"Look here." She pointed at some blurred characters.
"I can't read them," I replied, "these are pre-Mayan. No one can read this script."
"I know," she replied, brushing a lock of hair away from her face. "But last night I dreamed about a stone city. I read this inscription on a temple gate. Listen."
As she recited the alien syllables I felt that I almost understood them, that I knew the dread city of which she spoke.
I clapped my hands over my ears. "Stop!"
"People stood around an altar. A priest cut out your heart with a gold knife. The heart was given to me." I looked at her, but she turned away. "I ate it. You were dead."
"We should leave,” I said. “Now."
I seized her arm, but she slipped out of my grasp, darting through a door that gaped nearby. I ran after her. She eluded me among the shafts of light and darkness. When I came to a courtyard I was surprised to see her standing there beside a stone table the height of her chest.
"This is the place," she whispered, "this is where I saw you slaughtered."
"That was a dream."
Even as I said this I thought I remembered the scene she had described, and I felt something stir within me. Her sorrowful expression changed to one I could not interpret.
I was on my back. I tried to tell her that I needed food, that I felt hungrier than I ever had, but no words came. I sat up. I caught her hands and tried to explain, but she would not listen, trying to pull free, and shouting. I gave up on talk. There was no time for that now. Hunger was all I had, my vision shrank to a blurry point, and I could do nothing but fill my belly.
I came to my senses on the open hillside. My shirt was wet. The sun set in a welter of crimson and ragged shreds of cloud. A couple of Mayan youths in shorts and dirty shirts stood near. I called to them, but when they approached me their faces changed and they fled. I struggled to my feet, felt the awful hunger returning. Maybe the young men would give me food. I stumbled after them in the gathering dusk.
The end
During her career she was compared to the reclusive J.D Salinger, and later comparisons were made to Ern Malley as well as the Gilbert Hoax [citation needed].
She won the Ditmar award in 2019 for “Best New Talent”, and won the Second Quarter of the 2020 Writers of the Future contest. Her first novel Takers of Lilith (2023) won the Aurealis and Ditmar awards, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Her shorter works have collected dozens of awards (see Complete bibliography of Pamela B Hawke works).
While noted for the ground-breaking Devereaux Cycle series and her seminal humanist piece For Want of a Broken Apostate (winner of the 2035 Booker Prize), Hawke entered notoriety as being the first New York Times Bestseller to not actually exist.
The Hawke Decision
On the 3rd March 2037, journalist Adam Wakefield discovered the true nature of Pamela B Hawke. Though his methods were questionable (including an illegal n-tap and several breaches of the International E-Security Act) he discovered that Hawke’s internet usage could be traced to a location in Launceston, Tasmania.
Pamela B Hawke was discovered to be nothing more than an illicit artificial intelligence, housed on an antique personal computer which ran on the Windows XP operating system. This Johnny-Framen was set up in an empty shop-front which was leased to a fictitious business.
The staff employed at her office in Auckland confirmed that they had never met her. Their sole duty was to scan all of her hard-copy mail and transmit it to her electronically. They believed Ms Hawke to suffer from various mental illnesses including agoraphobia.
No-one was ever apprehended for the construction of Pamela B Hawke, and in a controversial decision by the High Court of Australia all of the equipment was destroyed, despite international calls to preserve the artificial author.
See also
New Zealand Authors
Literary Hoaxes
Turing Test
Artificial Intelligence
Johnny-Framen
She was just like us, but she was less than us, and she was more.
Pandora left the pantry door unlatched, the mead-stained beer steins in the sink, her clocks unwound.
She read the stars, some side-stitched journals stained by meadow grass, the minds of mortals (unreliably, it’s true).
Pandora had boxes--lots of them. She opened some and closed the rest. A magpie queen of hollow cubes, she mountained box on box, secreted box in box. She even slept in one. The boys perked up to hear how well she worked with boxes though she labored blithely blind to such potential perks.
She lived for untold years, for who knows what? She died, for who knows why (none cared to ask)? She altered lives, for good and ill.
So why are you, dear reader, unaware of her but for her famed faux pas?
]]>Air is all right. I manage—there's a way to still your gills with spells. Feet and tails aren't so different; it's easy to change from one to the other. And love, while not a simple matter, is still reason enough to remain. I gave up mermaidhood for her.
Her drunk friends at the palace on the shore dared her to go down to the water and call for a lover. They were all at her engagement party, stealing bottles of wine while their parents celebrated the coming union of Princess Madeline, 16, to Prince Bertram, 21. She'd never met him. He'd sent his portrait, and the original was traveling by slow nuptial progress through the kingdom. He was six carriage-stops away by the time she was two bottles in, stumbling down the rocky path ahead of their shouts.
She took off her shoes halfway down, I remember that. I watched from a rock out from shore, ignoring the songs and shouts bubbling up through the waves.
“Go on, Dauphine,” my friends had said, “Go to the rock and call for a lover. You don't want that old prince anyway—he's probably got a tail like a trout.”
I worried that she would cut her feet on the rocks, before I remembered that she had climbed down this cliff hundreds of times. I had seen her before. Maybe she had seen me. She came to lip of the water and pressed her toes into the foam.
I watched her for a while, while she stared out across the water. When I swam up she didn't look the least afraid.
“I haven't called yet,” she said, as if we already knew each other.
“I know,” I said. “My name is Princess Dauphine.”
I swam along the shore in the breakers; she ran along the shining edge; we went round the point of the bay; we went on and on; after many stories we wound up here, in our shack on the inland road, with wind chimes, a simple life, the occasional argument, plums from the orchard. Air is not so hard.
“Let them in.”
The bugs clickety clicked through the foyer and into the den.
“Honored sirs,” he began, “how may we help you --”
“Stand aside, human scum,” the first hissed, “to have shown us your paraphernalia!”
Charles waved his arm. Two of the culture pirates headed to the kitchen, where they soon could be heard clattering pans and opening and shutting cabinets. There was really nothing you could do. Bullets wouldn't stop them.
One of the bugs sputtered like a tea kettle with a lisp “To have antique furniture in shed? Back porch?”
“The garage,” Charles said. “That's where all the, ah, antique furniture is.” He followed them out.
One bug picked up a wooden folding chair. The bolts screeched every time it was folded or unfolded. That was placed reverently on the concrete slab. Soon it was joined by a beach umbrella (broken), a bookcase that proved Charles did not know how to stain furniture, and an upholstered chair that had survived three generations of cats.
“To have more valuable antiques, puny human?” demanded a bug.
“No,” Charles protested, “this is our best stuff. Please don't take it.” You had to act aggrieved.
Sherry screamed. Charles ran back in the house. One of the bugs was stuffing framed pictures into a sack. There went Sherry's mother, her grandparents, two of her great-grandparents. She was wrenching at the bug's lower right arm, but it paid no attention.
“Sherry, stop it. There's nothing you can do. We'll replace them.”
She wheeled to face him. “Replace great grandma?! This is the only picture of her. They can't have it.” She ran before he could stop her. He had to get the bugs out before she came back with the shotgun. She couldn't hurt them, but they could hurt her.
“You know the big house two doors down on the left? With the columns?”
“Sssss.”
“They've been holding out on you. They have all kinds of antique china in the attic. They have knickknacks.”
“Knickknacks?” the bug asked.
“Yes, but you better hurry.”
The bugs conferred briefly, then scuttled out the front door, slamming it just as Sherry came leaping down the stairs.
“Sweetie, they're gone.” She headed for the front door. “I scanned the photos,” he shouted, “high-resolution.”
She stopped inside the door, breathing hard. He gently took the gun, stepped in front of her and hugged her tightly.
“I hate bugs,” she said.
The end
It had been six months since it all happened, and supplies in the bomb shelter were running low. David had donned one of the suits and went scavenging. If he ran into soldiers from the other side he was done for, if he stayed put, they were all done for anyway.
The counter clicked away at every ruined building. David pointed the counter at the mass of vines snaking over the rubble where the pet store once stood. And the clicking stopped. David walked over and found a man reclining in reclining in the sun, having a smoke and a snack. He could tell from his coat he was from the other side.
David expected an attack and thought maybe he should attack first. The man noticed David and smiled. Why didn’t he have suit on, David thought.
Everything was gone and nothing mattered anymore. Still David was curious and hadn’t heard any news since it all happened.
“Is there something you could tell me please,” he asked. “Who won?”
The man shrugged. He motioned for David to take off his suit. David didn’t comply.
“Don’t trust me, check your counter,” the man said.
David did. It was all clear. He reluctantly took off his helmet.
“I’m out of supplies. I need to find some food,” David said.
The man pointed to the vines spread around the rubble. Ripe dark purple berries hung from under their green triangular leaves.
“They keep us all alive,” the man said. His tongue was stained purple.
“Us all?” David asked.
“Come,” the man said.
They followed the vines away from the rubble- a line of green snaking through cindered remains of trees and burnt out strip malls. They led into a settlement, bustling with people.
Dozens upon dozens of vines converged into one giant vine, thick as a hundred trees, reaching up into the sky, like from Jack in the beanstalk. The massive vine reached as high as David remembered the highest planes used to fly.
Where the vines thickened and combined at the base of the main stalk were organic pods that looked like the hulls of wooden sailing ships without masts or sails. People walked into them. The vines rustled and moved the wooden-ship-pods up the stalk, slowly, then faster as they climbed higher in the sky.
“Where do they go? Up into space?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” the man said. “Somewhere far away, I bet. Where we might laugh again.”
David radioed the shelter to reported his find.
“Come in alpha-bravo. Uh, I’ve found a settlement of sort. Um, there are vines. With berries. You can eat them. The vines seem to take away the radiation like a houseplant sucking cee-oh-two.”
“You’re crazy, gamma-delta,” the shelter radioed back. “You’ve got radiation sickness. Come back at once.”
“No. This is real. You should all come.”
The radio went dead.
“Come, if you’d like,” the man said. “You’ve told your friends. Its all you can do. Or stay. We are leaving, you don’t need us.”
“Guess I’ll set a course and go,” David said.
He tried the shelter again, then took off his suit and climbed in the nearest ship.
-END-
* inspired by the song, with the same name, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young *
Javad's ears popped as he door of his building shut behind him. The light, filtered by the blue plastic of the snow tunnel walls, was twilight-colored and noon-bright.
A scrap of paper, scuttled along by the wind, stayed just ahead of his feet. Midway through the second block, words appeared, lines in Korean script. A menu, to judge by the pictures of bulgogi and bibimbap -- smart paper, a page set for a local frequency, that had come loose of wherever it had been posted originally. Another three steps, and the menu faded to a flyer for the jewelry store Javad was passing, then to a teaser for that day's Tikhookyeanskaya Zvyezda. For a few seconds, under the concrete arch of a bike lane, the scrap showed nothing but crawl-scrolling gray-pink snow.
He followed the page, even when the tunnel wind took it off his usual route. Flickering false-3D ads melted into handwritten daily special lists, which morphed into tables of apartment dwellers meant to accompany banks of buzzer-buttons. Javad forgot the courtroom in Brussels, the message he hadn't gotten. When he passed a school where a chorus must have been practicing, a few staves of whatever the folk song they sang sketched themselves across the wrinkled, dirt-smeared paper, and, before he could catch himself, he hummed the first notes.
He felt the vocal lock tighten in his throat. The lawyer must not have been successful; Javad still didn't own the performance copyright to his own voice.
Wincing with shame more than pain, he leaned against the wall, feeling the chill of hard-packed snow through the plastic. He took thin breaths and let the paper continue tumble and change without him.
There'd be a message now, one telling him about the fine he'd just incurred.
Today, we'd like to introduce Ken Brady, who brings us something science fictional for his first cabal story. Find out more about him from the members link above.
But first, give Ken a moment to take you to colony somewhere far off in space, although perhaps not far enough...
The bears were the latest annoyance.
Not the only annoyance, rather the most recent in a string of irritations plaguing Colony 17's third most populous city over the last few weeks.
Kayzee, Colony 17's outgoing manager, knew there were no indigenous bears on Colony 17. Just like there were no snakes, no porcupines, no woodchucks, and no marmots. Well, there was the one pet marmot in City 1. So, one marmot, but absolutely no bears.
She shook her head. Calvin was certainly to blame. Again. A teenaged boy was always dangerous, but none so much as a teenaged boy whose father was Doc Blakeman, the head of colony engineering. While Blakeman was away in deep space checking out a distress signal, his son had gained back door access to the colony's matter transfer system.
The problem was how to get Calvin out of the air shafts where he'd been hiding, teleporting innocent animals from Earth to Colony 17. It was all security could do to capture and return the damn things.
"I'm just making our environment more Earth-like," Calvin had said over the colony PA system. "There are no animals here. Don't you think that's unfortunate? Do you like big cats?"
Kayzee thought what was unfortunate was that Calvin hadn't fallen down one of the vertical shafts along with his love of animals. No, she didn't like big cats, she told him. No lions, no tigers; instead she'd gotten bears. Forget that there was no natural ecosystem here. Forget that the light gravity caused the animals to jump ten percent higher than they could on Earth -- which the marmots loved. No, it was the smell that got to Kayzee. The colony simply wasn't equipped to deal with wild animal detritus. And Kayzee wasn't equipped to deal with Calvin.
She wracked her brain for an answer as she called security to take care of the bears. As luck would have it, a call from Doc Blakeman said he was heading back, and was, in fact, just inside the transfer zone. He needed Kayzee to do an emergency matter transfer directly to colony quarantine. Hurry, and tell no one, he said.
Kayzee knew the alien creature she was about to teleport from Blakeman's ship was dangerous, but, really, how bad could it be? From the blurry image he'd sent it certainly looked nasty, but it couldn't be any worse than bears. There was only one, after all. Since it liked to use air shafts to move around, it was perfect for the job.
If Calvin wanted wild animals roaming the colony, this one would certainly be the last. She paused, considered the uproar Doc Blakeman would certainly cause and what that would do to her career. Then again, she was retiring. Kayzee triggered the matter transfer system and "accidentally" teleported the creature into Colony 17's main air shaft.
They'd figure out how to get rid of it later.
]]>Runi go and spec the little silver bird, lifts a wing and her workings are in there, clicking away. Be feeling her shiver in his fat paw, shiver like a frightened little animal eager to dart into windstream and safety.
‘Junken,’ he gab. He drop her to the workbench, a little rough. ‘Junken and dross.’
He gone, the screen slamming and the tall grass shaking in the wake of his gyro. His gab is oft false. I know that he gone for sheet-cheatin, and more’n one sheila in his life.
Not much love left for him. I hurt and just want to howl like a bab, tear off me gear and bleed out in the bath like the Romans of old. Twist me wed-ring, over and over, just want to rip it off me finger but show me a sheila who hasn’t held some hope, somewhere in her heart, that her bad fella can change.
He left his tellingphone, and I spec it. I know all Runi’s dud mates, and com-lines are in there that I don’t reck. Don’t need me smarties as to know I’ve lost me fella.
I tink with the sparrow, I tink her a clever little mind, tink her a tongue as sharp as Runi claims mine to be. I spec her hopping along me arm all excited and chirrup, and a-perch on me finger I let her drink from a toxic brew.
I open the screen and off she fly, her silver wingspan all pretty flash, me sparrow carving through air. She’ll find Runi now, and she will be the last little bird to ever kiss him.
]]>At the Crrrazy Bar and Grill, where everybody loves you and your worst quirks, Joe Schmuck cradled a foaming mug of Schlitz, sitting in his regular black leather barstool. The stool’s panoramic view allowed him first glance at whatever otherworldly creatures would slime inside Uhura’s [insert more Irish sounding name because they’re so crrrazy and they likes they booze]. The balding bartender wiped down the counter as in sashays his fiery red-headed daughter, whom Joe secretly pines after--the superfluous love interest that is never quite requited so that readers return, story after story, wondering when those two crrrazy kids will hook up. They’ll almost make out, but then she’s beeped out to LaGrange point 2.5 to settle the alien dispute raging there.
In [walked, zapped, sizzled, slithered] a(n) [extra-dimensional being, time traveler, cockatrice, the oafish two-headed were-snake] with a mean thirst for stouts--only Joe didn’t know it was a(n) [extra-dimensional being, time traveler, cockatrice, the oafish two-headed were-snake] until he/she/it did something dastardly, putting the whole universe in peril!
But thank God for Joe and the dipsomaniacs at the Crrrazy Bar and Grill, who come together when they’re needed most. [Insert corny gag at the end to release tension through a forgettable denouement.]
B. Questions for Popular Templates
Is it enough to kick over a man’s many-storied sandcastle, laugh, and walk away? Isn’t the gesture like the hole left from a foot passing through walls of sand?
What is a template, but the framework that satisfies many, not unlike eating a pound of chocolate in one sitting? Is it that the few are displeased that many are happy with little, or that the few are displeased with much?
What drunken misfit wouldn’t want to guzzle a beer-sticky oak floor where misfits fit in? What lover wants the chase to end: Isn’t that what leads to boredom, musty motel rooms, and expensive divorce lawyers? Isn’t it fulfilling when the clumsy two-headed oaf saves the universe precisely because of his unfortunate birthmark as it gives hope to the rest of us misfits?
C. Pop Will Eat Itself
Socrates’ fame inflated like a latex balloon by his popping other balloons with questions lathed to pinpricks. But what foundation did he ever smooth with a trowel? Can an ecology of pincushions and wrecking balls exist alone?
The snake consumes its tale.
Or does it? Is Frankenstein any less for creating a monster that seeks to destroy him as much as the creator seeks to destroy the created?
The laminated prompt card still lay on her blanket.
One of the researchers was right there, making a show of reading something off a display in the corner. As if he couldn't have done that from control room.
She pre-empted what she knew he was going to say.
"I'll pack first thing in the morning," she said, and tugged at an electrode on her scalp.
"It happens this way with some people. A lot early, then nothing." He sounded sympathetic, but she knew he got paid by the page his subjects produced, and must be secretly relieved to get someone new into this room, someone who might dream more productively.
"I was there. On a street. Somewhere in the ammonite city."
He didn't even look up from his clipboard. "Did you see any inhabitants? Get a sense of what any of the buildings were? Were you in the inner or outer whorl?"
"I didn't..." she said. "I'm sorry." Her eye lingered on the spiral as she handed him the prompt card.
"We'll mail your last check." He pulled something from the pocket of his lab coat. "Here," he said, "for a free copy, when the book comes out."
The coupon showed the cover: More Dream Realms Revealed: A LucidTravel Guide.
She shivered awake.
The directory, Dr. Current-Waves-Tendril flushed disappointment pinks and purples from the tips of his upper limbs. "How much did you give them?"
Red-Sand-Hiding stretched on the sleeping shelf, brushed life-support barnacles from her mantle.
"Not enough," she said, "We're still a prime destination." She could feel frustration brightening her face. "Publication date's pushed back a little, that's all."
Within a year, they'd be overrun; mobs of dream tourists, gawking without inhibition, would wander the inner and outer whorl, the upper and lower spirals.
"The others haven't done much better," said the director, and Red-Sand-Hiding saw two-thirds of the shelves were empty. "They can sustain the dream, but not the dream within it. We'll have to try the next plan soon."
She loosened her limbs in agreement. Somewhere, she knew, behind walls that swirled like ink, were pens of sharks, hungry, restless, ready to turn the streets of ammonite city to nightmare for a season.
The head chef, Montague, said, yeah, that's where he was, too, and anyway while it was certainly his 10-inch steel Martian-made the murderer used, he shouldn't be a suspect, because he'd have had better sense than to use one of his own knives. And anyway he'd have cleaned it afterward. Not like the prep cook. Why didn't they ask her?
Of course I did it, said the prep cook. I'm crazy. Got a card says it. And she pulled out, not a standard colonial Form F-120 (a.k.a. “Crazy-page”), but a dirty napkin with numbers written on it. The judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation, pending charges. But she was one of those get-to-the-bottom-of-it type judges. Jupiter just bristles with them. Anyone wanting quick verdicts should leave the solar system.
I got called up after the prep cook. I told them that I was where the log book said I was, on the bridge, doing the trajectory numbers like a good little subnavigator. Anyway, Jared, I'm sorry, “the deceased,” and I were pretty much finished by the time we came aboard. No, no hard feelings. I started seeing Monty—the head chef—about 1020 hours into flight.
Monty's ex Sarah, who'd never liked me, said she thought I'd taken a break from the bridge about the time she'd heard Jared's life-support hit the landing dock.
At about 0600 hours? Asked the judge.
Yes, she said, and pointed out she'd already testified to that.
The landing dock on the outside of the ship?
Yes, she said, that's where landing docks usually are. Otherwise other ships can't land, y'know.
The judge ignored her sarcasm, and charged her.
]]>He, the homeless man, sat stiff against a tree, his legs crabbed back and his arms splayed out and his throat exposed and quivering with wiry black hairs. A boy--he can't have been more than five or six--threw a pine cone at a passing rollerblader on the bike path, but near the path the pine cone veered as though it were being swung on a string ... veered toward the man with the void, slowed down, rolled across the ground, sped up, skittered over the dry, sandy earth, leapt into the hole, and was gone. The noise, the water running over something electrical noise, went up in pitch just a tiny bit.
I turned, and there were people wandering toward us through the park, a pair of lovers whose held hands were losing their grip, a man in an expensive suit who had forgotten his laptop case on a park bench, a pair of girls dangling Barbie dolls ... all staring at the void.
My shoes started scraping against the dirt. I was sliding toward it.
"Go away," said the man with the void. "Far as you can get."
I shuffled backward, my treacherous feet nearly sliding out from under me, moving toward the void.
"What is it? What's in there?" I said. But he shook his head, and shuddered, and suddenly he folded in on himself and the void was much larger, a gap in the ground that was beginning to swallow the tree. I ran, pushed through the people, out into the traffic that all seemed to be veering now toward the park. I ran for the river, where there were oceangoing ships. I imagined the ocean roaring in, pouring into the relentless gap, the earth collapsing in on itself like the man had done.
But I didn't understand, because when I turned to look, fearing I would see the void already engulfing the park, instead there was a light in that direction, a brilliant light that shone like a new star.
]]>As Eshi grew from babe to girl, the kitten became a miniature lioness with a long tail and sharp claws. The lioness never outgrew its cage; throughout Eshi’s life, as depicted in the mural, the cage gave it ample space to pace and curl.
The second panel of the mural shows all sorts of people gathered around the girl -- old and young, bearded and bare-breasted, modestly dressed and clean-shaven -- examining the cage and the feline. Their confusion is painted clearly on their faces.
The girl silently bore it.
When she became queen, and the people of Umer gathered at her bare feet in obeisance, she cast those people in the second panel out from the city walls and did not let them return. Words engraved at the base of the mural record her words to them: “The lioness is a part of me, like a heart, and I will not have you prod her like a beast at market.”
Eshi ruled for two decades, and the lioness prowled and purred in her abdomen.
In none of the panels is the lioness shown eating. Perhaps it took scraps of meat from the table like a pet. Perhaps, as one historian has inferred from the way it licks the bars of its cage in three of the eight panels, it gained its sustenance in a more unusual manner. Eshi is shown eating twice: putting flatbread and beans into her mouth like a regular person.
The intricacies of the connection between woman and lioness were never understood, although its importance to their wellbeing was illustrated on the day that Eshi went hunting with some of her relatives and friends, when her drunken sister misfired and her arrow pierced the lioness.
As the lioness’ blood pumped from its body, Eshi clutched her abdomen and moaned in pain. Physicians rushed to her side but found no wound except that in the lioness.
They could only watch as the lioness bled out and their queen died with it.
According to some historians a textual fragment contradicts the mural, saying that Eshi died from an arrow through a vital organ. According to others, the two versions of the tale are in very close agreement.
So we broke in. Dumb, right? All I can say is, Donny said I wouldn't go even if he jimmied the lock, and I said he wouldn't dare jimmy the lock even though I would totally go, so there we were, sneaking through the darkened store, both scared out of our freaking minds. Light was on upstairs. Before I knew it, I was at the top of the stairs. I was looking right at Mr. Stajewski and he was dancing. I don't mean he was practicing his moves, I mean all 12 of his arms were moving rhythmically as his body jiggled creepily. I don't know which of us made a noise, but he suddenly wheeled around.
"Oh shit!" he hissed, and bounded across the room. He grabbed us and lifted as both up in the air. "What am I going to do with you boys?"
"Let us go?" I asked weakly. "We won't tell."
"And no one would believe us anyway," Donny added. It smelled like one of us had wet his pants, and I had no idea who.
It was really hard to read Mr. S's facial expressions now; he hardly even had a face anymore, so I didn't know what our chances were.
"Sorry boys," he said. "No one knows you're here, and I can't let you go. Luckily, I still have two more slots this year before I meet my quota. I hope you both want to travel." With one hand he flicked a switch on some kind of weird machine mounted on the wall. A glowing ball of something appeared in the middle of the room. Mr. S shifted his grip on me, and the last thing I heard him say was "advice to travelers: never miss an opportunity to relieve yourself." He threw Donny into the glowing ball and then he threw me right after him.
-----
I'm still having trouble getting used to the faces, but the extra arms don't bother me. In fact, I'm seeing this girl, and they come in real handy. No pun intended.
The end