Quincunx

Rydia's ears pricked right up again. This time it wasn't so clear and you needed the facial expression as well to notice she was miffed. "It's a girl thing really. I just can't not say hiiiii also and someone has to fill the air while other people are trying to drink and that water glass is awfully sparkly. Have you seen Carp? I lost him somewhere in the potted plant. It's REALLY sparkly." Too late, she was transfixed by the cut glass.

"I appreciate the shining, for sure," Rydia started to explain to the gnomish squad, "but you don't have to--" Oh yes, they did. Even if it took the entire squad to carry her overhead like a crowd surfer. Her sparkling polished boots led the way between the tables, around Harmony's ("Ohmygod that was so clever! can you summon me a net. . ." she drifted off as they carried her out of conversational range). Once they reached Zool's table the gnomes inserted her into a reclining chair, cranked the chair back up to dining position, and scurried off to finish their duties. She twiddled with one of her dangly earrings then while Zool pretended to discover the little one in the dining cart. Rydia had seen a wink pass from gnome to gnome. Creatures down at that height had a conspiracy, honestly! "Yes hon, have a seat!" she said, and pretended to whisk a speck of dust off of a nice high padded chair.

Tzimfemme reached out and touched the wall where the runes would have been. The spectre which materialized from the wall was not a memory. Without a jaw to open, it had no way to bluff before it roared. Her hair flattened under the force of it. "I am a cleric of the Bloodsabers of the aqueducts," she replied. "Hail Bertoxxulous and let me pass." And it was written and it became real. The runes wrote themselves all along the sewer walls and the spectre faded away. For now it was a dangerous place for anyone who did not worship decay. He was still kneeling when the runes wrote themselves around him and the wet avatar. "I thank you, my Lord!" She continued on to the cells and their doors made of wax. It was ever a Pen touch. Write the right thing and walk out of your prison. In one cell the wall had been polished to use as a mirror and a weedy little man posed in front of it. In the next a man squatted by his bed and tore handfuls of straw out of the bunk and stuffed them into a life size lovely doll. Tzimfemme put her hands flat on that door and sighed but then passed on. By the third door she stopped. Inside this cell was a younger man, grown up now, but he had been a boy when he was shut in. She rubbed the wax and wore a hole through it. "I do not forget," she whispered. "You know that I can write. Let me out." His voice was broken but then it always had been. "That's what I do not forget. I was there in the chats and nobody could say you were not a writer there. Why didn't you go quiet when you had nothing to say? Why did you take other people's words? I miss you." "You cloned me in the chats. You took all of me. How is that fair? Elder." Tzimfemme was quiet for awhile. The Butcher smiled as the map of the sewers entered his mind. The pool of blood. The great saber which hung above it. The binding stones chaining the spectres. The dead ends. The madmen. The cells. She shuffled the pictures in her mind. Each picture took many minutes to build. Her feet were numb. But the right one was there at last. It was a picture of Tzimfemme with her hair wild and mad and pointing at the sky like the roof was not even there. Around the edge of the picture were enemies with weapons pointing at her. The broken angel in the cell was lying at her feet and holding out a massive feather to her. It was fresh from his wings. The point was still bloody. "You gave me everything. My slave, you said. I did not take. I did not want! I did not claim!" Her voice rose at the end. Hysteria. "Tzimfemme--""I will not say your name!" She turned and fled. The wax softened and repaired itself.

Rubber chicken disappeared with a sound like an artificial cork being dislodged from a bottle, played in reverse. Which is more or less what it was. Rydia's ears shot straight up in dismay, with the fortunate side effect of catching Carp in a vise. She reached up and dragged him down to eye level with both hands. "What are you doing?! You can't attack people who aren't spammers. Cough it UP!" Carp belched in her face. Rubber toes were briefly visible. "Ooo, you!" she replied, and kicked herself out of the Cossack dance and to standing level. Carp struggled and slipped loose, but got no further as Rydia grasped it by the tail and shook vigorously. The jitterbug poison bounced off of her hair in droplets and her grip shifted; she started to shake Carp overhead like maracas. Every eight beats, a bit more of rubber chicken reappeared out of Carp's mouth.

"Ohmygod life was so much easier back on Blitz," complained the bush, which was now shaking rhythmically. "Two allies and that was it. No keeping track of army this and guild that." It sniffed and shuddered, and then its remaining uncharred branches gave up and fell, revealing Rydia squatting close to the ground and every so often kicking out in a Cossack dance. A stray jitterbug clung to the top of her hairdo, stabbing at it, and a dribble of venom slid out of the hairdo atop her scalp. Across the room, rubber chicken stretched and wobbled, but still strained its neck towards the sole remaining treat in the room. Across the room in the other direction, Rydia's Carp swam through the air, scales all aglitter. Over Rydia's head, their eyes met.

Looking at the still pictures while moving was not as good as sitting still and watching the dances of the gods. But sitting still among the still pictures was death. So Tzimfemme wandered. Her feet chose downhill paths. "You have no hope of reincarnation." The cloaked figure kept step with her. She grunted acknowledgement and kept walking. "No power to bring others to reincarnation. No eyes to see. No ears to hear. No voice to speak. "You did not cause anyone to raise a gun. I did." He held it out to her as he had held it out to him. The naked mage did not turn to look at the revolver. She reached for it though. Took it. Sniffed it. Put in her mouth. And bit off a piece of the barrel. Chewed, swallowed. Spoke. "I can eat gun too." And smiled. "My body will not die from it. Yours?" The cloaked figure was not there to answer. She kept on munching. The bullets and chambers tasted peppery. The rest of it, salty. "It is impossible to eat metal." Now the cloaked voice came from her other side. Tzimfemme walked on. "And yet I have. That is a truth. "You are trying to do the job that I have done." Tzimfemme thought for awhile after this. The cloaked figure spilled more threats, but she was not listening all that well. She was looking hard at him and at the still picture of his aura. And the threads. And turning them white, one by one. "Here is my gift to you. You belong to James Crow and you have not seen the white light with him. I don't think you can. Ever. To do the job you wish to do, the light is necessary. It is that light that brings folk to reincarnation. This job cannot ignite it. This job can only lead the way to it. Here is something which is not a gift." She opened her mouth and the gun poked out of it. Tzimfemme fished it out and handed it back to the cloaked figure. After that she waded through sewers and slime. They coated her. The picture of a white aura and an opposing force faded. The new picture was a picture of sewers and red rune graffiti and an aura of welcome for Tzimfemme.

The squirrels' dance ended with tails curled above their heads and noses pointed skywards; Rydia swept both arms upwards and together, and the shawl swelled out above her. Her pointed joined hands, unconsciously placed in the caller's gesture, crackled with a bit of mana. She watched the white flecks fall until they faded, murmuring "shiny", but then snapped out of it, tiptoed to a door, and left for a few minutes. When she slipped back in, a flexible feather dropped out of the upper air currents and landed on her hair. One ear flicked mechanically until the feather was dislodged. The feather tumbled to earth, bounced a few inches off of the floor upon impact. . . . . .and then the Swami followed the same path, but bounced several dozen feet off of the floor instead. The elf squeaked and scrambled for cover, behind a potted plant in a quiet corner, which was not empty for long. Swami Noguru crash-landed in the shrubbery, and Rydia heard the crackling of twigs and leaves, an involuntary exhalation, quick patting sounds of reassurance, and a POOM! She peered from behind the bush, her ears emerging into view first. "What in the world is that?" she inquired as another lump shot out of the turban. "It's my headcannon and I'll thank you to respect it" the swami retorted. Rydia sniffed in disdain and turned her face away from him, and caught sight of a sparkle of multicolored scales floating through another doorway.

"Not a one," shrugged Tzimfemme. "I don't like 'em anyway. Too much goo and not enough chocolate." The words trailed away to a rude silence. Tzimfemme tried to course-correct. "Nice work with the stick, Stick." And marched face-first into a conversational wall. The silence which stretched out after that was the sort everyone wishes they could just get up and walk away from. The nekkid mage lacked the restraint that explained why not to do that--she'd lost that somewhere in the splitting of the quincunx. So she did just get up and walk away. Odd things happened after that, somewhere. The pain of the shot which had murdered the maiden before the mage returned, reflected on the wrong side of the mirrors, and took words away. The light took fire again in blinding white everywhere except in the garden, and the dances of the gods slowed down to a flip-book. And Tzimfemme did not try to wrap these in words. The words were dancing up among the gods and she was low, very low. Alone. Only the two words that should have been chained together, low and alone, were not connected any more. They were two different pages of the flip-book now. Everything was a new page now and surprise was a lost word. She existed and that was a sentence in itself.

Rydia suppressed a headdesk at the pun of Swami Noguru by turning it into a bowed head. Her lowered eyes met the rubber band, which had picked up the tune of Le Rouet d'Omphale and added some extra funk into the boot-level bass. "Do you mind?" she whispered sharply, and the band trailed off into silence, then picked up the waltz--and started fooling around with that time signature too. Rydia's ears drooped slightly to either side of her head, the equivalent of a sigh. She looked back up in time to see Brighid's. . .banishment? "Oh, we would call you a green mage for that, Brighid," she trilled. "My natural ally!" Rydia beamed, looked to Zool for support, then lifted one ear in a distinct question-mark shape. ". . .Zool? You would be the other sort of natural ally? Wouldn't you?" Further delicate inquiry was cut short by the arrival of James Crow and some little girl who seemed much less hyperactive than the Pen standard. Rydia couldn't help tittering along with the rest when the card changed hands, but then she saw the fool, while still straining to remember. And quite a lot of pieces were lain down before Rydia's mind as cards of their own, as they would not have done for any other of the quincunx, one by one and slow enough to grasp. "Fool. Crow. Ley-line. Shadow. Unalive. Oh wow, like I used to be. . . "Oh dear," she sighed, quite defeated, to no one in particular. "No wonder he's so upset." She wandered out to the dancefloor and attached herself to the squirrels' dance as best as a tailless creature could, filling in by waving her shawl around like a kite, but her heart wasn't in it. Still, it would be rude to leave and talk to the rest of the quincunx without having at least one dance. The others could wait.

"Ohmigod do not talk to me about Ager," Rydia drawled. She focused on the cut-crystal wineglass she'd been twiddling with, frowned, and set it down. "That was not the fun kind of crazy. I was retired, I was gone, and then I got dragged back and into that. Ugh. Can't even look at a glass of rosé these days," she continued, and scrunched her eyes shut before picking up the glass again and draining it. When she opened them again, squirrels had invaded the room. Rydia tipped the empty glass and gave it a look of suspicion, but the shiny glints of light from the remaining drops of alcohol made her giggle. She looked up again just in time to watch them flee. The giggling died away into a noncommittal noise. "That great big quest about going forth and finding the ultimate spell for a red mage? And the reason for needing one? See, Boaz was right in the midst of that but I wasn't. . .so. . .did it start with shadows creeping in at the corners? Because if it did. . ."

It seemed as if no one had. "Hmm," Rydia cooed, "Maybe I'd better back up a bit and explain the world. Blitz Terra lived life at full speed. We were all really young and crazy. Let an hour pass by and the world would've changed, two dozen people piling in and saying something, and barely two paragraphs when you added it all up later and got rid of the carrots." Zool cleared his throat with a noise that sounded quite like 'carets'. Rydia shook her head, setting half-a-dozen sparkly dangly earrings flying. "Ohmigod no. Car-rots. Believe me. So you would live an entire lifetime in a day. Well, more like two, but we didn't go in for splitting hairs like that, that was more of a Blitz Two thing. We're talking about Ones here. With me so far?" "Not especially. . ." Brighid began. "Great! Now you're getting it! Not really knowing what's going on, but hanging on for dear life. Someone shouts 'LOOK! A MONKEY!" and just hours later you find yourself swatting flying devil monkeys and giant carrots out of the air with whatever comes to hand. One day there was an argument about who was the most crazy person on Blitz Terra, and believe me there was some competition!" She giggled and flipped a corner of her shawl. "Anyway, after a few hours of this I got bored and I said OK, now you are the Demigod of Madness, and that was Boaz. And a few others, it was quite a craze for awhile to get yourself a demigod title. "Now the Demigod of Insanity decided to have a bit of a propaganda war later, and got an entire guild's worth of people to go swarm another corner of Terra in his name, but somehow that didn't seem fair to me y'know? So somehow I ended up 'leading' this, yeah right, the way the head locomotive leads a runaway train down from the Rockies, but anyway, I called myself Boaz Mastermind of the Joats." Rydia pointed an ear back at the mistaken portrait of herself in "Boaz" regalia, in between the rather more correct one of Boaz taming a red dragon of formidable size and an extra wide canvas showcasing Boaz and others in the midst of a battle set over a simmering volcano with entirely too much realism.

Springs squealed and one of the doors at the rear of the room bowed inward. For a moment the door creaked open without any hand to be seen, the light beyond it was darkened, and everyone who'd noticed the shadow drew a sharp breath--but then the light reappeared and silhouetted the neck and head of a young giraffe bent nearly upside-down. A female chirruped from beyond the doorway and took some strain off of the door hinges; the giraffe sniffed at the glowing exit sign, righted its head, used the sign to scratch between its horns, then retreated back through the doorway. The door swung back shut for a little while before the owner of the voice stepped back into the room. She stopped dead upon seeing the chaos, but she was smiling. "Madcap antics and mayhem. That's more like it!" Her ears (rather longer and more pointed than the giraffe's had been) pricked up with joy. That lasted for a few seconds, but then her nose twitched, and she turned up the sole of one long boot and frowned. The elf seemed to deflate on the spot, and hopped back out on the other foot, bumping the door open with her hip. Half a dozen members of a musical troupe skittered out of their chairs and rammed through the door after her. It hadn't even settled back to stillness before Rydia was borne back into the room in midair squeaking in dismay, and being bounced twice a second as the rubber band twanged out a entrance theme while carrying her in. After they'd boogied on over near the portraiture table and dropped off the elf, she seemed somewhat green. That wasn't seasickness though, that was just her. Boots, dress, eyes, even the hair which went up and out and over and balanced out the sheer length of the ears, all in shades of green. "Oh hiiiiiiiiiii!" she chirped, unfazed. "Zool it's been simply ages! And this is proper blitz! And you brought back the swami--" she stopped and her eyes went wide, "oh dear." Realization wasn't just for Rydia. With that look of incipient panic, and if you mentally subtracted the ears and recast her looks in a human form, and added on a costume of a power-mad red mage, wouldn't she just be a match for one particular portrait in the series of portraits of a red mage lining one wall of the room?

This. . .this was magnificently bananas. Bananas of the speckled and wholly ripe sort, not the green and uniform supermarket ones.

Funny thing about stepladders: they don't fit through doorways unless one turns them just so. Picture this from the outside, if you will; if one (or two) turn(s) the stepladders just so, but in the wrong way, they're not getting out of the storage closet either, what with there being a ladder jammed horizontally across the doorway. The ladder was rattled against the wall, several times, in quick succession. The wall didn't budge. "It wasn't funny, you know. This isn't the place for just messing with people." She harrumphed. "It wasn't intended to be funny. No nosebleed, no comic oversexualized reaction, no. . ." "Satisfaction," Wyvern interjected. "No blackmail material. Hang on." The visible section of ladder tilted downward on one side, then bobbed back up to level. "As unsatisfying as an Almost Dragonic product, which, by the way, is why no, I am not entrusting my life to a ladder I'd have to buy from you." "I don't see why not, mine offers several times the reach and because I love the Banquet Hall so, I could offer some extremely attractive financing options." The ladder shifted several rungs to the right. "No, Wyvern. And if you wanted the seductive embrace, go apply to Signe, that's the point." The ladder shot back to the left rather faster than it had moved before. The uppermost upright of the ladder dropped away from the doorway. "Wait a minute, I've got it!" Soon the ladder was parallel to the ground, and jostling back and forth. "Ok, maybe not." "Why not?" Tzimfemme's voice was suddenly quiet and well off of the topic of stepladders and liabilities. "Because we're still trapped--" "Not that." In the pause, one end of the ladder retreated from the doorway. "Why not pick someone and pair off? We all did."

This fire was eerily silent, the beams of the Banquet Hall too seasoned and warded to pop or snap like campfire wood. If it weren't for the faint birdlike stink in the air, and of course the flames, a person might fail to look up and notice the fire at all. They stared upward for awhile, side by side, also in silence. More water dripped down Wyvern as he fidgeted; more dust fell from Tzimfemme as she crossed her arms. "Well?" he finally burst out. The naked mage cranked her gaze back to eye level, and shrugged. "Yep. It's still burning." After several uncomfortable seconds, she amended that, "And it's out of reach. "Nothing to do but work with what's within arm's reach." And with that, she reeled him in. His tail had time to thump against the floor just once before he'd been collared, embraced, and released. "Just messing with ya. C'mon, let's go find a stepladder."

Between the competing forces of a malfunctioning portal and a Wyvern fleeing water, Tzimfemme was spun like a-- Oi, that wasn't water, that was fire! --At any rate, a few braids flew out with centripetal force, and got singed for it. She dropped the flail altogether and it sank back into the dying portal. "FIRE!""I know that, I see it!" Tzimfemme yelped. "Claws!" "Do something!" Wyvern tried to shake her into action. "Claws, in my shoulder, off, please!" She swiveled her head (more braids worked loose), homed in on a likely tapestry, and skittered sideways to it with a wince--Wyvern hadn't let go yet, and wasn't foregoing the use of his human shield either--ripped it down and flung it over the wood. Wyvern let go then, out of sheer surprise. "That wasn't magical?""If I can't control a portal," sighed Tzimfemme, "no way can I cast a fire suppressant. Might as well bail toilet water over it. Say," a fragment of the previous conversation had finally broken through her preoccupation, "what was that about bathroom porcelain anyway?" He shuddered. "Oh you didn't," she said, but after several more uncomfortable seconds added, ". . .you did." A hole, outlined in red, began to eat its way through the thrown tapestry. ". . .at least you're getting dry with all this fire around?" she ventured.

The naked mage grasped for his claw as they marched down the hall, but muttered something first. "What was that?" "Apologizing to Signe, wherever she may be." Tzimfemme quirked a grin. "We held a kaffeklatsch, the women of ÅoÅ, and divvied up the world into the types of men. You're her territory." "Oh I see--I'M her territory?! No no nononono even if she had invaded the territory of Wyvern, which was just named after me, and didn't even stop at the tollbooths--" Tzimfemme talked over his protests, "Deténte wasn't against the Decalogue. And why would we risk squabbling over our own guildmates? No, you had to be assigned with the rest. Young and frisky ones went to Signe and that was that--" "--the concept of territories at war was a wasteful idea anyway," he added in spite of her, counting off the costs on the claws of his unclaimed hand, "but if people were willing to let so many acres of the wins get destroyed, I thought, why not skim some of that, they'd never miss it--" "--the unprofitable, the untouchable, and the uninterested were and still are mine. Ha, unprofitable, maybe I should apply to Signe for restitution!--" Tzimfemme, not pausing either in speech or stride, snapped a portal of mana open through the dying air like a flipped pancake. It sizzled. Wyvern stuck his snout into the portal like a striking snake and, between sentences, chomped the chocolate succubus figurine before it fell into the Pen, then licked his lips luxuriously. "--Signe is still delicious--" "--because you are the walking definition of 'unprofitable', but no, what was once written cannot be un-writ, nor all your tears et cetera--" She shoved her hand into the portal and extracted what appeared to be a bent crowbar, but the second bend got jammed in the portal, and one arm's worth of leverage seemed not to be enough to pry it loose. He hastened half a step ahead to avoid her elbow jabbing the air and failing to dislodge the flail, with the portal now being dragged through the air behind them. "--I'm not unprofitable! That's slanderous! You're friends with him aren't you? Tell him the profits might have been deferred somewhat but the mercenaries are bound to show up eventually, after all we still have their weapons--" "That's what chafes me, absolutely chafes me, about the entire business--" For all that they were ignoring each other, the possibility anyone else might have overheard the side-by-side monologues was even further from their minds.

Some characters have plot shields. Wyvern has an aura of pratfall. So when he and Tzimfemme collided in the hallway, their limbs went flying upward for maximum comic effect before they crashed to earth, and then one slipped again on a bit of storm runoff which moistened the floor (indoors?) and pulled them both down again just as the other had regained balance. Photos, torn loose, floated improbably above the pocket they'd fallen from and dusted the immediate area. Tzimfemme grabbed for the shred of newsprint about to sink into the water, but Wyvern pounced on it first; she closed her hand over his fist instead, and promptly let go. His skin had a strange texture, not in the least like dragons' skin, even less like the zombified dragonskin smock Minta had turned up in one day after going on a dragon-hunting expedition with her non-gnomish friends. Nor was he hydra-like. Tzimfemme tipped her head back and took another look at Wyvern, who seemed now to be swathed in gray, cut off in a cloud bank, suspended over meteor showers in an indifferent sky-- "Hello? Hello? Tzimfemme?" He waved his claws in front of her face, realized he was waving faux-Tzimfemme photos in her face too, removed them in a hurry-- She watched yellow wildflowers scatter from his claws and sound waves of his speech etch into the wax surrounding him, and couldn't help but cluck with rueful laughter. "Never mind," she told the tableau, "it's just nonsense." He frowned, sneaked a peek at the stack of photos, and straightened up the edges of the stack. "Let's go find others. Any others, anywhere." It's your quest, isn't it, only wyvern that we've ever known anywhere? "Find something which makes sense." They were bound to be disappointed.

The mountain goat picked its way to a point where its head projected above Tzimfemme's, looked long into the naked mage's eyes, then pulled back and headbutted the wall with emphasis. Tzimfemme winced at the meaty sound; the clack of impervious horns it was not. "Heh," she muttered, "do I know the feeling". She sniffed the air, then wafted some dispelling mana in the direction of the goat. Nothing happened. Tzimfemme shrugged and eased herself into the elevator shaft one limb at a time, lowering herself down along the goat's path. Fiber-optic mana cables had splintered into fans of glass, brutal to the skin, but she reached solid flooring with only a few shards stuck in her skin. The naked mage looked down at those largest shards caught near her ankles, emitted a whinnying sort of snort, and flicked her head back up to stare at the goat. "Follow or not, curse you, Mary-lady!" she snapped, as the braids fell back into her eyes, and dashed out of the elevator with reflections glittering at her heels. Something called, high and pained. Was it Snypuier's memory, wrenching open a hole in the flows of mana through which chaos howled? Was it James Crow's storm winds rising and wringing noise from the disintegrating walls? Was it Wyvern, his tail pinched between the slats and the boxspring? No matter. Tzimfemme heard, and heeded, and chased after it.

Between evenings lay the shortening days of falling leaves, and all the possibilities of leaf piles. Scheherazade could not sweep up enough leaves by herself, and neither could the gnomie girl Minta, but Minta brought along "cool Halloween costume servants" and those zombies could tidy up a lawn even while the children climbed a wooden step-stool an' hopped down into the leaf pile, chattering all the while! "But it doesn't snow in the middle of summertime!" Scheherazade protested, "not without autumn coming first!" "It did too! An' me an' the other neato necro girls had to go an' find the other _other_ neato necros an' they had," Minta paused for a bit while a zombie swept a particularly noisy rake-ful of leaves back into place, "glass stuck in them here an' here." When she pointed to her heart she thumped herself on the chest and fell backwards into the leaf pile. Scheherazade shook her head, standing on the top step of the stool and looking down at the gnomie. "I don't believe it. I'm going to ask if that's even _possible_. That would have killed them!" "If they did die, I got dibs," Minta retorted, pointing up at the sky for emphasis. The unclouded sky. As GeldrinHor saw it, it was worth any backlash to hold back the storm's wrath from interrupting the children's play. ***** "Holy--!" Tzimfemme latched onto the edge of the elevator updraft with one hand and one ankle. The other hand recoiled from where the elevator updraft was not, and over the span of several minutes her weight slid backward until it balanced once more upon the foot still on the floor. She stared down into the shaft she'd so nearly leaped into, and saw the mountain goat. It stepped among the dysfunctional fail-safes with unconcern, ascending. The naked mage had to wonder, though, why its stance brought to mind not ordinary quadrupeds, but memories of the two-man chocolate wrestling teams, mount and rider circling the edge of the lake. She unhooked her ankle, settled back upon both feet, thought-- "Aha, it's looking ahead, not to either side! Now why's it not got wide-field vision?" she thought aloud.

It's impossible to prove a negative. Isn't it? Tzimfemme crouched on a lab stool, pulled away from the lab bench to better encompass the room, with one foot holding down the fiber-optic tube stretched away from its housing and the associated nozzle resting across her knees. The air itself tasted sour, organic. Nothing moved, except Tzimfemme in a slow rotation around some unnamed axis, and once some anonymous rustling under a pile of broken glassware and fallen posters--until the naked mage had uncoiled and blasted the debris with a stream of mechanically channeled mana. It might not have been vermin, but how could it be proven that there were no vermin? She hadn't slept in awhile. Not on, not in, not with, within or without. There might have been vermin in her nest. "Once." Once defiled, could it be purified? This was a place of peace. "Peace." But why was it not a place where all that had to be said was said self to self, distilled down to essence, and only then delivered? That is not dogma. "Perhaps," Tzimfemme said, and gnawed on the tip of the mana nozzle, "I should have set it to verse." Rydia's ward could not be overcome, but the boss's servant, the dark elf woman with the blasphemous name, could be compelled to convey the necessity. So she was. But the Pen wards had intervened, and did Rydia know that sons were permissible, but daughters would die? The web of the quincunx lay slack. Power, generally speaking, did not. Power was tension was dynamism was power. "Why the hell," added the naked mage, "did he end up with her anyhow? A Man of Terra, I ask you." And Tzimfemme burned. The very air above her head was impelled into an updraft by her thoughts, and that in its turn spread out against the ceiling, dispersed its energy and tumbled down along the walls. Cooled metals creaked. Tzimfemme's head whipped around at the sound, the nozzle raised to fire, and another cloud rose--this time of dislodged scent. The naked mage's nostrils flared. She curled her neck and looked down upon what could be seen of the floor, shied, but then gathered herself and leaped. Two hops away from the doorway, the hose ran short and she released the nozzle. It coiled itself back into the wall, slowly at first, but as she leaped out of her quarters it accelerated and the nozzle slammed back into place with a screech--then the housing cracked along its edge and slumped out into the decaying room.

I found A Fine and Private Place while sorting through the dingiest, slenderest books of the used bookstore, and couldn't resist the sort of book where one can read, before the first page has ended, "He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn't, and in either case there isn't very much you can do about it." I should have recognized the whimsy before buying it, it's not the first book from Peter S. Beagle that I've read. He hadn't quite hit his fantastic stride in plotting yet (he did better with intermingling the ordinary and the non by the time he wrote Tamsin) but the voice of the author was fully formed. Also, Ozymandias, that aforementioned raven is a forerunner of Quoth. Plenty of raven-philosophy for you to pluck out and roll around in your beak.

"I dunno cousin, it looks like a unicycle to me. . ." "That's 'cause the second wheel gotta be mounted horizontally so it gets the gyro motion goin'!" "Ohhh. . ." Asmadeus nodnodnodded an' gave the heavy horizontal rim a push. The 'bicycle' wheel touching the ground wobbled madly to and fro encircling it all, and the illuminated flag of the Gnomish Empire whipped overhead on its long springy stalk, but not a drop of water slopped from the top of the bowl. Meanwhile Minta hopped in Asma's interpretation an' pedaled the pedals as pugnaciously as possible. The ironclad paddleboat slewed around in the lake of Ak'Anon, while pairs of goldfish mounted at front and rear swam around their little bowls pushing paddlewheels of their own, charging capacitators and illuminating lightbulbs. Their toolkits tipped over on the shore, spilling out. . . chicken wire, velvet, stopwatch.

Oh hallefrickin'lujah that is exactly what I was looking for! Now to ferret out what I stashed there awhile back.

The setting that governs the cut-off date for posts displayed is now even more unfindable than before, in Mighty Pen Tan. Either point me at it or enable it, please? (I can get the forum to acknowledge the threads in it, but still not make them clickable. . .the count will have a few hundred, but only the stickied ones are "new" enough to be clicked.)