. Pretty much everyone who watches/reads/ingests news. Why do you ask?”

“Of course, of course...Platu dear boy...has it not occurred to you that our man Lester Dong (whatever), or rather, Lester (whatever) Dong, is actually none other than our dastardly nemesis, Sultan Zphat?”.

“Of course not Menlo. It would be preposterous for me to jump to such a conclusion. Zphat is of some foreign descent. Definitely not a name that is from around these parts.

Dong is a really, big, family in the Southern United States. I'll pass this off to your upbringing, Sir.”. Obviously, once again a proof that "thee ain't from 'roun chere".

“But Platu, really. Do you not see that his mannerisms are those of a Sultan? Sure, he's all black with radiator grime and all, but scrape that away and I'll bet you'll find the heart of a nomad, or a really big bird.”

“Nah, he just knows radiators...he don't know no Sultan-in. Scrape it away and you'll just find more Lester. Leave it alone Menlo. Your powers of wizardry are failing you,” replied one final, exasperated time our Mr. Platu.

“Well, he looks like an oil sultan with all that black grime on his face”.

“Trust me, he is a simple man, our Lester Dong,” and with that, Menlo and Platu went back to sipping their whiskeys and watching more of that timely classic “Beaujangles Hyde: Terror of New Orleans, Hero of the Left-Wing” on the “Educajin Channel”.

Storyline: Metanoia

Sterquilinium
Alas, humble reader, for the vicissitudes of a rambling tale are akin to literary whiplash, in which the mind, like the boom of a small vessel daring the foaming peaks of a raging see, darts now one way and then another. And yet, so must it be, for in no way can the modest authors of this tale impart to you, the dear reader, that TRUTH which lies at the base of this narration, without resort to the perambulations which now beset you.

And so, let us merely due our duty without more apology, but, without delay, let us recall to your mind all that has passed, and all that is to pass.

For, as Pierre Saint-Barnabas reflected upon the heavenly disturbance and pungent fungal aroma that drew his mind back to the Howard Metzenbaum Ball Room in Singapore, just at that moment, L'il Timmy Rompkins reclined on his couch with the amiable Melanie Lustiger at his side. His mentor, Professor Klimmingstock, was not far away from Saint-Barnabas; south of Bretagne, he was lifting the manhole cover from the Parisian sewer, carrying his dissapointment like he carried his unused camera - that is, on a string. Hansel Daggerfjord lay in the hold of a storm-tossed tanker in the North Sea, while Bigoyle and Sultan Zhpat looked down upon the emerald maelstrom they had created. Colonol Snack was likewise nearby, leaning against a grafitti'd wall in Ivry-sur-Seine, taking the report of a flustered Corporal Ying with his passel of Singaporean gendarmes, who voiced their humble protestations at their failure to capture Winky. And Elsa? Elsa McConkey lay in the brush of Greenback Tennessee, her love-child Warto beside her, who in turn was beside his fiance Crystal Silverloin (who had only been able to come with a black catwoman outfit on short notice for this reconaissance mission). Behind them, but unnoticed, perched high in a Bradford Pear, was Lt. Frank Corky, who was handcuffed to Herve Quisleau (a distant cousin of Pierre Saint-Barnabas, on his mother's side). Corky watched Elsa as she trained her binoculars on Greenback Tower, his unbendable legs sticking out starkly on either side of the bough that supported him, unaware that he in turn was watched by Shimmy Platudinor. Shimmy turned his own binoculars onto the green windows of the tower, to the observation platform, where he could see his uncle Platu dangling a nervous man by one ankle over the edge of the 1000 foot drop.

And behind Shimmy, disguised as a morbidly obese Kentucky Polecat, was Druppins Patinki, the brother of Ragnar "Fats" Patinki, the Hungarian Assassin dispatched by Big'un Rompkins at One Pickle Place in Cincinnati Ohio. Patinki could see almost nothing out of the tiny eye-slits in his polecat costume, but he had a vague impression of someone being dangled from the observation deck of Greenback Tower, which put him in mind of Lucky Luko, the Czech assassin who had been slain the same night as his brother Ragnar. This caused Druppins' body temperature to rise considerably as he thought of revenge, which unfortunately caused a resonant heat condition inside the polecat suit. This, combined with the entire turkey that Druppins had consumed for lunch, sent him into an immediate coma - a coma from which he never awoke, for Earl Platudinor's groundskeepers found him the next day, and presuming that they had the redolent carcass of an unusually large polecat to deal with, dumped him unceremoniously in the Greenback Tower incinerator, from whence fine particles of Druppins Patinki later descended on the residents of that sleepy little town.

All of these divergent facts were known only to you, the reader, and to a sinister man dressed in a nutter-butter suit, who sat in a darkened van nearby, watching everything from the broadcasts of his army of microbot camera-flies.

And yet, though he could see the present, and in some sense predict the future (whether based on some unknown mystical ability or simply a mastery of the syllogism), he was unable to see the past, unlike your devoted authors, who now, for the purposes of clarity, must take you back to the year 610, in a dirty hira near a scrubby desert town...

---------
EDITOR'S NOTE: SECTION REMOVED FOR FEAR OF OFFENDING THE MUZZIES.
-------

Da Bomb smiled as he remembered that day, and his unwitting protege Mo. Mo had accomplished all that Da Bomb had wished, and more. And now, centuries later, all was falling into place. The first stone was securely in place in Da Bomb's secret hideout in Mecca. The second was surely in the sea-cave temple that Roger Bacon's girlfriend "Mollie" had created for it, and which Da Bomb, Sultan Zhpat, and that infernal Texan Bigoyle now sought with increasing urgency. The third stone could only be in the hands of his nemesis, Plato, or whatever farsical name he had chosen. But Da Bomb now knew, thanks to the carelessness of Darkins and the idiot accountants of the Central Twillings Oil Works, that Plato was living in the South of the United States of America, that place of last resort to which he always fled. And Da Bomb would be dealing with him shortly.

Or so he thought, for as he turned to walk along the seawall, he was drop-kicked from behind, staggering under the blow imparted by the massive frame of Big'un Rompkins.

Storyline: Bigoyle Refining Unlimited

The inhabitants of that rough coast were not sentimental and so they had little qualms in selling out to what appeared to be a large international petroleum company Bigoyle Refining Unlimited. There were some raised eyebrows however, when their new neighbor erected an eleven foot high wall that snaked about the countryside separating the BRU property from the rest of Bretagne. The fact it was bejeweled with the skulls of various animals, including humans, cattle, and sheep began to give them some consternation, and the fact that now at night, the dark sky seemed to be awash in the reflected red glow of some enormous conflagration within the BRU property had them soon talking in hushed whispers and warding off demons with their own druidic incantations. What was, after all, going on?

In the following months a few fishermen ventured close to see if they could discover some clue as to the apparently demonic machinations of BRU. They came as near to the coast as to determine that an enormous tower was being constructed within a sea wall a good five hundred yards or so off the shore. An enormous fountain spewed water continuously from within the walls out into the Ocean.

Not long after, the fishermen’s nets became choked with dead things: eels, squids, all sorts of mollusks, and putrefying fish that not even Parisians would eat regardless of how much mayonnaise was employed to cover the foul taste. Sick black ooze formed a deadly skin over all the water and charcoal gray smog covered all the land, completely hiding the activities within the wall of skulls as the locals began to call it.

When men started to disappear from the surrounding villages, a deadly fear seized the rest, and one after another the villages were abandoned, the fields became fallow, the paths and trails choked with brambles. Wild dogs ruled the streets, and derelict cars and homes became warrens to hordes of enormous red eyed rats.

Only one road remained open, the road which led from the BRU property to Roscoff and along it a seemingly endless stream of trucks brought more and more supplies. They passed through the black gaping gates, over laden with cargo, and returned empty. Along this road, seven miles from the BRU property, a small tavern and inn eked outa pitiful existence. The proprietor, one Pierre Saint-Barnabas, was a man of great curiosity and learning. He happened to be a self-taught expert in biochemistry and biophysics who specialized in exotic and rare mushrooms, especially those of Southeast Asia and who had also toyed with various modern Nerve Agents. In fact he had recently been in Singapore attending a conference and had witnessed some unusual events which set his mind to rapid electric pulsation. The strange odors carried on the breeze towards his disintegrating business made him wonder if he had not, perhaps, stumbled on something more sinister than the Dantesque inferno that had sprouted from the verdant terrain might at first suggest.

Storyline: The Second Ring

Dusk in the early fall of 1201, two peasents were gathering in scythed wheat from a bumpy field along the track that lead from the town of Agneash to Ballaragh on the East coast of the Isle of Man. These hearty fellows were rather non-descript save the flaming red hair which grew long down their backs and marked them of Norse stock. They were third generation Manx; their grandfather had been one of the landless high birthed who had sailed across with Loof of the Crimson Fist, but a storm in the Irish Sea had driven him ashore on Man and he was forced into servitude by the local Viking chieftain.

Their task was still far from complete when they heard the sound of a horse being driven fast and recklessly up the narrow track. Such a sound was a wonder compared to the gentler plodding of Oxen. Horses were rare in this part of the country seeing as they were far from the wealthier provinces and the cost of keeping horses was prohibitively expensive even among the chiefs. Moreover, the potted ox-cart road was no place to take a horse to a gallop, and at dusk disaster was inevitable.

Indeed it was, for no sooner had horse and beast appeared as strange silvery figures against the strangely white Eastern sky, but the horse stubled and fell in a sickening thud, throwing up straw and turf. In its agony the beast rolled over upon the rider, crushing him under its vast weight. The rider let out a horrid cry, then moaned as the horse attempted to regain itself kicked its hind legs striking him in the chest.

The two peasents were upon him in an instant. One, the taller of the two noticed the strange leather and whicker constructions strapped to the horses hooves, which had been beaten to shreds in the rapid flight of the horse. Acting bravely, he took his wooden stave and struck the beast on its head, cracking its skull and ending its life.

As the other peasent dragged the rider aside, he noticed the red cross on his breast, the well oiled leather armor and a strange reed tube, bent into a shape like a J and strapped to the riders neck.

The two peasents knew about the crusades, its successes and failures. A brother of theirs had joined one of the English crusades in the hopes of finding land for himself in distinguished service, but had died of a fever on Cyprus before he could distinguish himself. But this creature was something entirely knew to them.

In the final glistening light of that day, as the two brothers bent over him they could see dark blood welling up from the knights mouth with every pained breath. It was clear that the knight was trying to speak. The sound of other hooves now came to their ears and the knight's eyes widened with fear. Clearly this brave man was not afraid of his own death which was certain but of something else. He gestured towards the dead horse, and the tall peasent went over and saw the waterproof saddle bag. The knight nodded. The peasent brought the bag back and loosed its contents. There was some food for the journey, some coin, an extra cloak, a wineskin and a waterskin, a leather bound book (valuable whatever the contents) and a black stone set in a bronze ring. With an unworldly effort the knight managed to sit up, then stand. He grasped the book and the stone and shoved them into the arms of the smaller peasent. Then with his last effort he pushed the peasent aside, away from the track and turned to face the unknown riders.

This smaller peasent, notable only for his profoundly large lips, found himself running, driven by a fear he could not comprehend. The sound of conflict and shouts rapidly faded behind him, yet he did not stop. He ran all that night and all the next day, stopping only when he reached the monastary of St. Colm, a tiny chapel and dormitory of rock and wood in the rugged terrain surrounding Snaefell. There, he hid the book and the stone without anyone's knowledge within the wreckage of a fallen hermitage at the edge of the compound. He rested for two days under the care of the kindly Monks.

Having mastered his fear he returned to his home, a journey of some three days, but before reaching his village a relative told him that his brother, the taller of the two peasents decended of Vilek from Dagger Fjord had been found dead on the road and it was assumed that he was the murderer since he had disappeared. Quietly, Janik the shorter of the two peasents with the enormous lips, retrieved his family and moved back to the monastary of St. Colm taking up residence in the ruined hermitage.

Janik lived another 65 years after these events never saying a word about what had happened and relating this tale only on his deathbed to his son. That was in the year 1266, the year of the Treaty of Perth.

Philo Platudinor's Campaign poster from 1863

Philonius Platudinor was also know as "Black Philo" for his role in undermining republican efforts to gain a foothold on the South after the war. Most of the more conservative side of the Platudinor family considered him a black sheep, and some attribute the monicker to the major players in the family and their attempt to distance themselves from him.

Storyline: The first of the three rings

Upon Greenback tower, just barely visible from the street below, there is a small helipad, several radio and microwave transmission towers and a small observation platform. Upon this platform projecting out towards the warm, soft, green, and oddly motherly mountains of Tennessee was a metal rod 99.45 cm long, upon which a ring has been mounted. The ring is precisely 1.1 cm in diameter and 1 mm in thickness. One could, if one were so inclined, by leaning far enough over and twisting one’s neck slightly look through the ring and stare down upon one of the many pear trees that ringed the tower.

Yet that is not the purpose of the ring. To understand the purpose of the ring one would need to know that it, like the entire superstructure of the tower was composed of a special Beryllium Iron Nickel alloy with quite special properties. Virtually infinitely stiff, virtually zero coefficient of expansion, virtually transparent to high-level radiation. One then might notice that the axis of this rod projected backward would intersect the axis of the tower precisely at a point marked by a smoothed stone of some strange mineral polished to a near mirror like finish.

But the stone was not perfect. One would find, if one was quite careful was not quite spherical but was, in fact slightly ellipsoidal, with major axis 975 mm and minor axis 909 mm. Its coloring was far from flawless rather it was mottled and streaked, in some places quite rough and dull and in places seemingly polished and bright. The rock was held fast by a ring segmented by twelve small blades or vanes twisted as to catch the wind. This ring sat upon a special non-linear friction bearing so that the stone would turn under the influence of the prevailing winds of Greenback, but regardless of how weak or powerful the wind, it moved at precisely the same speed.

Depending on the direction of sunbeam or moonbeam and the cast of the shadows, the stone would reflect quite differently so that the color was ever changing. But almost always visible was an unusual bright spot ten degrees below its northern pole and several darker shadows which seemed to creep across its surface. In fact, were one to consider quite closely the two shadows, one might be inclined to think of them as two snakes locked in battle encircling the brighter spot, but it almost seemed as if the shadows were of forms within the stone itself and the bright spot an internal glow.

The observation platform was on tracks and itself moved, but quite slowly, so that it took 110 hours, 22 minutes, and roughly 49.86 seconds to complete a single revolution about the tower.

Considering again the rod and the ring, if one were to drop a measure from the ring to the street below, (quite possible due to the conical shape of the tower) one would find that the distance was not quite 1500 ft but in fact roughly 1466 feet, or in actuality 446.818 m.

The inhabitants of the tower, all but one of course, would have been quite indifferent to these facts seeing as the eccentricities of its creator were as numerous as they mysterious and none seemed to have any particular impact on their ever-present task. But their meaning within the pantheon of forces shaping our story is important, indeed could be considered essential for there were in fact two other places where such similar numerological constructions could be found. One Platu knew well, and it was the thankless task of the army of engineers to return him thence. The other, was its antithesis. The dreaded pit-temple which at that moment Sultan Zhpat under the hidden power of Da Bomb was entering.

Storyline: Chaos rising

The delapidated old tanker trudged through the icy waters as if some titanic root hog foraging for buried morsels of scant tubors left after an orgiastic feasting on the plants that the roots once fed but were now reconstituted as razorback fertilizer.

An empty tanker that had once trolled these seas with belly full, she now skirted on the waves like a water spider.

The nose of the beast would seemingly dive into the frothy currents, only to emerge again splitting the waves like cannon fire through the ranks.

A cold mist formed large ice banks along the hull of the aged beheamoth as she forged ahead through the dark waters.

In the belly of this steel giant, a warm glow emanated from a tiny room deep within her cold, inhuman frame.

A pot-bellied stove sat in the corner of the steel room, and moisture formed on the walls and dripped from every over-hang.

The scotsman, roused by the rocking of the great ship, stoked the fire in the stove with more chunks of black and dusty coal.

He then fell against the wall and slid to the floor. "Elsa looks so lovely in the dim firelight", he thought, so lucid it seemed he heard his unspoken thought.

She reminded him of those cute little mice that would inhabit the corn-crib way back, in the back of beyond, behind the hidden place that one could only find by first venturing into the back woods in those hills of green that he called home - Greenback.

To Hans, he never would forget that it was the place of the blue-belly dollar, masquerading itself on an aqua-azure note.

The democrats had tried to fund the union forces during the Civil War by issuing (as all blasted liberals will do) $450 million dollars, greenback.

Printing more money has always been their standard when it comes to economics. If it doesn't really exist (or, if you don't like history), simply pretend. Who will know the difference. Who will care?

The repulicans on the other hand backed a stance that would once again base US currency on the gold standard - something real and tangible rather than fraudulent and fictitious.

The little town was torn in twain by that nasty war. At the time, they had embraced the liberal philosophy...but having been sold down the river, so many times since (by the TVA, for instance), they now have instituted a campaign to move away from that sullied past, and locally have embraced tobacco as their monetary standard (for the black market trade and barter of the backwood) - specifically a non-cancer causing, genetically-engineered strain that has all the flavor (not to mention addictive properties) of its cancerous counterpart, without the harmful effects (other than the brown teeth of most inhabitants).

To Hans, Greenback represented those beautiful green hills, and his secret place hidden within them.

But he'd thought enough of the tyrrany of the left, and the rage he felt for them manifest in that damned demon, Bigoyle.

He gently kissed Elsa's cheek and drifted back into glorious slumber dreaming beautiful dreams of warfare and the sweet, sweet taste of victory over those damned slug liberals.

Storyline: The Horse Gurgeller

Sterquilinium
Lefty Cratchins shook his head and sighed, his weathered face and perpetually squinting eyes betraying no sense of the depth of his sadness. Behind him, a couple of the new hands stood in mild shock. One of them let out a heaving sob, before burying her face in her hands and turning away.

Lefty took the wheat stalk out of his mouth and stood up, his hands brushing the creases out of his blue jeans before coming to rest at his side.

"It's allright, Janey," he said in his gravelly voice, "this kinda thing just happens sometimes"

In front of the three was the object of their attention - a beautiful palamino, lying dead and bloated, its scuba gear wrenched awry and thus ineffectual. The horse must have struggled for the surface, never able to make it from so great a depth.

Inside, Lefty wondered whether it was all worth it. The years of training - the patient work that took a horse from a mundane land beast to the pride of the Mounted Marines. He had thousands of hours invested in each horse, and yet every so often, this would happen. For no damn good reason.

And now the high mukkety-mucks were talking about getting rid of the horses alltogether, replacing them with some new-fangled mechanical contraptions. Left could spit (and did). Mechanical mounts for the marines. Hell - might as well train dolphins if you're gonna do that. It was a damn fool world, full of damn fool people. And Lefty had about as much of it as he wanted to take.

"Come on," he grunted to his field hands. "Let's move 'im off the beach."

The Tao of Mao

The lightning illuminated the Sultan's skeletal features, the direction of each flash bringing into clarity a particular bony protrudence. His face was horrific in the stark black and white of the stormy Ocean coast of Breton. It was as if his skin had been wrapped so tight that it was compressing the bone beneath and at any moment the fragile film would rupture bringing into complete presence the skull. The bulging frog-like and lidless eyes were veinless. The whites of his eyes were a sickly yellow. The irises were olive green, the pupils dilated and huge.

His clenched jaw bulged in time with the clenched fist which gradually was crushing to powder an ancient vellum text.

It had been written in Old Manx but used the coptic alphabet. Few could have deciphered it. Never now would man know it. But the fact that such a thing might even exist would have quickened the pulse of a any who have sought to delve into the conspiracy of the Illuminati. Yet by paths hidden now it is possible to guess what Zhpat had read, what had sent him to this spot and why now he looked up at the starless sky, cursed God and begged the sea to swallow him up. It had said something to the effect of this

Two hands clap at Sophia's death,
A decade err the third age draws breath,
From whence Arturius sons cast glares,
Towards their lots now Saxons' shares.

Old Gaia ne'er crushed opens her womb,
And forth spills the sea from San Grayls tomb,
'Tween lotus and star the pattern makes,
Take salt, three rings, for Pan awakes

Herman Mao put his hand upon the Sultan's shoulders. Cold comfort, the comradeship of the damned. "I think, perhaps, dear friend, the storm has got the better of you."

"Pfaw."

"The tide is coming back in, the barometer is still falling. You will not find the place tonight."

"Not tonight?" Zhpat snarled, "not tonight than not ever."

"The wyrm turns it is a dyrythmic drama, and you are foiled by an alliance of God and science."

"I believe in neither. Consume that philology if you must and die. Only fate exists, that star under which we are born...

"And Gaia herself of course, the lotus flower. Its your philology which needs rejuvenation."

"Bah... where is Bigoyle?"

Heavy flopping steps were rapidly approaching. Zhpat and Mao exhanged uneasy glances. Was it the Inuit? The Canadians? Zhpat, drew his saber from out of the cane pole that masquearded as a walking stick, while Mao, took his luger from its holster at its hip, snapping a fresh clip in. "Hold friends," a deep phlegmy voice called out, colored by a touch of a Basque accent. Out of the murkiness, a man appeared. Duck-like and majestic in its eeliness, the flippers slapped down in a final quick stocatto burst and he was at attention, rubber riding crop raised in salute.

"Oh, its you Juan-Henri, how is the Queen?"

"She is perfection incarnate."

"Glad to hear it. Please relax and report."

"This is for the Sultan, sir. Sultan, my men saw beneath the cliff, right at your feet almost a great cave has opened up, it has since disappeared under the waves, but we clearly marked it, and even now we have four men at its entrance."

The Sultan's face almost beamed with delight. He sheathed his saber and rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other. "Take me there."

Greenback Tower

An image of Greenback Tower, as drawn by Melanie Lustiger after her 1989 visit with Lt. Frank Corky and Herve Quisleau.

Storyline: The Dervish of El Segundo

Sterquilinium
Irony! You goldhearted bastard! Descending on alabaster wings to leave talon marks on the foreheads of your victims! Surely it was you who brought Bigoyle, with his aura of The Valdez, into the ever narrowing circle inhabited by Jade Piece, whose unwashed Mongol miasma could only be enumbrated by the fouler sort of toxin that suffused Bigoyle's person.

And, uncontent with this most unlikely union, you must sink your claws deep into the befuddled mind of Hansel Daggerfjord, who, at the moment you punctured the aquifer of his hatred, was engaged upon the most serene and pacific impulse imaginable - the purchase of a new puppy.

Yes, indeed, as Daggerfjord groped upward toward the light, quoting good Lutheran verses from his Revised King James, his soul was weighed down by the ballast of his past, and unable to grip the hand of his son Warty, he leaned forward against the pet shop window. Beside him, Elsa gasped suddenly, and her hand went reflexively to the hilt of the claymore sword strapped across her back. Warty looked up at his father with the wide eyes of a twenty-six year old and said:

"What's the problem, Dad?"

Hansel steadied himself against the glass with his one real arm, his crooked nose and Jaggeresque lips only inches away from the quivering snout of a Burmese Dachshund.

"Nothing, Warto" Hansel panted, his eyes glacing only slightly at his son and his future daughter-in-law Crystal Silverloin.

"Dearest," Elsa chimed in, "Surely you are not remembering that day in Singapore?"

"As a matter of fact, Honeysnoot, I was"

Had either Hansel or Elsa, or Warty or Crystal, allowed their eyes to drift off of each other's faces, even for a moment, they might have seen in the reflection of the pet shop window the unmistakable visage of Sultan Zhpat, emerging from the stairs of a double-decker bus and onto the Stockholm sidewalk.

-------

Platu looked out from the catwalk upon the floor. Below him, in bank after bank of low-walled cubicles, and in invariable blue oxford shirts with white featureless ties, an army of engineers and mathematicians toiled. Computer keyboards clicked, printers spat paper, and for some reason, a bank of industrial capacitors charged and discharged, only to charge again.

Platu knew they must be getting close, closer than he had dared to dream.

"Oh, hello Platu," came a voice from behind him. He spun, ready to execute the Brazilian Prod, a deadly martial art that only he had ever mastered, before he stopped himself.

"Mr. Menlo, I have asked you three dozen times not to use my real name."

"Oh, uh... sorry there, Dr. Platudinor."

For Menlo, he could hardly fathom that Platu was a real man, let alone a real man masquerading as an eccentric billionaire. And the more he found out about Platu's history, the more stunned into confusion he became. After all, here he was, standing on the catwalk of the 34th floor (engineering overlook) of Greenback Tower, and beside him stood a man who had not only swapped spit with hotties in the Amazon, but had educated Aristotle, decried the wrongs of Athens, and studied under Socrates himself. Menlo's eyes glazed, and he shuffled further along the railing. Speechless.

Der Pariah Negra

The black ink of night poured through his soul as an oozing denizen at once devouring each and every molecule of his existence, enfolding his being in its viscous tar. He felt like some self-aware sponge saturated by its smothering nothingness.

He feared the night. For to him it was only a harbinger of a destiny of doom.

How unlike the other side. There, complete knowledge. Total comprehension. Illumination, complete.

Here only the icy black, numb, nill and nefarious.

Reaching out into this chasm would only remind him of the futility. Groping to find nothing, and reminding him again that he is alone in this black sea.

Here he lay, a sponge at the very bottom of the leviathan. Like the water, he could feel the darkness. It was consuming him; filling his pores with an ink one shade darker than black-strap and twice as thick.

He dreaded the light of day, for even in it he would carry the darkness of night on his soul. His burden was heavy - his task, damning.

To take a man's life. To stop his heart. In an instant, to destroy his being and at once your soul; to cast him eternally into this fate that of recent had become his black enemy.

Daggerfjord thought of how it would be...to again look into the eyes of his enemy as he peered into that eternal damnation of dark, with only the yearning for some light.

He could draw no other conclusion, and he feared the black blasphemy, but what becomes of evil but damnation?

To see the eyes of his prey as he had done so many times before. To view those ice-blue eyes consumed by an ever-expansive ebony apeture telling of the eternal dark. To once again feel the dark exhale of the dragon's final breath. To cast this soul against the black chasm of space and infinite dark.

"Revenge is mine, saith the Lord."

"Then might I be the fulfillment of thy will, Father. The facilitator of thy plan, the sling and stone composing thy weapon, the assassin of thine enemies. Cast me true into this night, oh Father, and pierce it I will. The heart of the dark chasm will explode with your light and will leave not a single slice of shade in any corner of the universe. Victory will be yours.

Forgive me, oh Father. If it means the loss of my soul, it will be worth it for those who will come to know the light. For what I am about to do -- to break thy commandment again and stop the beating heart -- for this I am so terribly sorry. Mine is a justice, incomplete; but for the terror he has wrought, I am left with no other choice.

Forgive me."

That black bastard who was ripped from the womb of Lucifer's whore would now meet destiny. His eyes would not be able to blot this unmistakable blue light of truth.

Bigoyle must die.

###################

Bigoyle turned to his lovely valet and asked her to mix him another whiskey sour.

A young mongul girl of Russian descent, Jade Piece was more than happy to oblige. She was dutiful, but Oyle knew her ambitious soul.

To some she was known as the Green Dove, thanks to her past exploits as an eco-terrorist. It was she who master-minded the attack on the Dove soap factory in Pinepski, Illinois.

To the hippie, soap was nemesis. Full of who-knows-what (99.99% pure hell), it was the thing that washed their funk away.

Lord, how the hippie hates bathing.

Jade was their heroine. She struck at the heart of their enemy's soul and dragged its white purity through the mucky slime pond that was her domain.

Filth was her weapon, and Bigoyle knew he must exploit this dirty girl to his own, dastardly ends.

Her nasty funk would be his weapon against that muddy so-and-so, Daggerfjord.

Fight filth, with greater filth. Ingenious. Simply, ingenious.

Storyline: Flashforward

Sterquilinium
It is among the most dastardly of plot devices; that awful trick of an errant author, in which beloved characters are stranded, midaction, upon some netherworld beach of drama, poised and prepared, and yet doomed to be frozen thus, until in its meandering way, the story returns.

And yet, that is the device perpetrated upon you, dear reader, for we must now bound away from the humid days of April in Singapore, and descend raven-like upon a date exactly 10 years later. To wit: April 3rd, 1997. La Hoya, California...

L'il Timmy Rompkins smoothed back his beach-blonde hair, and his free hand reached up and touched the scar on his lower lip, a reflexive action that he had acquired in the last decade since that fateful day on Sentosa Island. He was reclined on a faux-leather sectional, it's burgandy sheen blazing forth against a muted beige room, sunlit by a bank of windows that looked out over the Pacific ocean. The brilliant white light of So-Cal midday burned into the room, turning everything it touched into white California Plastic.

Rompkin's free hand continued to stroke the scar on his lip. His other arm was wrapped around the shoulder of Melanie Lustiger, who dozed on the couch beside him. L'il Timmy's arm was beginning to go numb, which was unfortunate, because the hand at the end of that arm was holding onto a Highball glass full of Jaegermeister & Cola, and with the condensation, LT was afraid the glass would slip out. He called out suddenly.

"Angel!"

Steps were heard in the corridor, and Angelista Rasmussen strode into the room, clad in the French-maid outfit that L'il Timmy made her wear.

"Yes, LT?" she asked.

"Come 'ere and take this drink, willya? It's startin' to slip out."

"Yes, LT" Angelista replied, and dutifully came forward to take the glass from his hand. Striding across the tiled floor, she retrieved the corked tray, placed the glass on it, and stood, expectantly, looking at Rompkins.

"That's all," L'il Timmy continued, "you can go back to the accounts now."

"Yes, LT" she answered, and exited the room as gracefully as she could in 3 inch heels.

--------

Hansel Daggerfjord looked up from the foozeball table as the door to the Diplomat Lounge opened, letting in a wicked ray of light that pierced the smoky air of the seedy bar. At that very moment, an undistracted Nigel Krunt drove in a hammer shot from the 5-man. Daggerfjord's beer-sodden reflexes responded too late, but he spun the goalie anyway, and unfortunately several threads of his crimson hair became wrapped around the grip, and Daggerfjord's head was suddenly jerked to the left, and downward, until his ear was pressed against the warm metal of the foozeball pole.

"Get it off! Get it off!" he began yelling, and for the next ten minutes, a crowd of concerned bar patrons gathered around the foozeball table, attempting to extract Daggerfjord's hair from the ball bearings on the table joint.

---------

"Zis eez incredeebull!" Professor Klimmingstock blurted. His voice echoed through the cavernous brick tube, reflected upward from the rancid sewer water and fading away into the distance. Klimmingstock hung from the rusty ladder, the crook of his left arm holding the ladder tree, his left hand holding the high-power lantern, while his right hand attempted to bring the 35mm camera into focus.

Below him in the water, a 25 foot crocodile slowly surfaced. This would have been enough to astound any visitor to the infamous sewers of Paris, even were they, unlike the Professor, totally unfamiliar with the importance of the aged leather collar around the crocodile's neck, the crocodile's missing eye, and the lettering emblazoned on that collar: Winky.

Klimmingstock was having a devil of a time with the camera. Using just one hand, he could barely rotate the barrel of the lens, and he was totally unsure how he was going to attach the flash from his precarious perch. But he never got the chance, for out of the sewer's darkness, a sudden roaring sound was followed by the forewake of a black zodiac crammed full of Singaporean policemen with harpoons.

The crocodile, more agile than the Professor, immediately dove, but the powerful searchlight of the zodiac caught a glimmer of his tail as it vanished into the murky water, and the chase was on. The Singporeans motored by the Professor, totally oblivious to his presence, laughing as they pursued their quarry deeper into the Paris catacombs.

One moment Klimmingstock was about to have the most important photo of his life, and the next moment he hung uselessly, his camera dangling heedless at the end of its cord, as he listened to the fading strains of singing coming from the disappearing motor launch.

"Oooo bayabee do you know what that's wolth.... oooo heaven is a prayce on ealth...."

It was enough to drive a man to drink.

--------

Platu stood on the top floor of Greenback Tower and surveyed the landscape. The room he occupied was entirely circular, forming the entirety of the maximum circumferance of the cone that formed the tower's shape. Above Platu, the circle diminished. Below Platu, the circle diminished. This suited Platu just fine.

He contemplated Pi as he tamped more Captain Black into his hula-girl shaped meershem pipe (described lovingly in "Goodnight Mr. Menlo, wherever you are"). Taking from his pocket a Zippo lighter with a palladium casing, he lit the pipe, and contemplated for a few more moments. What the heck was Pi? He was sure that the answer to this riddle would have staggering implications. In an otherwise orderly world (or so Platu found it), how odd it was that such an unusual number should form such a critical role. 3.1415etc. It just wasn't right. After all, compared to the neat package of days, weeks, months, and years (ignoring certain inconvenient variations necessitating that despicable leap year), Pi just seethed incompleteness, messiness. Why couldn't Pi have been 7, or 3.33 or 12.34? Why the hell did it have to be 3.1415etc.

Maybe, Platu thought, it had to do with that meddlesome whole number system. In fact, what if he were to rename 3.1415etc to "one". Then "one" would become -3.1415etc, and Pi would be 1. That would be much, much neater.

Platu clapped his hands twice in rapid succession. From the corner of the room, where his intercom box was plugged into "the clapper", came a muffled voice.

"Howdy Mr. Platudinor! What kin I do you for?" Platu was instantly irritated at the redneck accent of his parrot-faced secretary Darby Smithreen Gribbles, but he replied in his best Jamaican accent (for Darby was convinced that Platu, whom she had never seen, was Jamaican):

"Ms Gribbles-mon. Git my engineers on da phone an tell dem dat we's going ta make one into Pi"

Darby giggled outrageously for several minutes before responding.

"Allright honeybuckets, I'll git yer egg-heads called up and tell 'em you wanna make one inta Pi, but you better do some thinkin' about the implications of messin' around with that there mathermatical system."

But Platu did not hear his despised secretary, for his mind had already engaged upon its next flight of fancy.

--------

Herve Quisleau completed his 400th pullup and dropped down from the tape-wrapped pull-up bar at Lean-firm Gym. The remainder of the athletes went about their business, oblivious to Quisleau's feat of strength. And this irritated him to no end. Lighting a Misty cigarette with a match he struck against his bare chest, he turned and glared at the nearest person. But no-one was looking at him at all. He glared around for a few more moments before shrugging his shoulders and pulling a 9mm Glock from his gym bag. Stuffing the Glock into the waistband of his shorts, he then pulled out a pair of numchucks and a few throwing stars.

Spying a muscle bound man wearing a "Cleveland Rocks" T-shirt, he threw one of the shurikan on a deadly arc, and the tines of the weapon were buried deep in the man's forehead. His eyes crossed before going into a vague stare, and the man collapsed on the bench, 200 lbs of weights and bar falling onto him before drunkenly tilting onto the floor in a stupendous crash. By then, Quisleau had already killed two more men with the throwing stars, another with a flying drop kick, and was bludgeoning yet a fourth with the numchucks.

Finally, he was getting some attention, he thought. He was just about to reach for the Glock and do some serious business when he happened to glance at the door. There stood Frank Corky, in the modified-Weaver stance. A teak slingshot held in one extended hand, with the elastomer sling pulled back by the other hand. Quisleau could see the wicked gleam of a ball bearing in the pouch of the sling.

"Corky, you American bastard," Herve began,

"Can it, Frenchie." Corky responded, "I'm taking you in."

"You will never take me in, you miserable pile of dog-poo!"

"Oh yeah?"

"What is this, O yeah? What is this supposed to mean?"

"It means you lose," Corky answered, and he released the sling. Two ounces of austenetic stainless steel were suddenly accelerated by the leather pouch, and a split second later, the ball bearing had struck Quisleau on the bridge of his gallic nose, rendering him immediately stupified.

The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was Frank Corky putting the slingshot in his slingshot holster and looking at his watch.