Quincunx

Towel. Chocolate. Towel and chocolate? Tzimfemme wasn't accustomed to stressing over what to wear. While she wrapped, one by one, a series of sizes of towel around her in immodest drapes, a tiny hand reached from inside the shower cubicle and stole the pot of body chocolate. "I'm a simple person," Tzimfemme told the angled mirrors, covering the sounds of the little gnomie slurping out of the pot. "I don't do clothing," and she shed the current towel, "nor ballroom dancing." She squinted at the infinite, progressively more blurry Tzimfemme reflections. "Neither makeup nor small talk--but that's fine, people see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Maybe there'll also be some who want to think." She wrapped the headband fabric over her braids and clipped on her guild symbols: the circular pie-graph with five segments, the blue most vivid; a Serra Angel with a crown of miniature chocolates and the gown airbrushed away; whips of wormwood bowed down with white blossoms. Passing through Dr. Tzimfemmestien's lab to the outside door, she stepped aside (Minta, invitation already pocketed, bolted through the open door as Tzimfemme turned away) and cracked open a drawer of the deep-freeze unit. Inside this one lay thirty frosty shotglasses, many filled and labeled with a type of vampire; she selected one, shuddered, muttered, "It's only a precaution, I don't NEED to burn it," and gulped it down. ***** Tzimfemme sniffed the air. Taffeta after years in storage. . .way, WAY too much face powder, or an explosion from Almost Dragonic Industries' animal testing lab. . .roast beef panini. . .pathos. . .burning mana--portal maybe. . .ham and swiss panini. . .and a pleasing lack of rampaging hormones. Breaking wrists of hands that got too familiar was deeply ingrained, and she couldn't shut off the reflex, not even for an event as genteel as a Fall Ball. Besides, if this ran true to the form of the usual Pen get-together, the healers and rebuilders would be plenty busy by the end of it. "Invitation," stated a doorman who was anxious about a naked savage standing in the way of respectable guests. A small bluish portal popped open and Tzimfemme stuck her hand into it. Her expression froze for a moment, forearm muscles twitching as she groped blindly around. "Blood and bones," she muttered as no invitation came to hand and the doormen crossed ceremonial sabres in front of the door, but she did not retreat. There were four options at this point: stun the doormen with phantasm or clerical magic and hope they hadn't been infused with faerie dragon resistance (unlikely), burn the vampire blood and charm them into letting her in sans invitation (which would leave her subject to vampiric faults for awhile, in a room FULL of lit candles), simply whack 'em over the head and let herself in (gauche), or-- The other end of a Tzimfemme portal appeared in the ballroom, about head height to a human. "Hello? Can anyone hear this? One-two-three. . .ahem. One of my people swiped my invitation. If she's there, kindly propel her to the door so that she can let me in using it; if she's not, er, would one of you tell the doormen I've come as your fashionably late date?"

Tzimfemme's jaw drops open and stays open. She had been spit out onto Terra after the age of Death Rock, and not even the continual headbanging party that was Metalium could quite compare. This did.

We could all show up with towels, of course--Tzimfemme with a towel around the head, Minta with a towel cape (pinned at the neck with a death's head)--that gives us a common element to work into our introductions AND a chance to pay twisted homage to Douglas Adams.

Tzimfemme wants to know if it's come as you are or masquerade ball. I think her Dr. Tzimfemmestien-ish side is starting to show again. ^o_o^ Minta absolutely positively refuses to leave her room if dates are required (you can peek inside and try to coax her out, but she's being rather loud). --Rydia, shiny pointy ear starlet

"Oh dear, oh dear," drifts into the hall from the far end of the stairway, feminine and brainless. "One of the pegasi must have gotten loose. What is Wyvern trying to do with my sweeties!?! . . .although these hoofprints are awfully big even for Mogmumble. . ." Rydia keeps her eyes on the ground and ear-tips alert as she passes Kalypso in the hall. Even with the pale elf skin, her overall effect is green-by-choice. She notices a hoof of Tempest and her ears snap to attention, then jab wildly at the air as she unfolds her wings and propels herself quickly away from the frightening horse! --and, noticing Kalypso, hovers to a halt. The ears waggle again, less emphatically, then one curls into a ? "You don't earspeak?" she asks aloud.

*Tzimfemme reels through the room, wearing only a necklace of O-shaped chocolate cookies strung together into a necklace.* w00t and happy birthday! Nothing says "we know who you are and where you live" like the gift of catapult! *Minta ricochets off the party walls!* yeahyeahyeah! *Looking down, Tzimfemme finds that the 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola is empty, and staggers away again to resupply, humming 'Star Trekkin' just below the level of verbalization. Rydia is nowhere to be found.*

"I'll save you!" Rydia offers, leaping to her feet and carefully laying out her whip along the floor so it passes just out of paw's reach of all the cats. One little tug on the whip handle nets two pounces. A gentle twitch attracts three more. Taking a step backwards toward the door results in four new cats leaping upon the lash as it tries to sneak away from them! Rydia steps carefully backwards with the feline parade, trying to coax them further away from Ayshela and any allergic people in the Cabaret Room, while Carp fends off a hungry half-grown cat with its webbed tail, THWAP!

Izanagi violated several of the mission's primary rules just after takeoff, spitting a burst of flame out of his stabilizers: wasting fuel, deflecting himself off course, almost running into the path of three incoming missiles, and most importantly endangering another probe. Hermes was only singed, but still must have complained to base camp, judging by their sharp reprimands to stay out of that flight path. Still, he thought as he shut his outer eyes to the firefight, the brat had more than earned a scorching just by dragging him into this. He'd been planning to buy a silicon press and go into a quiet retirement as an 'engraver' along the southern coast. 'Engravers' weren't entirely legal; they lasered new and usually copyrighted information onto mass-produced blank silicon spheres, melted down old silicon instead of turning information over to whatever military held control of the Horn, or (his specialty) take the silicon slag and remake it into blank spheres. Hermes had been a cousin of a cousin's wife, well-educated, and a non-entity in her scientific circles--until she discovered that his 'pebbles' were supermolecules. A Pebble™ was to an ordinary sphere what the first optical microchip had been to the transistor. Perhaps more. Izanagi was glad enough to avoid the fame, but seeing the spotlight on Hermes hadn't made him happy either. Only when she was accepted into the Destiny Project did her ignorance of Pebbles cause trouble, and she pleaded that the 'dear old uncle' who had taught her also be given a chance at destiny. The Destiny Project had agreed to keep both to preserve the idea of family, although a last-minute decision had kept them from being named as mythological family. Now he and she and twenty others were relying on Pebbles instead of bodies. The last human voice he would ever hear spoke to him. Three of the probes hadn't cleared the atmosphere--among those, his dear cousin Hermes. Base crew flooded his mind with condolences, true sorrow for one of their own extended family. Perhaps it was better that Izanagi no longer had facial expressions. *** He didn't look at the clock. He shuffled through his database, checked the SOUP for premature development (none), and went back to hibernation. An old man needed his sleep, even if his Pebbles didn't. *** Again and again. No human being had looked at these stars in centuries, and there were no human beings left to see them now. *** Again and again. There was no Earth to block the light from these stars. *** Izanagi had no brain tissue left to become choked with plaque. He had no eyesight to fail, no muscles to become weak. Nonetheless, he was going blissfully senile. Without the constant irritation of Hermes, or the silicon press to putter with, or anyone else to wake him up in the morning, Izanagi didn't have a purpose. The Destiny Project hadn't been his idea; all the talk about preserving life and transcendence and such had gone in one aural circuit and out another. This time, when he woke up, he decided to take a quick mental stroll around his workshop. SOUP didn't contain enough silicon, but carbon (it was carbon, wasn't it?) would substitute. Something kept going wrong, however; no matter what he tried, the pebbles kept forming into hollow spheres, with nothing inside to engrave upon but the rest of the SOUP. He was irritated, and preoccupied, and jettisoned the little spheres, and tried again. No good. The spheres could be too small to reflect light, or almost as wide as his knuckle had been, but every one of them was hollow. The small ones were unstable, also, and were cracking open whenever they encountered the very large spheres. Those got thrown out quickly before they ruined the entire batch. For the first time in a long while, Izanagi was fully awake. He shut his outer eyes to better focus on his work--he needed greatly magnified vision, not the long-range focus needed for scanning space. He tinkered blissfully for an unmeasured time before the fragment of shattered Earth spun into the probe and chopped it neatly in two. Izanagi and SOUP flew painlessly apart in a shower of silicon pebbles. *** No Earth life had survived the vacuum of space. The little carbon pebbles had. They clung to the core and tail of the comet, carbon bonding with carbon and transforming the pebbles into asymmetrical lumps. Other molecules became trapped inside the pebbles. Wayward atoms floated towards the irregularites and were bumped together, forming molecules previously broken by the SOUP's self-regulating sensors. Only a few of the irregular spheres penetrated deeply enough into the chunks of comet to survive if they chanced to start forming two spheres instead of one. *** Again and again, the virus passed from comet to comet, asteroid to asteroid, only reproducing when it encountered a new source of carbon. *** Again and again, a comet's tail would pass near a planet, shedding meteors. The carbon pebbles were tough enough to survive the heat of atmospheric re-entry and the molecules within charged with energy. They formed impossible new bonds.

Tzimfemme dusts off the Regel molds for AoA Miniature Chocolate Mages and melts down bricks of some fabulous orange-flavored chocolate she found recently. "It's even slightly krispy to match your mage color," she grinned, accidentally-on-purpose rerouting a bite-size brick to her mouth.

I've been enjoying and proofreading the printed manuscript for this for the past two weeks or so (LOTS of dead time in airports and on planes. . .and this was better than anything the bookstore had to offer). Going to go through it a few more times first, but one thing I simply cannot make any progress upon: What is Aline and what is Anlise, if they are different geographical areas and not a variable spelling? P.S. Don't know whether I'll mail the manuscript from here or hang onto it 'til I return to the U.S. Either way, it'll return with at least two different colors of ink upon it.

Regressing into a past life?

Evoé, Bacché. . .live again until the fall. . . (Tzimfemme's eyes are opaque, as in the days when Archmage was crumbling. . .)

No, we kicked around names like the Chalkboard and the Hugbox, but so far as the link was concerned--shoutbox.

Bulwer Lytton (long gone to his final reward) Proclaimed the Pen mightier, sir, than the Sword. Ever since then, whenever a Poet drops by, We hear him reiterate Lytton’s old lie. Democritus, long before Lytton, averred That any old action beats any old word; So Poets say quickly they spoke but in jest When challenged to put Lytton’s mot to the test. With, alas, one exception. A Poet I knew Was silly enough to think Lytton spoke true. Of eau de vie forte he drank quite a store, Then challenged a Swordsman to combat a mort. While the Swordsman was yet in a daze from surprise, The Poet fired gallons of ink in his eyes, Backed up by barrages of sonnets; rondels; Ballades; chants royals; triolets; villanelles. The trochees and dactyls about him exploded So fast that the Swordsman was quite incommoded. He was epigrammed, similied, punned, metaphored, Until with recluctance he unsheated his sword And lopped off the head of that Rhymer of Rhymes, Then returned to perusing the sports in the Times. The dying head sighed, “It may be now and then That the edge of the sword has an edge on the pen.” Dear Poets, when Swordsmen drop over to play, It’s wise to say, “Sorry--I’m out for the day.” (And will be, till foxes lie down with the hens, And will be, till smiths hammer swords into pens.)

Depression is halitosis. Be unwilling to smile and let the taint escape, or speak and broadcast it. Be unwilling to breathe in unknown and peculiar patterns, recycling stale air.

Tzimfemme hung upside down from the roof of an unoccupied wagon, probing at the center of the shutters, where a latch must be on the other side. She didn't care for the fortune teller--Rosemary's ravings were more than enough and, damn her further, often true. However, this wagon housed one of those delicious sidekicks, and if they weren't inside, there was plenty of time to install her super-hyper-technologically-advanced recording binoculars in a concealed corner. Back in Tzimfemme's room, her nest of stolen underwear shuddered to an unseen cue and flipped over itself in its haste to roll out of the room. . . ***** Rydia's hammock was dull with dust. She already knew her destiny. ***** "You GOTTA see this!" Minta insisted, capering around Rosemary while flinging her scattered child-size tinkering tools into a toolbox. The vampire didn't look up from her anvil and only moved whatever limb was immediately in a tool's trajectory, beads' reflections glinting and rippling like water. Minta overshot the toolbox with a phillips head spinny-pin-antipindelator, which bounced off of the wall and gouged the mirror Rosemary had been engraving. The little necro screeched to an apologetic halt as Rosemary grafted the quincunx-mark into the new spirals. Minta kept to one spot now but bounced up and down with every word, "Come onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn! The neato clockwork is gonna wind down if you don't hurry! What if the weird lady picks it up, then you're never gonna get to see it! An' Astralis said he wanted to see it too an' we just GOTTA get there first!" "It's soulless?" The hyper little girl considered that and replied, "Ummm. . .I think so." "Then it cannot come to me. If I go to it, others will come and perhaps take it." "But you GOTTA see it! Is a TALKING CLOCKWORK! It says 'Caryon Artificer'!" Rosemary counted on her fingers as Minta relayed the message, then swept motes of silver dust from the surface of the mirror and pocketed it along with the stylus. "Guide me to it, then depart, little one. Two and this is seventeen and this is rare to be so late. Seven who follow unknowingly and ten beyond. . .we shall see what keeps them near to me." She held out a cold hand but Minta dodged it and ran out of the untidy room.

Love in souls is like the water's wet: not noticed until you thirst and drink and drink and drink the soul and never taste the love. It clings like dew to words which effervesce.

"We write to move our hand". . .Simple one-syllable words. . . A phrase I have never encountered before--an image of writing and leaving one's mark and sweeping one's hand all at once-- This is an original and memorable line. The entire poem is good, getting more focused in the final stanza, but it is that line that'll make me remember your work.

Week Two Sleep: Medium (8 hours) Sensitivity: Medium (mp3 player, and computer, on the fritz--guesstimating) Intellect: Medium Emotion: High Body: Medium (lifted computer easily, but digestive system troubled) Diaries are too feminine. That's my misogyny speaking, the angry and outward offshoot of self-loathing. To be lumped into this thread is making my skin crawl, but if I don't write it down, who will know? My own computer is still trying to reconcile two sets of FAT files, and failing. We'd taken it to a repair center, and my honey had spoken first, to relay misinformation he was trying to give second-hand. I was annoyed but overruled. The technician jabbed at it pre-Windows and handed it back altered, supposedly fixed. I was skeptical that the problem was gone, but was overruled. Sadly, I'm also correct, and marginalized onto my honey's much newer computer for the fifth day. Damn, why'd it have to break down just after I returned from four days of computerlessness and mystery? I want my mystery box back dammit! I need to return to the endless question of how this inconsiderable personality fleshes out into that online persona, and to find the true mysteries--those combinations that should not be--and be enraptured, and to cultivate my own mystery; without the computer, I'm confined to sifting for a secret life in the folds of drab suburban fashions. There is no mystery here--the exposed navel is neither proud nor aware of the swell behind it, the common baggy pant legs conceal the slash-by-number cuts from the common razor blade, and nothing of the soul rides in a single bumper sticker. There are no goddesses to be found out here. Time, then, to raise a wake online and become one. --Tzimfemme, the naked mage I dress more demurely than you do

Is zero finite?

Week Four Sleep: Medium (7 hours) Sensitivity: Medium (mp3 volume up for Renaissance, down for Mellencamp. Note to self: find equalizer doohickey again, download and use it) Intellect: High Emotion: High Body: Low (stepped into steel sewing machine, toes barely felt it) Well, the sentimental side (labelled Rydia) has finally let go after four days of complete dominance, and I have to do some heavy spin control. Thank goodness that a) my honey finally got interested in this summer's travels and Rydia can't handle stress. However, thanks to a friendly kitten at the pet store today still lingering in my mind, we didn't pass silently as we usually do. Why must you keep cooing over that brat, I said, as the real life kitten was to her a surrogate child. Well you have your silly veneration of grownups, she said with exaggerated feminine touchiness, but the rest of us have children. At least with those, you're expected to worship them and maybe get a result. Gods help me--I agree with her. I want to become one of the living goddesses, a wise and witty and wizened woman. In all my life I have known only six women who qualified--thought I had seven but all that is periphrastic speculation (see, I do it even now). Only one of those had children and I honored her for overcoming that and keeping her stature. With a child, you give it your intellect and emotions and body as a seed and pray it grows enough of its own that you can reclaim yourself. Most can't do it. Anyone can breed; not everyone can survive to be a goddess. So many resolutions have fallen aside. Instead of remaining celibate, I learned to love relationships. Instead of killing myself, I killed my child the one time I did become pregnant, before it could even be called fetus. Goddesses do not lose their resolve--well. . .they do, but then they are goddesses no longer. . . None are. It's going to be a sleepless night if I don't go bury reality in an overdose of Everquest. --Tzimfemme, the naked mage Metaphors make mud clearer

I think it's only least read because it updates as slowly as it does (more text equals more typing, even if a story and poem undergo equal editing). . .although why it gets fewer passes than Library would then be a curiosity.

Absurbities and Oleos is buried far, far back in this very Cabaret Room, and is the only humorous writing that comes up to the Monty Python. . .well, 'standard' hardly seems like the appropriate term. . .read it, but post your praises on this thread.

A Rosemary poem: Diabolist You cannot draw demonic out of me. You summoned these from there, you're now aware, And all are irrevokable. Don't flee. All will pursue and neverending flare. Now you are halo'd with these sinning three. The common, noble, holy--all will curse, But what can mortal weakly do you worse?

Week Three Sleep: High (10 hours, slow to awaken) Sensitivity: Low (mp3 player at 50% and still sounds dull) Intellect: Medium Emotion: Low Body: High He claims it's because he never crawled as an infant, but the problem is more common than that: he wrote the description to capture the image in his head, but I can read those words and find a different interpretation. The legal pad's edges are all given over to upside down Us topped by Os with noses, moving around the characters of this page of Freeland, according to the words we're bickering over. I move the little square (a window? a cabinet? a futurstic recycling unit? he hasn't decided yet) across the page at whim because he didn't include a qualifier for it, only a listing that suggests left to right as English is read left to right. This is how I earn my keep. Any maid could come in and do a HELL of a lot better job at home maintenance, but a good editor is hard to find. Being the apple of the author's eye doesn't hurt either. (A little 'hmph!' from the sentimental part, labelled Rydia. Shut it. I didn't see you being any help two weeks ago when the core was bare. For that matter, who's footing the damn hospital bill. . . .oh. Right. Him. End parenthesis.) . . . I screech to a halt not two inches away from the wall. Minta reactions cantering body across the room like the dog frolics after a too-short walk, and her reflexes are better than mine. I should put the headphones back on, now--having their cord tether me cuts down on that quite a lot when I write and brood on all things internet (Plain walking is another tale.)--but I took them off because the noise passed through my ears without recognition. Read at some point that the bacterial population of your ears increases seven-hundred-fold during an hour of wearing headphones, probably up from three-hundred-fifty-fold but statistics quoters don't care for context. Neither do some other quoters I know. Brood--with headphones on. --Tzimfemme, the naked Changing the quotes under my signature became untrendy a few years ago--why?