Quincunx

"Make yourself at home" is the worst thing a host can possibly say. Don't they _know_ the state of my home? This place is nice, if a bit heavy on the echo chambers--I can't do that to it! Then again, anyone who would tag "if you're still alive" onto the end of their greeting deserves to get their place trashed. Making myself at home it is. I opened doors, leaned in for a looksie, and shut them again. Not the kitchen. . .not the kitchen. . .still not the kitchen. . .what's a woman got to do to find a snack around here? . . .door to the stairs, down the stairs, shut the door, more doors, still not the kitchen. . .door, door, door. . .twenty doors. . .no kitchen, and no stairs. . .

Dear Pen Diary-- I am not amused. I have tried to be ingratiating with this other community of folks. When one of them ran by squealing for a cleric, I stalked after the panic flight, only to have it abruptly flare over to laughter at a firepit where a roast humanoid turned on a short spit, and after that confusion when I made no move toward the meat, and when I snapped for an explanation, they turned to Minta and demanded answers. Oh, they yelped for healing not long after that, but not for very long. She has overpowered herself with magic, and that foul "necro language" is not her native mode of speech. (Inventive, though. Never knew you could do _that_ with a waffle. Note to self: obtain bottle of syrup and willing co-participant.) What's more, she did not reanimate that humanoid on the spit along with the rest of the group, she _resurrected_ it. Standing before me, she casts her own arrhythmic spell. It overrode mine. Here, in this splinter of Norrath, I am not the most powerful spiritual sister. Yet. --Tzimfemme, the naked mage

Not too long ago I picked up a compilation of National Geographic articles only to find that about half of them overlapped with my back issues--possibly the same frustration which sent both of them to the charity shop in the first place. Oh well. Some of the other articles had been mined far out of the past and were still fresh and engaging. Otherwise I've been reading The Entrepreneur's Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing and (gasp, gulp) writing in the margins, cross-indexing that book with its supporting blog. No fiction recently. Needed more brain stimulation than that, and yikes have I gotten that. . .

In the age where information is available at the touch of a keyboard, asking for information from people has become a social ritual instead of a request for information. True information can be found alone. The ability to discard objects/ideas/whatever is a skill, and not one which everyone has. Likewise creation is a tool, especially the creation of art, and while everyone has the skill, very few seem to understand that it can be a tool. . . .and they can be quite grateful when it's brought to their attention! Creation and destruction are free, after all.

In addition to, or in place of? The new lines return to the florid style and the implications instead of saying things outright, and the last two lines of the original draft are a little too bald and forthright to fit. Have to sidle up to the admission sideways, usually, if your tongue is doing circumlocutions like the first few stanzas, otherwise the speaker is dropping the verbal bomb on himself instead of someone else. People don't often bomb their home territory--knowingly.

I always felt that song was missing a howling instrument or three, but maybe the gentle restraint is the point of the melody. There were enough howlers around at the time, anyway, and it might even have been something to distinguish them from the pack. A song in the service of other people?

Peredhil, if I didn't know you better I would say that someone is receiving a rebuke. It's excellent that you feel free enough, especially here, to be ever-so-gently sarcastic. Or is it that it IS placed here against that pedestal we put you on (er. . ."oops" isn't the word, for the motivation was pure. . .maybe just "sorry" for elevating the person as well as the principle) that it's more effective sarcasm, as the reader tips her head to listen for the compassionate undertone, notices the echoing lack, and realizes that something is askew about the entire piece?

By the spume-caked gods--alive, alive, alive! No fog, no filth, no filter between me and my world! That's the drawback of the cocoon of blood, o book of my indiscretions. One can still function within it, yet without an emergent shock, one does not fully re-engage with the world. It is the Armageddon and the rebirth made mundane, and Sossity--she the golem which precipitated my last cocooning--was nothing if not mundane. How long have I been walking asleep, not reborn? No matter. The portal and its appellation awoke me--not the passage into the new world. It rent the caul of Sossity which hung upon me. All the same, this world assailed my senses; my eyes sparked and my ears hummed, my hand pricked with pins and needles, and I wished to collect myself in the quieter atmosphere of the temple of Bertoxxulous. Strange, that. Leave aside for the moment that I should have chosen the godless song-magic, not Rydia, and examine the fact that I broke with the preferred worship of the Legion of the White Rose after taking Minta's advice on the matters of alternative deities. Minta! The unholy child only offered to align me with the gnomes' god of necromancy. What principles of the Corrupted God can they worship, that she and I share the worship so comfortably? We share gender, talent, and some history--not temperament. That neglected child ought to be, if anything, committed to the Neglected God. (She tells me that during the time of separation, she has seen the Neglected God and spoken his frankly unpronounceable name, but that one must entrust oneself to a gnomish time-and-spaceship of sorts in order to 'visit' him. I'll pass. I like my internal organs well enough where they are.) The faithstone is not at fault. Its artisan required nothing imbued and made sacred to the god. At the time, I assumed that instead it drew upon the cleric's own fervor, and now I am certain. If anything can be said to be at fault, say that the portal was--but it woke me, purified me, stripped away fog and filth and filter! How can that be a fault? Let me be plain. I was not riven. The laws of magic are a body not easily broken, here. A spell of gating moves one from a single origin to a single destination, otherwise the request goes unfulfilled. It is as impossible as I would find it, were this in the Pen Keep, to speak two names at once with my singular mouth. Yet the faithstone attempted to send me to two destinations at once, and being a magic slow to activate, was slow to realize its impossibility and negate the flow. Thus I had time to look at the superimposed destinations and to know. There was the warm stench and humidity of the aqueducts and the temple of Bertoxxulous, god of all filth, conduit between my filthy mind and the Norrathian body of magic--there was a mist of cut lemons and fainter scent of rosewater, marble slabs polished to a mirrored sheen, and mistake upon mistake. What idiot magic further obliterates my face, that it should appear so in the reflection--? Black sapphires, diamond-cut. Rosemary's face nestled in my braids, in the walls of the Temple of Marr. No sound, though that was the fault of the spell overloading itself--all the same, it helped, o book of my indiscretions, for Rosemary's wisps of recollection were easier to hear with my own self muted. She erred. I erred. She erred worse. . .Grasp names, woman. I bit my tongue and held it, held onto myself and let the foreign thoughts pass through me, as she, Rosemary, should have done. Her foreign thoughts: three times she had erred, overreaching the limits of those madness-powers and leaving a bit of herself caught in the soul of another. One of those, she and I (I and she) had reclaimed it, together, brutally, at the shores of the lake of Nim. Two, she did not--but wait, that's not true is it? She didn't, but I took back one, with mutual consent in the midst of the Pen carnival. That leaves one. . . His foreign thoughts: How can I keep her? Then: I will imbue armor for her, and then she'll take over this name. Then: Why doesn't she like this better body? Then: How -dare- she. Then, in the armory: Burn, Tzimfemme! Burn her weapon, burn her memory, burn it all! Flames failing to catch around my flail, my Lobotomy, yet doing merry disintegration against the weapon rack, the heraldic hangings, the walls themselves. . . So -that- was why no one in the old, dulled world would call me by my proper title! I am half-alive when not the Tzimfemme, o book of my indiscretions, but the portal restored that to me! What's more, it overcompensated when it merged our flesh of divergent worship! HA! I can see the lights, I can hear the verses, I can speak the names!

La! If you listened to Tzimfemme, you'd think I overpacked for the trip, which was completely not true. It wasn't all my stuff! Minta was supposed to take care of Rosemary's possessions, the way those two had their arrangement back on Terra, but did you think she remembered to do that when she took the early shot at the portal, no she did not. So. At least I don't have to feel guilty about cramming it in the bottom of the pack where everything's going to get rumpled and wrinkled and possibly broken. Also it made a fine cushion for my instruments--try cramming five of those in one backpack without breaking them, if you feel like a luggage challenge some day--and her valuable stuff was all jewels and jewelry which never goes in the luggage. My luggage set didn't start off jeweled, you know, and the portal magic's never fine enough to ask. While you're at it, ask Tzimfemme why her braids were styled up today, wrapped around a "bun netting"! Anyway, I got to the head of the line -finally- --so maybe it wasn't the best idea to let those people cut in front of me, but they were from the allied guild and that makes them as good as allies I knew--and got out of there. The new world, it was SHINY. Those gems just seemed to pop out from the luggage, and the luggage leather got glossy like wet lacquer, and oh my gods I do not know how we kept putting one foot in front of the other in the old world. Not that I did a great job of it then, la, until Minta's little helper boosted the backpacks up and off. Ow, the shoulder pain! I could barely bend my arms back to let them go. I'm going to have strap marks for weeks. So Minta's skeleton was a good little porter and carried my luggage straightaway to the new guild hall before I even got my key, and of course she was wound up with all of us in that horrendous long line coming in, running here and there and everywhere and completely uncatchable. Things were just a little bit hectic, so I was way surprised when things just--caught for a moment. It was Tzimfemme -of- course, causing some portal feedback. I swear, she actually bought her holy faithstone just for the bonus gating function to cover up that she can't even cast gate reliably. It's only like the simplest magic to do--ok, -if- you cast magic. I can't do it with my instruments. Song only has the range of sound and magic is worldwide. Should've gone to druid school here instead even though song is shinier. Whatever. I looked back and sure enough she's pulled her hair down and taken out the faithstone. Now what I want to know is when did she re-cut the black sapphires on it? I saw her use that long after Rosemary was gone and the black sapphires still looked all dull. Now they're sparkling. This new world -is- shiny. She spent a good half a minute getting the statuette to work, and then doesn't gate, and gets a look on her face like she stepped in orc poo. Now those two, Minta and Tzimfemme, they've told me what that temple is like and "orc poo" is about the least of it. They chose to build it under the human city, in the sewers! Oh my gods, ew! Minta tried to get me to visit after I learned the song of invulnerability, but does it make my nose invulnerable, no it does not. I don't see why she would be making a face if -she's- so used to it. But then. . .she cackled. Vicious laughter. Worse than usual. Now I'm almost used to her being crazy--why do you think I went to another server altogether in the first place! not that she ever left me alone afterwards--but there was no crazy in this at all, and I was there and my instruments to play a silencing song were not, and how I wish they had been!

Bent, weary as donkeys, grunting out agreements around luggage straps clenched in the teeth, a cable stay reaching up and back against each body's load, the refugees queued before the portal. It reflected identical landscapes on either side, yet on this side, when the refugees' boots scuffed against the carpets, dust only rose a few inches before dropping back to earth, not swirling on any current. Caryatids loomed on all sides, the marble as lustreless as wind-worn quartz. Tzimfemme, one of the few not buckling under a mass of possessions, spun her head around to take in a last look of the lobby. "Rydia," she remarked to the elf just ahead of her in the line, "I will not be displeased to leave." Rydia squeaked agreement around her luggage strap (green leather, studded with seed pearls and one faux emerald, princess-cut) and amplified the statement with her ears, but the naked mage would not have understood even had Rydia's pile of coordinating luggage not blocked the view. The elf resumed her chat with a slight young ranger just ahead of her in the queue, whose gnome-made headband sported wide-angle mirrors to spot attacks from the rear, or earspeak from a bored and luggage-muted bard. Meanwhile Tzimfemme stared through the coils of the crowd, seeing nothing. The line doubled back on itself many times and people's outlines should have flickered, were the portal emitting light. This was not the wastelands, and yet. . . The naked mage was no nearer to an answer for that resonance by the time she and the elves stood before the portal. The other side was chaotic where this one was orderly, people scurrying to and fro, knotting in embraces, hands and ears and mouths fluttering. The elf ranger stepped through and immediately staggered sideways out of sight under the impact of something small and purplish. Minta skittered sideways back into view, eyes locked on the portal as her latest skellie pet shambled into the frame. Rydia's ears straightened just enough for the tips to clear the luggage pile and she reached up to grasp the luggage strap with both hands, spitting the end free. "I'm Rydia!" she declared to the portal's face, and stepped through. Minta sprang up into the air, landed, hopskipped in place, pointed at her pet and Rydia's impedimenta, and skipped several circuits of bard and skellie as the pet unloaded the bard and staggered away with a bony tail held stiffly backwards for balance; Tzimfemme blessed the portal's lack of energy transmissions extending to sonic energy. "I am Tzimfemme," she affirmed, and stepped forward. Two things seared. First, she was not truly Tzimfemme, and the thing that was not Tzimfemme seared--second, someone else -was-. I am Tzimfemme, in one ear, and I am Tzimfemme, in the other, Lobotomy the flail burning in her hand--she stepped forward again and the sensory overload fell back to the levels of normal life. Yes, after the dying world, it was searing, and maybe moreso for Minta's life and enthusiasm shining again, after the time of separation. Why, then, the after-images of white light moving across the field of vision when she turned her head? Why the prickling pain of blood returning to one hand's grip on the flail and not the other?

Not long after Corwin left, Tzimfemme also took her leave, trying and failing not to notice that the darkness was an entity in its own right. It was not bad enough to be incapable of small talk with either Degorram or Kikuyu under normal conditions, but when others were plucking on the strings of the soul and shooting stars. . . .She halted and cast her mind back over the past few minutes. Scientist. Science. All things observable and quantifiable. Now the moving darkness was not a metaphor, but familiar. "Damned black mages," she reiterated. "Weren't you disbanded after that necromancers' quarrel?" The shadows dipped down at shoulder height, the approximation of a shrug, then pasted themselves back in the shapes the light dictated. She crossed her arms. "Ah. Sentinels. Spin on, mad world--eh?" A salute, of sorts. She descended the stairs and re-traced her route out of that section of the Pen Keep, kicking another fallen shard of Snypiuer's costume ahead of her. One last good punt sent the broken flowerpot sailing into the nearest bed of perennials, there to confuse archeologists of future times, before she crossed the grounds to the circular tower. Meanwhile the shadows of the perennials played over the shard. . . At the jump tube, Tzimfemme checked herself, and nearly turned around to seek one of the more conventional forms of ascent; a gnome had been tinkering with the design. Down at gnomish height a box had been bolted to the open jamb, which Tzimfemme knelt to inspect. It was wired into the tube itself and sprouted buttons like mushrooms after a soaking rain--in fact, one button was labeled with the silhouette of a mushroom--but the only ones depressed were a smiling face and a T-square silhouette. She tested the airflow with her hand and, finding that it responded with the usual force, gulped and stepped out into space. Up she drifted, and as she grasped the handholds at the appropriate floor, a side-mounted vent opened and blasted her onto terra firma. Tzimfemme blinked. "That's new," she began to say, but was cut off by another new feature. Metal meshes descended and cut off the doorway, the smiling face button popped out, a spring-labeled button popped in, the fans lost power, and a gnome flashed into view and out again, falling. Fans roared to life, and the gnome shot back briefly into view, now flying upwards shouting "wheeeee!". Silence. "Wheeeeee!" Fans. "wheeeeee!" Silence. "Wheeeeeee!" Fans. "wheeeeee!" Tzimfemme shouted past the mesh, "Dare I ask?" "Wheeeeeeeee am testin'" Fans. "wheeeeeee the failsafes" Silence. "Wheeeeee is FUN!" Fans. "wheeeee!"

Tzimfemme had relaxed a bit once the pocket watch had come out--so she hadn't been hallucinating a scent of turtle, then--only to whip back out of reflex as it proved to be a clockwork device. Still, it proved itself to be an unusually fit-for-purpose clockwork device, and so she leaned back within the presumed blast radius to better witness the first aid. Not too close, of course. Keep the field sterile. She raised an eyebrow when the needle slipped into Snypiuer's wound without any outcry, then realized: contact anesthetic liquid on the cotton ball. This clockwork was _very_ fit for purpose. It was almost disappointing to step back again once it had finished, but this feline needed his personal space. In lieu of that, she snagged a post-it note and quill from the table and jotted down a few lines. "Now, what's this about me paying what to whom again? Be patient with me, mind; I'm good with science. But bad with money." At that, Tzimfemme raised an elbow to jab Snypiuer-as-Wyvern and jar that avaricious look off of his be-coned face, but reeled it back down to admit Degorram. The newcomer spoke quickly and to the point, and Tzimfemme was glad for the luck of having picked up a sticky note, for she could attach it to Corwin's arm as he exited: Would be very pleased to see your lab once you have settled in; plenty of space in Pen Keep for duplicate lab or portal to more comfortable locale; send notice to circular tower, vitreous lab, or drop in at any time. Degorram sank her head in her hands, shoving the blindfold up and almost off, stray locks jutting out between headband and fingers. "What a week," sighed the shapeshifter, addressing the desk as much as the others. "Did I miss much?" "Not much, starchild. Grats on the promotion by the way, I hadn't heard. Probably didn't _listen_ in the first place and you announced it anyway, but still, grats." ". . .what did you call me?" Tzimfemme blinked hard, thrust her head forward slightly to get a better look at Degorram. "Er. Starchild?" She tipped her head to one side for another angle. "Meteorite, Keren of the Light? . . .I'm babbling. Also there's stars in my eyes." Scrunching her eyes shut, shaking her head like a dog with ear mites, opening them again--"'What a week' indeed. Giddiness. What say we mutually retire and refresh ourselves?"

"Eh, Snypiuer, I followed _you_ here," Tzimfemme added, from just outside the door. There was a space behind the sentence, a gap just long enough to fit the word 'boss' into, and add a deferential bobbing of the chin. Instead she transposed herself, doorway, and Snypiuer to end up inside the office and out of the reach of Snypiuer's costume, the wings of which had already swept a stack of IOUs to the floor atop several other piles of previous IOU blunders. She leaned back from the ankles as Snypiuer spun around trying to figure out how she'd done that, his traffic-cone-snout nearly poking her eye out. "Hate being short," she appended, rippled back upright, and spotted the cat smack-dab in the center of Wyvern's (former) (how strange _that_ sounded) desk, surveying the clutter with. . .not feline indifference, no, interest, yet a shield of objectivity behind that. She rubbed her face with one hand. It _felt_ familiar, that gaze. Facial muscles tense around the eyes, no interest and no tension in the jaw. It was what she wore, dispassionate in the lab, when the lab coat was no longer an option to wear. "Oh." She kept on mouthing sounds beyond that for a few seconds, until she heard herself and cut them off with that same hand. "Snypiuer, we--No! Later. Him first." Tzimfemme did bob her chin deferentially, then, but to the cat. "Hello, fellow researcher. Have you the power of speech or should I brace for psychic communication?" ***** (OOC: Yes, a stand-alone story is perfectly fine as an application, but the acceptance RP tends to migrate into an office-like setting regardless of the form. This won't happen with all serious stories, just the ones in this sub-forum. Any story that is complete and needs to not be treated like an RP will be read and left un-smudged in the Assembly Room.)

"Why Are We Running?" Rydia's ears repeated the question in earspeak, the better to be heard over the stampede they'd found themselves caught up within, but Tzimfemme didn't understand that, so she had to repeat the shout! "I don't--I Don't Know! Oh, Forget This Shouting Nonsense," and Tzimfemme lunged to the left, leading with her shoulder, plowing through an insectile runner, wading double-time through a squad of halflings (sending two airborne although not aiming to punt), grabbing briefly onto a golem's hip to pivot and vault past, landing on its far side adjacent to Rydia. The naked mage fell back into her goatish, stiff-legged gait, keeping pace with Rydia's quicker running steps. "I was rubbing someone's nose in his writings, held his neck while he tried to shake me off," she crooked her fingers into the spinal grip, "cantering and bucking the truth of it, you know the drill, then bam, I'm here. You?" "Just emptying out a mop bucket. . ." Rydia lifted her hands, and yes, she was still carrying it. Dingy water slopped around in the inner rim, splashing when another short one tried to sprint at just that instant and headbutted the underside. "Have you got anything?" Tzimfemme sucked her cheeks inwards, sharply, then grinned a tight and wary smile, pink with a few drops of blood. "No strands on either of us. Got some stars in my eyes, white, but--" Rydia's wings materialized in an eyeblink and flung themselves out flat, buffeting Tzimfemme in the face. "What in buggery was that!" snapped the naked mage. One ear pointed forward into the scrum forming, around Degorram it was now to be seen, then down as Rydia's protections swept her into the air, fleeing danger. . . "Nimball. . ." . . .only to be pile-driven back to earth by a squadron of dragons who had chosen a similar approach. Tzimfemme managed a full-chested, shoulder-dropping huffy sigh without breaking stride. It was the sort of sigh which pushes up the non-existent sleeves, scrawls the line in the sand, and draws back the fist. The fist, at least, existed. The brawl broke around Degorram like surf. Glimpses of Tzimfemme, and other familiar Pennites, tumbling through the melee trading blows and possessive shrieks, a ring of avarice orbiting the Nimball™--it invited her in! But leaping in and cracking a few skulls, that would require relinquishing the coveted Nimball™ and that was just not done. She clutched it closer (the Nimball™ squealed in distress) against hands which tried to rip it away, backed up a step, and brushed against the feathers of an angelic being of-- "Thanks! \o_o///" Rydia waved an ear with good cheer and stepped back, the Nimball™ safely in her mitts! Degorram tensed for a spring only to receive a sharp, insistent tap upon the shoulder, and then a quick spin of the shoulders to face the new opponent. "Cutting in!" Tzimfemme announced, and she and Degorram fell into a sparring match as Rydia turned away, cradling the Nimball™ and oblivious to. . .

On the floor below, Tzimfemme steps aside as a football helmet shimmies from the base of the stairwell, propelled by a suspiciously vibrating attachment, and by fits and jerks drags itself across the intersection and out of sight. "No. . .No, I don't," she says, and yet can't stop herself peering into the stairwell. The backside of the speedo, and the backside of Snypiuer, wobble slightly above the floor as he tries to rise to all fours. Well, it's too late not to pretend to the burning desire to know. . . "Don't tell me the 'Women Against Speedo's' have started another gotcha campaign," she offers, flexing her fingers. "You'd almost think they aimed to grab ass anywhere the recipient would be off-balance." "Don't be ridiculous!" retorts Snypiuer, gesturing from the floor like a toastmaster, flapping his pseudo-wings, forgetting that he was using that arm for support, and once again making a tripod of himself via his face. Up went Tzimfemme's eyes. "Mmm mph! . . ." By the time she'd indulged that fit of eye-rolling, he'd pushed himself to a kneeling position. The naked mage crossed her arms. "Of--course. 'Twas ridiculous to suggest the WAS would object--" "NAY! Could ANY woman object!" More gesticulation. The difference between an ordinary man and a Man of Terra was only the scale of belief, and the difference between those two groups and Snypiuer was plausibility. Tzimfemme reached out for his wrist, then, and reeled Snypiuer upwards with a twirl, and framed his face with her hands while trying to follow whatever blink-dog thought process had led to this. . .this. "You. . .came downstairs. Note to self: see if one-way quality of hot air jump tubes can be distilled in magical form and applied to staircases, with allowances for--bugger it I'll work it out later." Now it was his turn to wear the baffled expression. "I wanted to go upstairs and have a chat with Wyvern in the Recruiter's Office and--you didn't. . ." She pushed him to arm's length and took in the entire outfit at once. He had. "Good gods. . .I want to go upstairs and chat with you, then, once you retrieve your horns." She pointed her thumb backwards over her shoulder, helmetwards.

It would fit as a lyric to a forgotten Wall of Voodoo track. Stan Ridgway would approve. I certainly do.

That's odd. I do remember the signature in question and that image wasn't it. This is sized to be more of a background image than a long rectangular signature and the sig was cropped from this (but had the stylish horizontal lines added back on). These days, I am resizing images before I upload them with ye olde resize command(e) in IrfanView (ctrl-R for the shortcut). Gives a handy dialogue box where you can choose dimensions in pixels and what-not, and also allows you to keep the ratio and just change one measure. Given that you have hosted it at Photobucket, though, you can tweak the size of it there. Above the image in your album is an "Edit" tag, and that goes straight to a page with a Resize utility of its own. There IS a command in bbcode to resize images on the go, but that command isn't working in signatures at the moment. Trying to find where to turn that on. . . (EDIT: Oh joy. Guess how you expand the list of usable bbcode commands? XML. *headdesk* For future reference, it's (width)x(height), expressed in pixels.) (I am making no progress whatsoever on the learning of xml, which is needed to fix the look of this place. :/ )

The more I poke around with this, the more I don't remember. . . If I just upload some less wide/tall icons, will the page compress a bit, or is it being told to display such broad topic bars by some other element? (If it's any consolation, we were by no means the only board to be blindsided by the sudden loss of skins.)

His corpse had--he had thudded onto the tiles when the clearing-house slaves yanked the coverlet out from under him. Still wet with his dying, yet they tossed it out the window and to the waiting cart nonetheless. She no longer had the words for that. Pallet stripped; pallet dismantled. Book-box emptied; book-box dismantled. Cypress trunk emptied; cypress trunk under the pry-bar, but one slave laid a hand on the other's arm, and cypress trunk carried out whole. All the rest was fed through the window, cloth or parchment, clay or plank. She rested against the inner edge of the cart, grim and waiting. One slave pulled in the donkey's stead, the other heaved the cart from behind, but still she and the cart juddered every few steps over worn spots in both wooden wheels, and rippling sounds of clay jars sliding back and forth over every bump echoed in her ears. No words for that. No words for the slaves' words funneled upwards by alley walls. "Buggerin' camel-faced WATCH WHERE YOU'RE DRIVIN' THAT BULLOCK almost took me foot off--" "--thinks he's so high and mighty, he's got an animal to pull his cart for him--" "--drivin' for the Alexandrian toff, he is--" "--is he now? Well, wouldn't you like to go pick over _his_ estate-at-the-time-of-decease--" "--I'd like to not 'ave to wait for it!" Coarse, living laughter, and the jars clanked to a halt as they set down its shafts beside the wickerwork gate. The inset door whisked open, and the bitter-faced woman who emerged dipped her hands into the cart without so much as a greeting, picking apart a flaking scroll of his parchment, and perhaps she could speak-- "What's these strange short lines?" --perhaps not. "They all look the same to me, lady. Give me 'glyphics, then I might be able to tell you." The slave standing between the cart shafts only shrugged. The bitter-faced woman weighed the bundle in her hands, counted the planks with a glance, dropped parchment and picked up damp and stiffening cloth. "Ugh! It's still wet! What am I paying you for?!" "Not washin', lady!" More laughter, male. No words for this that she ever wanted to say. Under her appraising hands, the cart's contents seemed to organize themselves. Planks migrated to either side of the cart; jars lay straight, wedged in between; cloth and parchment tumbled into the empty cypress chest. She lowered the lid and turned to the clearing-house slaves. "Six." "Lady, you are not serious. Not a coin less than eleven!" "'Lady' first of all? Flatter me with a title? Seven." "'Right then," he drew in breath, "me flowery free-born lady--" "Stow it," but her eyes glinted, "seven and a tip." "Tip first." She tipped her head towards the door. "We've just had a very important visitor." "Important enough to fetch the wagon?" "Yes." ". . .Done. Seven and a tip." The bitter-faced woman stepped through the door, pulled it shut, and pushed open the gate. They took hold of either shaft of the wagon and pulled it out to the alley, one hauling harder than the other. She had no words, and they only needed a few-- "The Alexandrian has visited us. He's here right now." --they trotted down the alley, hauling the wagon. The bitter-faced woman stepped to the cart, drew it into the yard, shut the gate. She followed the chest to the room where the Alexandrian lay. He clutched--his corpse clutched--strips of cloth and lumps of colored clay; blue beetle, black quill, red heart. She could have spoken to him, once. The bitter-faced woman fetched parchment from the chest, sliced it into ribbons, bound the clay charms closer to the corpse with those words.

(puzzled look) Not that I don't love the submissions, especially the one-upping of 'ridonkulous' which points towards a system for one-upping and intensifying a lot of these terms--because I do--but why is it that a tmesis (that's the fancy term for splitting a word and dropping another word into the gap to make one long compounded word) is so frequently used for a negative adjective? I know of 'splendiferous' (adj., aesthetically appealing, with extra ruffles and flourishes. "You filled the room with roses?! What a splendiferous gesture!") but not too many other positives.

You may be vibrating in tune to your own class notes about communication models from six years ago, so generously shared with us--that was the seed which led to learning.

Precision and symbolism do not make a perfect, or common, substitute for concatenation. It is possible to choose, when communication with all is going to be impossible, whether to communicate with one reader precisely or for one hundred to get the gist of what you're trying to say. Among the things other people can't perceive is how much you had to leave out to make yourself understood. (This is related to how readers can enjoy a work which the author is convinced is utter crap.) It might not be just you, but it might not be everyone either. And a few picked up recently by the best method--watching other people's mistakes: If you're going to take a stand against the current truth, do it in a field without absolute truth, not one which has them, e.g. mathematics. ". . .For the moralist has made an unforgivable assumption; namely, that he knows better than his reader; nor does a good intention save him. If the pill is not sufficiently sugared it will not be swallowed. If the moral is terrible enough he will be regarded as inhuman; and if the edge of his parable cuts deeply enough, he will be crucified." --William Golding, "Fable", The Hot Gates

Clap That's not the way hands were meant to meet! Stretch your arms and let me hold your wrists gently, bring your palms together. Not so slow. Try again. Yes, it makes a noise! That's called a clap, now pat your palms on mine! Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man-- Why are you a baker's man? I don't know!

Tap The metronome will now outrun the pendulum The left hand fondle the right, backs slithering, warm The metronome will now outthrum the pendulum The tapes will tighten, skein of skin will tauten the pawn The metronome will now outgun the pendulum

Ohh, how clever--he's gone and invented picture-in-picture. --Rydia, singing pointy ear shiny hunter