First things first: We need a narrator. Do we have any volunteers for a narrator?

This is already like DnD.

The forum is full of characters who have skill profiles. Original posters are like summoners of monsters (the posing of a problem). Then folks converge to attack, befriend or disenchant the problem.

I'll be Nil. A horribly burnt child who cloaks himself in black robes and a mask, who rides in back of the cart and prepares coffee, tea and other pick me ups to sustain effort in the face of absurdity (i mean adversity).

Edit:

Nil ought to be a religious caste of being that has interchangeable members (copies) of itself. So there are many burnt children who conceal themselves in cloaks all which have the same name. We are all Nil, made in the same burning ritual, trained to do exactly was Nils do: serve coffee and tea and pick me ups in the back of the cart. Maybe we also know how to shoe horses.

Bimble is the son of a Swedish midwife and an only child. He never knew his father. Whenever Bimble asked his mother about him she would only say that he died many years ago. She never said how or exactly when he died. When pressed about it she would become flustered and abruptly remove herself saying “I just remembered...” and trail off in muted mumbling. She did this countless times over the years. Who is she trying to fool? Bimble would ask himself. Clearly she was hiding something, but what?

The other mystery, which everyone who encountered Bimble would ponder, and that could potentially be related to his father, was the extraordinary size of his hands. They were enormous, but at the same time extremely nimble. Even though they were the size of dinner plates he could thread a needle as adeptly as the most experienced and skilled seamstress.

Growing up, the one thing that defined Bimble, besides his gargantuan hands, was his complete lack of grit. Whatever he put his mind to, no matter how insignificant or crushingly important, he would become instantly discouraged at the slightest setback and drop whatever he was trying to accomplish. As a result of this he never got very good at anything. He had a wide range of interests though, from juggling to magic. Well, actually he just had those two interests. As for magic, he dropped out of wizardry school after one of his professors caught him using an invisibility spell in the girl's shower room. Apparently the spell wasn’t strong enough to cover his huge hands entirely.

His mother gave him a juggling kit (three balls and an instruction booklet) for Christmas one year. He vowed to himself that he would master the art by the year's end to prove his grit. He gave up before the end of January of course, but he could juggle by that point.

A late bloomer in most respects, romance was no exception. Bimble’s first sexual encounter was with an English art student that he met at a village barn dance. Though considerably older and possessing a brash egocentric personality she was nevertheless attractive and a willing partner in both dance and sex, though she was oddly controlling in the latter. A sign of past sexual abuse, Bimble thought. The roll-in-the-hay (behind the barn and literally in the hey) was understandably awkward being his first time. Other things that robbed from the pleasure of it was all the mead they’d drank that night and the fact that nighter of them liked the other.

Character development to be continued...

As for magic, he dropped out of wizardry school after one of his professors caught him using an invisibility spell in the girl's shower room. Apparently the spell wasn’t strong enough to cover his huge hands entirely. — praxis

This is exactly a training task assigned in some spy guilds, to infiltrate the local whore houses using invisibility but the prevalence of guard dogs has always been problematic. Finding and disenchanting magic doilies and wards is by no means a piece of cake but the dog problem is a whole other kettle of fish. And don't even talk about doilies on dogs... spy folk might as well quit while they're behind.

____________

Nil starred blankly into his cup of tea.

Bimble drinks dragonwell green tea, a habit he developed from serving it to his master every day while in training, but that’s another story...

One day while roaming aimlessly through the countryside after his mother threw him out of the house Bimble happened upon an old beggar. It should be noted, by the way, that Bimble’s mother evicted him because he was 15 years old at the time, and back in those days that was considered middle-aged. It simply became too embarrassing. Anyway, this beggar that Bimble met on the road was quite old and looked to be from the Far East. Not wanting to part with any of his money Bimble put his head down as he passed the beggar. "You lost," said the beggar as Bimble tried to pass. "Oh, how would you know?" said Bimble. "I know, you lost. Me show you! You come follow me." Not having anything better to do, Bimble followed the beggar and shortly after became Master Zeo's (part-time beggar) devoted student.

Master Zeo knew of Bimble's grit deficiency and therefore didn't teach him in a conventional manner. In fact, he didn't teach him anything at all and just used Bimble as a servant. After awhile Bimble became frustrated and eventually confronted the master. "Master, I've been doing your bidding for five years like a servant, or no, like a slave, and you haven't taught me anything." "I teach you patience," said the master. "I've been patient!" "No, I show you patient," said Zeo, and then gave Bimble a karate chop that knocked him unconscious.

Things went back to normal for a few years after that incident, then out of the blue Master Zeo asked Bimble, "what you know?" Not quite sure what the master was asking but excited that he finally took an interest, Bimble said "I know lots of stuff. What do you mean?" "What you know!!" Zeo asked again. Thinking about it for a second, Bimble replied "Well, I know how to juggle and I know a little magic." "You combine and become a-okay fighter," replied the master. "How do I do that?," asked Bimble. "You go now," said the master. Not wanting to miss his chance Bimble immediately left. He would have left at the mere hint of a dismissal.

"Thank God I'm rid of that old phony," thought Bimble as he packed his things and left the masters shack. In time, Bimble did combine his juggling and magic and became an okay fighter. He learned a spell that would transfix an opponent and leave them open to attack. He would have to start juggling and then yell "mesmeradi," then he could throw juggling balls at his opponents. He could materialize a new ball with the magical incantation "juggal mea neo spherico." Unfortunately, that spell is kind of a mouthful and hinders rapid-fire. It's also rather irritating for anyone within earshot to hear that repeated over and over again in quick succession.

Now that Bimble was a fighter and ready to make a name for himself he dreamed of quest and glory.

Bimble was seized and knew instantly he was in the grip of a night terror, paralyzed.

His own shadow twisting around him, creeping upwards and around his neck.

A silhouette of a figure appeared on the ceiling, as if caste by his bed-stand candle light.

"You must find the waters of Sahul that you may know your true face. Then you will die that I might live."

Bimble awoke, gasping for air in a room of complete darkness.

With trembling hands, Bimble reaches into his pocket and pulls out an icosagon die, then casts it for a 7. "Fuck!"

The icosagon glowed like a faceted piece of coal. Silence broke with a thudding knock and light poured through a door.

"What in tarnation is going on up here?" @Wheatley, the bartend and musical narrator for the Dungeon Master's Tavern, stood in the door way holding an oil lantern.

The room would have looked unexceptional if not for the pallid face of a horrified youth staring into the ruddy blotched face of a stout mustachioed innkeep. Shadows danced on the walls as the lamp light flickered.

Vaccum decay had been initiated by a non-deterministic irregularity in the fabric of space time 22 to the 12th power miles away from Dungeon Master's Tavern. This would give the denizens of the world 2 weeks before the speed of causality would sublime them unknowingly.

10:09 AM

Refusing to accept that chance could determine his fate, Bimble ran. He ran past the bartend and in so doing accidentally knocked the oil lantern out of his hand. It crashed on the floor and exploded like a lazy molotov cocktail. Unbeknownst to Bimble, the still glowing icosagon die lay in that fire, and just as the long-forgotten proverb tells, “A die that is heated can be cheated,” Bimble’s ultimate fate continued to be indeterminate.

Bimble believed that he was doomed, however, and continued to run as though he was running from his own shadow, mostly because he actually was running from his own shadow. He soon wearied of running though, and that’s when the grief started to set in. He thought that the end would come abruptly but realized after a while that the Night Shadow would take him by inches. He diminished in all but imperceptible degrees, and his grief developed in large stages but with equally regular progression.

The first stage was denial.

A light in the distance drew Bimble toward it. The brazier next to the town's well created an island of the known. This memory of town held up and stabilized his sense of place. But there was a pall of silence, as if nothing outside of what was touched by the light of the brazier existed. The contrast was both deafening and blinding.

"It is silly to run." A voice spoke as if immediately behind him. Bimble turned around but saw no one but a few shambling hollyhocks.

"You cannot see me because of the direction of the light but you would not recognize me anyway. We are one and the same in a way and nothing alike in another. You carry me around like you carry your feet.

Bimble shivered in cold perspiration. "What demon is this..." he thought to himself.

"Do not interrupt!" the voice hardened. "We don't have much time. I have given you my grief and it is no trifle. This gambit is a risk of desperation and so you must feel it in the pit of your core that both of us maybe free before the end. Inside is a wound caused by the death of what you would've loved had you come to know it."

Bimble could feel the strain of gravity within, a gut-twisting funnel of iron rising from the pit of his stomach to his throat. A body-collapsing anguish stained him.

"If you would destroy this feeling you must take me to the waters of Sahul. You must drag the grief with you like a leaden shadow and stare into the water's surface. Then I and the grief will be gone."

Gameplay notes:
I finished reading Oracle Night yesterday, a story essentially about how one random event can drastically change a life. The main character in the story is a writer, and in the story he writes a story, so it becomes a story within a story for a portion of the story. I mention this because of a couple of remarkable coincidences between Oracle Night and the D&D gameplay here. In Oracle Night, there’s a somewhat mysterious old asian guy with poor English who at one point gives Sid, the writer, a single karate chop that incapacitates him during an altercation. The same thing happens in the D&D gameplay, and it happens before I read it in the book. I might simply chalk this up to common cultural stereotypes but, as the title suggests, a prophetic quality is embedded within the Oracle Night story.

I have two theories to account for the coincidences. The first theory, which echos the theory in Oracle Night, is that when someone writes a story they can become a kind of conduit or oracle, if you will, unconsciously piecing together disparate bits of experience to formulate a prediction that is ordinary thought to be merely a fictional story. This seems plausible because the mind is largely nothing more than a prediction machine, some believe. Oracle Night is the fourth Auster book that I’ve read in a row and so my Auster intuition may have developed to the point of having prophetic power.

The other theory is that when someone writes a story they can become a different sort of conduit. They can, for example, become a conduit of life or death in the case of Schrödinger's cat, collapsing the wave function and determining its fate. It could be that this D&D gameplay shifted all of us to an alternate universe where Oracle Night features an old asian guy similar to Master Zeo. Because this theory could be true, I suggest excluding non-deterministic spacetime anomalies from any further gameplay. With the virus/economy things are bad enough as it is.

It could be that this D&D gameplay shifted all of us to an alternate universe where Oracle Night features an old asian guy similar to Master Zeo. Because this theory could be true, I suggest excluding non-deterministic spacetime anomalies from any further gameplay. With the virus/economy things are bad enough as it is. — praxis

Coincidence is an explanation for the parallel you describe also, but not very exciting or spooky. You've provided a new means to shift the content of this thread because we can go back and edit that which has not really carried into the future yet by someone elses acknowledgement. Who would notice unless they were constantly re-reading? New authors/readers would have different stories from old authors/readers unless they reread the content frequently.

That kind of extinction of the thread (by vaccum decay wave) is not necessarily a bad thing though. I explain it as just trying to set a limit on the boundary of our play or as motivation to continue or end. All decisions are reversible by whatever proposed mechanic. There are really as many get out of jail free cards as you'd care to use in the world of fiction.

I was thinking about Tinker Bell effect today but need to read up on it. "Every time someone says 'I do not believe in fairies', somewhere there's a fairy that falls down dead." There is a moral qualm (just a feeling) about torturing fictional characters. We are priming and exercising torture circuits in doing so, or it reveals something about the pscyhology of the author. But I want to pursue the idea that if a imaginary character is being tortured and folks have the ability to relieve that torture by changing fate, as participatory authors, are they at all motivated to? How much work does it take for an audience to invest in a character? Is there an audience of more than two here? Mysteries.

The gods of the Ancient Greeks are looming, moving and transmuting characters like clay. When do their works become alive?

You've provided a new means to shift the content of this thread because we can go back and edit that which has not really carried into the future yet by someone elses acknowledgement. Who would notice unless they were constantly re-reading? New authors/readers would have different stories from old authors/readers unless they reread the content frequently. — Nils Loc

Oracle Night includes a time travel storyline. I can’t help wondering, in a semi-inebriated state, if you knew that or if this is another instance of coincidence.

Oracle Night includes a time travel storyline. I can’t help wondering, in a semi-inebriated state, if you knew that or if this is another instance of coincidence. — praxis

These ideas are very common but they're dressed up in different ways. Maybe we can say there are archetypal patterns which shift into metaphor/analogy. Your brain is taking a structure underlying one thing to map another thing and its lighting up associations.

We impose upon events a synthesis of cause and effect which suit us. The events happen as they do because they make sense that way. All of this is probably unconscious to some degree. The coincidence might be a confabulation, like a sense of deja vu, seeing data in noise, apophenia...

Don't go too far down the rabbit hole. No psychedlic mushrooms. Tea is best.

“I’m fine, really, just a bit of the blues. All I need is a good night's sleep, a spot of tea in the morning, and I’ll be right as rain.” Bimble replied to a fellow passenger who commented on Bimble’s downtrodden appearance as he boarded the ship. The truth was that he would not be right as rain, or right as sunshine, or right as anything else until he dealt with the shadow that tormented him, and time was running out.

He was a nervous wreck by this point, plagued by grief and relentless panic attacks. Not being able to concentrate, he lost the ability to fight. In his diminished condition, the juggling/mesmeradi spell would only work on small animals. He used what ability he had though, and secured a position on a merchant ship headed for the mysterious waters of Sahul. The tall wooden galleon had a bad rat infestation that Bimble promised to solve in exchange for passage. He could efficiently mesmerize the rodents with juggling and the mesmeradi spell, knock them out with a juggling ball, and then toss the poor unconscious vermin overboard. It was a humiliating step down from the glory of being a heroic fighter but these were desperate times for Bimble.

He slept remarkably well the first night aboard ship for some reason. The sea must agree with him, he thought. Well rested, he left the cramped cabin that was assigned to him and headed for the top deck to find some tea. He overheard that there was a cart that sold stimulating beverages there.

He eventually found the cart in a corner of the aft deck. Approaching it he saw that there was a small cloaked figure tending the cart, no larger than a child, and wearing a mask. The child-like figure nodded to him as he approached.

“Do you have Dragonwell green tea?” Bimble asked.

“Of course!” said the cart-tender, “Only the finest and brewed to perfection with imported spring water from Zhangjiajie, and served in a Ming Dynasty china cup.”

“Really?”

“No. This is what we serve,” said the cart-tender as he flicked a small scroll of parchment at Bimble. The scroll bounced off Bimble’s face and landed on the deck.

He picked it up and while perusing the little menu said, “I haven’t had such an easy time of it lately, you know. Just last week I–” Bimble was interrupted by the child in the cart.

“I’m gonna stop you right there. What does this say?” The child asked Bimble while pointing to the sign above his head.

Bimble looked at the sign and with an exaggerated French accent mockingly replied, “Cafe Nihilistique,” and then commented, “A bit foofy and pretentious for a rundown rat-infested merchant ship, if you asked me.”

“It’s not French, imbecile. The point is that nowhere on the sign does it say ‘ships counselor’. Cry a river to someone else and on your own time. I’ve got a cart to run.” Said the cart-tender.

“Fine.” Said Bimble as he continued to read the tiny menu that listed the following selections.

Arabica Absurda - light roast
Sisyphean Sumatra - dark roast
Green Gambit - Chilean non-organic green tea
Pirates Pekoe - black tea

Thinking that it might help to try lightening the mood of the exchange, Bimble said in his best pirate-speak, “Arrrr, me hearty, I’ll have me a mug of ye Pirates Pekoe brew!”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“This isn’t a pleasure cruise, rat-catcher. There are some rough customers onboard and if they hear you carrying on as you have you’ll be twenty thousand leagues under the sea by nightfall.” Said the cart-tender.

“You speak like an adult, with your fancy-schmancy literary references and arrogant tone,” Bimble said.

“You speak like a child.”

Becoming exasperated, Bimble said, “You know, there’s a part in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that reminds me of–” Bimble was distracted by a rapid tugging on the back of his shirt. He turned around and saw a small cloaked figure identical to the cart-tender. It shoved a mug, presumably the Pirates Pekoe that he’d ordered only moments before, into his hand. It then held up the other hand palm up.

Taking the hint, Bimble put a coin in the new cart-tenders hand. It didn’t move. Bimble put another coin in its hand. Speaking so quickly that it sounded like one word, it said, “Thanks, come again.” And with unnatural speed disappeared in a blur.

The business done, Bimble headed below deck to start his work, but after a half-dozen steps turned around and with a raised voice asked, “How did you know that I’m a rat-catcher?”

The cart-tender remained silent. Then duplicate cloaked children started to come out from behind every corner of the deck, all staring at Bimble. With a chill rolling down his spine, Bimble muttered, “Nevermind,” and quickly departed.

It's really good. Wish I could make mine as enjoyable but writing is like trying to collapse Bimble's superpositions. The wave never collapses as one wishes it to.

I wonder if any of the following tales refer to titles of books in the story itself.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick or Billy Bud
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Joseph Conrad's A Tale of the Forecastle

I had to read about Captain Nemo's motivation.
______________

"Yeoren! Bring rat-catcher! Now! I'll have em chained to the hold if e won't do is job. The rats and Nils can ave him."

A large brown rat was squeeing and chattering away in the captain's book case, chewing the spine of a favored book, The Phantom Atlas.

"Yeoren! A ship full of donkey's knaves! I'll do it meself."

A wooden laundry paddle flew through the air. With a shrieking squeak, books tumbled, pages fluttered and the rat vanished.

Captain Luda would have been a handsome chap if he didn't want to appeal to his men by unhygienic imitation in looks and speech, like a scurvy dog, or so he'd tell himself. After years of sailing the high and lower seas on his beloved ship, Erromander, he slowly lost the will to wash. The rats didn't help at all. Word below deck was that the ship's wood had quite a flavor judging by the scent, of smoke and mushrooms, and that sooner or later the critters would eat a hole in the hull itself causing everyone to go down the the ship.

Yeoren's grimy face slid out behind the cabin door. "Sorry Sir! Was fixing the scuttlebutt leaks again."

The captain sighed. "What are those damn Nils for if they can't do anything useful. Teach um what needs doing. We need the rat-catcher to step up his game. Have em deliver his catch count to the galley at sundown."

"Yes sir... But the Nils, they... only do coffee and tea sir, it's in their contract. Custom tier service is not in the budget."

Luda gritted his teeth as he pulled on his dusty beard. "Then get um to bring me a cup o special blend 77. Go."

On deck a crowd had gathered around Bimble.

[unknown] is a mute quadriplegic. Being unable to either talk or write, his history is a mystery. Someone will have to push his wheelchair for him.

The true name of [unknown] if he exists, is Michael Mod. But for the purposes of this story no one ought to know that the name of [unknown] is Michael Mod. His caretaker, Yahad, an exceedingly beautiful young man, speaks for him.

He is from Devon, where the stony outcrops of Dartmoor, the tors, hide archaic secrets. But all readers must disregard this information.

“They’re not ordinary rats!” Bimble yelled as the crew converged on him.

“They’re huge, for one thing. I saw one the other day that I mistook for that guy at first,” he said while pointing to a small hairy man with a narrow face, small beady eyes, a long nose, and sitting in a wheelchair.

Bimble noticed that the little man in the wheelchair looked a bit wounded by what he’d just said so quickly added, “Uh, it was below deck and it’s really dark down there.”

“Also, they can cast spells with their squeaky little voices,” he exclaimed, “They hexed me so that I can only conjure sticky cheese balls. Have you ever tried to juggle with sticky cheese balls?”

“It’s impossible!” he yelled hysterically.

The Nils were enjoying the spectacle. They enjoyed seeing the bumbling fool Bimble squirm so much that they made more copies of themselves in order to watch the action from all angles. They had seen everything leading up to the event, of course. How the crew had grown increasingly impatient with Bimble's lackluster performance as a rat-catcher. The last straw was when the rats had eaten through the floorboards of the cellar and all the jugs of Jamaican rum had crashed to pieces on the deck below. The rats had lapped up the rum that pooled around the broken bottles, and these rats were mean drunks. The drunken rats attacked the crew, scratching and biting. It wasn’t pretty. But the fact that there wasn’t a drop of alcohol left aboard ship was what really sealed Bimbles' fate. He was a walking dead man.

But there was something else.

I would cut it at "But there was something else." Holding to the possibility that the rogue wave is the expedient we need to further the story along to its end, if it could ever get there. After that I feel like the tempo accelerated and I felt impatience.

The same impatience that caused the those things we fucking hate, non-deterministic space-time anomalies.

non-deterministic space-time anomalies — Nils Loc

They can be potent.

But there was something else... the booming voice of Captain Luda.

"All hands!"

Bimble looked down at his hands as the jeering motley crowd of weathered sailors broke away and began to assemble port side in a straight queue.

"And you, tea imps, to the patron's deck. U're not my crew." Or anyone else's for that matter. Luda whispered the latter to himself, waited for the dark children to leave then addressed everyone in his captain's voice. "As you well ken, the rats arr worst as ever. Man's affliction the father would say, that one's home is another's food, always til the end of days. But fret not about the rum, costly as it is. We will gain new fortunes in the weeks ahead." Luda locked eyes on the rat-catcher. "This lucky git is not our curse but a means for hope. Look favorable on those who would fix what we cannot. For we have tried, a dozen dozen days and more to wipe the vermin out. So give um the benefit of your doubts before tossing licks. Besides, he is a jugglar. Better than ol Limon, whose tricks are as common as gullshit. Show us jugglar, Bimmy or.. is it Bamble, a bit of fun. "

"It's Bimble, like 'Thimble' but with a 'bee'." Bimble reached into his rucksack to reveal two spheres, one red and one blue and began to juggle. The sailors queue relaxed into idle crowd of onlookers.

"One falls, blue balls
"Red rose, round."

Bimble repeated the words. He heard laughs, snorts and snickers.

"One rose, red rod
Blue falls, down."

Suddenly the spheres seem to defy the motions of Bimble's hands, as if they were levitating on their own, and multiplying. The speed of the spheres were lost in multiplicity and a continuous magentic circle of flame. The purple light dazzled in the sailors eyes between utterances of awe.

"That is almost as good as the dancing Sheilas." said Limon.

Yahad watched closely as his charge blinked his eyes in a rapid pattern.

“Indeed, Sir, I couldn’t agree more."

I think JerzeyFlight ought to be a character in this world but only if he could do the meaningless, inane, work of writing himself into it. He ought to be himself, swift and exacting in judgment concerning worthy intellects and prolific with language. Maybe he could war against religious cults in order to save the world from a return to a prophesied dark age. A war of the rationalistas against the irrationalistas. Hopefully there will be a lot of blood because humans cannot get enough of it.

He ought to have an opinion about the existence of the unicorn, a strange and exotic horse-like creature from distant lands, which carries a spiral sword on its head for competitive sexual selection.

JerzeyFlight! bearing on his head the swift piercing screw-needle of a preternatural kind of horse sense. That knobby knife of power! The cutting agent of just good rational sense that puts any house or stable in proper order.


:monkey:

His archenemy should be Gus Lamarch, a Brazilian highborn ubermensch who possesses the power to corral a mass of mindless minions, and with a mere fib or two, send them out to slaughter the Nihilistas in holy jihad.

Lamarch and JF are impressive, eloquent, and dramatic characters. Egoists or polemicists for good or ill. Worthy of an epic adventure.

The metaphysics of Plotinus is either an influence or an influencer of Gnostic mythos. Why is the the shaft of primordial light being split such a strong and pervasive, popular mythic divine conception. Newton is pictured with a crystal refractor. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon has it as album art. Noble Dust used it in his poem as naming it a godhead.

The light of the sun illuminates and drives life itself in all its grand plurality. We should just call the Sun our god, or curse it because it generated this horror show, along with the darkness.

_________

"When the One is refracted through the prism of deficiency, this coruscating dream of the Demiurge, then there is just refracted light of this One great deficiency: the rainbow of duality. The colors of worldly things in the field stand opposed to or aside one another in their reflections of the beatific veils of Maya."

From the Book of the Well of Mirrors by Daimon Kalkan

"The tea is usually black or green or white, aside a little piece of spiced or fruited cake."

From the Book of Tea by Camilla Sen

______

God damnit.... how does Bimble get to his end. By the burden of the work of focusing on Bimble.

Bimble dreamnt again, of the shadow that was the anathema of his waking life, and driving him toward a mythic dissolution. It took the form of a raven with a feather beard and purple-tinted eyes, watching from a mossy boulder.

There were two other monstrous agents in this illusion, one red and one blue. The red creature, what came to mind as a proper anthropoid thrull, had immense muscular shoulders joined to a hunched backed spine, its toothy head curving down toward the earth, its body studded with boney protuberances. Its feet were anchored in the earth. Bimble's feet were clasped in the vice grip of its red hands.

The blue agent was ethereal and buoyant, suspended in the sky, very humanoid except for its well proportioned size and stature. It might have well been the combined volume of 10 Bimbles. Its body was emblazoned with a myriad of brands and runes. It held on to a physical chain which was wrapped around Bimble's wrists. It too had an ethereal chain but wrapped around its neck, tensed and terminating in the direction of the noonday sun.

The raven squawked, "Pull!"

Both agents pulled toward their respective poles, blue towards the sky and red downward along the gradients of earth.

Bimble was caught in the middle, tensed as the rope, in a cosmic tug of war.

The Quick End

The child (non)hero, afflicted by a curse causa sui (?), comes to the threshold of the labyrinth of illusion, the temple of the 10,000 aquatic reflections (Sahul).

B enters a hall of mirrors, after taking refreshment at the in-temple cafe, and he is assaulted with his own mental contents as apophenic projection.

The multiples of B are disconcerting. He sees himself as the cloaked woman who served him a piece of cake just moments ago, her copies fading into distance. The reflections of being other than himself in grand play of mirrored morphing figures dizzies him. In one scene he was cat in the lap of an obese orange-haired boy king. In another, he was a mummy-wrapped leper, shorn of limbs, laying sideways on a dusty street. In another, just a morning dove sitting beside its kin.

"I'm obviously not those, now." Said a mirror image of himself. The sound multiplied and echoed as much as the image.

"Ha!" The figure appeared, a golden shinning mask evocative of the sun with two black eyes, hanging in the billowing robes of a dark veil. "We've got you!"

"If you had been helped by fortune of other gods as authors, others would have warned you that this is the crucible of Nil, a house that turns the wayward aimless into its own disciples, who all share in the weals and woe of their god. You, soft clay cup, will carry the waters of Sahul."

B. stood still, and the anxiety fled out of him as if his own bowels had gone with it.

"Now brace yourself for the fixing transformation. The hall will be purified with fire and you'll be serving up tea in no time."

<-------(The End, The Middle or The Beginning?) ------->