Juno’s family would most likely be cool if they were to unearth her habit; they’re neither pious nor hypocritical, and anyway, they like her. Mom would want assurances of her health and safety. Frewin might recommend a counselor.
But addiction runs sweetest on the engine of shame.
Thus secrecy, careful systems, the constriction of her heart when someone’s been poking around her room. It’s only when she knows the house is asleep or empty that she can bring out her box, her relics and the little black hagiograph.
Veneration is ecstasy. Juno surrenders to glossolalia, pillow bunched hard against her mouth.
Every Thursday, the Inhuman Resources Department shuffles in to remove the hated printer and replace it with one that is, in some unique and specific way, worse. The test page is a ritual of dread.
“It can’t be as bad,” says Pippa, “as the invisible ink cartridge.”
“Or the two-in-one, with the crosscut shredder–”
“It doesn’t print capital letters,” says Railyn, examining the results in slow horror.
“HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO MAKE MEETING TRANSCRIPTS?” frets GLARTH.
“What kind of idiots wouldn’t test that?” Railyn shrieks.
“Idiots? Please,” says Pippa. “Only a genius could only produce such fresh hells.”
This guy Iakob has had a bad day: the girl’s enforcer crippled him and dragged off his boss in a dynamite undershirt, and Hidebound must have followed to torture said boss’s whereabouts from him. This would explain why the Vulpine Phalanger finds him huddled over the toilet, choking and snorting.
“You know why I’m here, right?” she says gently.
He shudders and nods, but something’s wrong: a chink of metal on porcelain. He’s cuffed here. A reflection, in the bowl, of something white and doughy wired into his mouth.
Three steps; the blast hits. The Vulpine Phalanger tastes blood and darkness.
Murdock Vermilion exits adolescence better suited by name to be a wizard’s apprentice than to parking lot attendantship, or indeed any name-tagged position. She refrains from cursing her parents for this only because they are already cursed to a sufficient degree.
Yet more problematic for Murdock is the punishing lack of depth perception afforded via refusal to wear broken glasses. Parking by feel turns out to be rather a faux pas. Thus, one brisk midnight in November, she finds herself in disemploy and a black mood.
Note that Murdock Vermilion does not become a wizard’s apprentice.
Wizards are not real.
SWM should stop trying bars while Cirque du Soleil is in town.
“Yeah, I’m a web developer,” he says, nails buffed mirror-bright. “Mostly sites that work on your iPhone, y’know?”
“Can I see one?” says the only SF who’s shown interest all night.
“Sure! As soon as I get an iPhone–”
“Gut evening,” says Jorma, stepping in as smooth as butterscotch. “I speak three languages. I have traveled to feefty countries. My body is perfect, and I can fly.”
SWM opens his mouth. They’re gone.
“Need anything, sir?” says the kind bartender.
“Another Rogers,” SWM sighs, “heavy on the Roy.”
Yael only understands the nature of the puzzle when the smoothly closing wall tries to crush her. It can’t be more than a few minutes past five.
Why all this trouble, why drugged darts and ventilation and tricky little games of punctuality? If this place is a tomb, why not fill it with stones and bomb the mouth shut?
Because someone wanted it to be solved.
Four more downward twists of the path: she catches up to Silhouine in a vast space occupied by a suspended ship of impossible beauty.
“The Loveblind Bird,” whispers Silhouine, then vomits and collapses in siezure.
Will Ferrell might be here to kill you.
“The alternative,” he’ll explain, “is that you do something funny.”
Cast about; don’t make this complicated. Grab the first thing on the table of your mind. Don’t let yourself speculate, don’t picture yourself as a king’s fool forced to–
Will Ferrell should apply electricity to your genitals. Scream.
“Humor is pain wedded to aesthetic distance,” he’ll say, over you. “Distance is trivially achieved, but what of suffering?”
Sob the joke about Kermit’s finger. You know the one.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Will Ferrell will sigh, and enforce on your body an artist’s discipline.