SG: Rad #95 (3/3): Go?"

[Gary]

(continued from part two, preceding...)

                                 ***

     Rumiko Moroboshi felt warm.  Arms were around her, beneath her
back and beneath her knees, and she felt someone's torso against her
side.  Wind rushed against her other side.  Rumi realized she was
being carried, and that her carrier was in the air.
     Rad.  Father.  It had to be.  He had found her somehow, and was
taking her away from this strange place, this weird world of fake
zombie people and floating airships and inexplicable ways.  Away to
somewhere--Planet California, Planet Hottentot, anywhere.
     To her surprise, Rumi felt no elation.  She was unsure exactly
what she did feel.  She still wanted to leave Earth, of that she was
certain, but... not yet.  Not just yet.
     She opened her eyes and saw Esteban Veracruz.  All at once, her
body told her she should have known she was not in her father's arms,
as the arms that held her were too skinny, the torso not as muscled.
Nice angle to his chin, though, she thought.  A pair of plastic safety
goggles kept from his eyes the wind that turned his black hair into a
blur.  Beyond him were stars, and darkness.
     He was carrying her somewhere.  But where?
     She could have flown, she knew.  But she stayed.
     Warm, just for a little while.
     When the bronze-gold stole over her sight, she did not resist.

                                 ***

     "Dude," said Rad, as Dr. Gigawatt placed the nectarisite chip
into a clear vial and stopped the opening with a rubber cork.  "You,
like, gotta know, like, I haven't heard of this, like, Hidden Empire,
like, y'know?"
     "Not many people have," Gigawatt replied.  "Particularly in the
last hundred or so years.  And even then, it stayed in the shadows."
     "This is a really well hidden empire, then?" asked Yury, as she
sliced herself a generous helping of Darleen's birthday cake.  "Not
just some old empire that fell behind the sofa?"
     "The name 'Hidden Empire,'" said Gigawatt, "was given to it by a
detective of the occult named Richard Cartier, and then only in his
private journals.  Richard Cartier, in case you're not up on
nineteenth century supernormal activities, was the Dweller in the
Shades.  And the chances are that you've never heard that name,
either, though your once-sorcerous twin Dar would have."
     "Like, whoa, dude," said Rad.  "I thought, like, the Golden
Swashbuckler was, like, the first Mystery Dude... er... Man... like,
y'know?"
     "He was the first to be built up in the press as a hero,"
Gigawatt corrected.  "The Mystery Men of the early twentieth century
were the first verifiable public crimefighting and war-fighting
figures, what we used to call superguys before Superguy, as it were.
But they were hardly the first to ever have 'powers,' or to use them
to fight crime or wars.  But prior to the twentieth century, beings
with powers are either not verifiable--most people believe the civil
war tales of Union John and the Confederate are fiction, eyewitness
accounts included--or not known, owing to the lengths they went to so
as to keep their activities secret.  Cartier was of the latter, and
when his journals became public in the eighties, most scholars shifted
him to the former without breaking much of a sweat---"
     "Can the balloon juice, prof," said China.  "Tell him about the
chip."
     "I was getting to that," Gigawatt testily replied.  Rad was not
sure, but he thought he heard a very slight Stock German Accent
fighting its way clear.  "'The Hidden Empire' was a name Richard
Cartier gave to a shadowy organization operating in New York City and
its surrounding environs in the late 1890s.  Their agents were
whispered of 'in the depths of the criminal cesspool,' as Cartier
might have put it, for their inhuman quickness, shortness,
devilishness, and a rumored ability to appear and disappear at will.
They kidnapped people, usually opium addicts, prostitutes, and other
undesirables who would not in the ordinary course of events be missed,
and put them under mental control, for reasons Cartier never was able
to discover.  The means they used, according to Cartier, were pieces
of bronze-gold metal that, in his opinion, allowed the controlled
subjects to be mesmerized at any distance, possibly via radio
transmission.  Radio was quite new then--at least to the general,
non-secret-society-belonging public--but Cartier was a forward-
thinking kind of detective."
     Rad shifted impatiently from one foot to the other.  He hoped he
would not have to remember any of this.
     "Once, Cartier was captured, and was interrogated by a 'quite
singular' woman--his words--named Capella, who claimed to be the head
of the organization.  Told him the metal--called nectarisite--came
from the center of the Earth.  Cartier scoffed at this possibility,
and was told by Capella that the 'center' she referred to was that of
an Earth in another dimension, one in which the surface was
uninhabitable, but the interior was alive, and the nature of reality
was very different.  She bragged that what he called the 'Hidden
Empire' was far grander than what little he had seen thus far."
     "He never knew the stuff was called nectarisite," Chalandra said.
"Bhossi and Cla'rabhele told us that.  All he knew about the metal was
what Capella told him, and that he thought its fantastic properties
were due to occult manipulations of some kind."
     "You, like, knew him?" Rad asked.
     "Our paths crossed, once," Chalandra replied.  "There's nothing
relevant I can add that isn't in the journals."  She shrugged, a
casual gesture that Rad thought was forced.
     "An encounter that evidently took place during a time covered by
the first 'missing' volume of the journals," Gigawatt noted.  Rad
thought he sounded surprised, as if Chalandra had never before told
him of this.  Gigawatt looked like he would say more, but closed his
mouth quickly when Chalandra shot him a warning look.
     "Hey, this cake is good," said Yury, as she wiped chocolate
frosting from her lips.  "Is this 'Darleen' around?"
     "She's up on the flight deck," said Chalandra, the sternness
melting from her expression and voice.  "Too busy now, but maybe
later..."
     "The Hidden Empire ultimately failed with whatever they were
trying to do with their mind-controlled captives," said Gigawatt,
raising his voice and the stockness of his now-vaguely-Slovakian
accent, "because the mesmerization was imperfect.  Radio waves other
than those projected by Capella's agents interfered, often with
strange results.  Eventually Cartier traced the source of the
interference to the Roburtron, which Verne had brought to New York in
his secret airship, the _Albatross_, in order to locate the escaped
villain L'Anglais..."
     Rad tuned out the digression, and remembered how the bank robbers
had behaved that morning, as well as how the pseudo-ninjas had behaved
during their attack.  Both had seemed to be acting in character with
what they claimed to be, save for moments where they sought to
acquire Jessica Simpson tickets, or search for laffy taffy.
     As if guessing Rad's thoughts, Chalandra showed him a sheaf of
papers.
     "Guido had us check the playlists of several major radio stations
in the area," she said.  "This morning, around when you were
confronting the hostage takers at the bank, station KVOM out of
Anaheim announced it would give tickets to a Jessica Simpson concert
to the 13th caller.  Then they played a song called 'Laffy Taffy,'
which for a few moments the hostage takers heard and tried to
interpret as commands, much as they previously interpreted the
instructions they received from their controllers."
     "Dude," said Rad.  "And, like, when the pseudo-ninjas that, like,
most heinously attacked us earlier started saying, like, 'smack that,
all on the floor,' and, like, stuff like that..."
     Another song, played at about the time the pseudo-ninjas tried to
obey it," said China.  "But this time, it came from KPPS, which is
KVOM's neighbor on the FM dial, just about."
     "Guido initially thought that whoever designed the implants
neglected to use encryption to screen out contrary communications,"
said Gigawatt.  "But the problem is the nectarisite itself.  The
element is from another dimension; one that we are told observes
different principles of physical reality than ours.  My tests on
samples I've acquired over the years have indicated this is true, and
that it possesses qualities I can only describe as transdimensional,
and transdimensionality-enabling."
     "Dude..."
     "You can say that again," said Yury, as she handed Rad a piece of
cake.  "You wanna unpack that one for us, gramps?"
     "He means," said China, as she returned her attentions to her
console and her typing, "that though it is physically in our world,
our dimension, it retains a connection to its home dimension.  And
someone can use it to move from said home dimension to ours, and back
again."
     "Like, okay," Rad replied.  "I actually, like, understood that,
like, I thi... hmm.  This, like, really is, like, some totally awesome
cake, y'know?"
     China held out her hand, and Yury gave her a slice of cake.  Dr.
Gigawatt finished the piece he had sampled before speaking.
     "Nectarisite has some very fluidic capabilities, for a metal,"
said Gigawatt.  "It is not comprised of nanites, nor of any
nanotechnological analogues, so far as we have been able to determine.
But its greatest asset--its transdimensionality--appears to also be
its weakness.
     "If nectarisite is from another dimension, one where some laws of
reality are different, it must follow that, when brought into this
dimension, with *our* laws, it must perform in a less-than-optimal
manner.  In this case, the nature of the element appears to be
subverting the attempt of someone--The Programmer, I am told--to
impose a circuit structure and embedded programming upon it.  Had I
more information on the nature of this dimension, I might hypothesize
on how we might exploit the subversion... but, alas."
     Rad paused to absorb this explanation, and while he was at it
contemplate what was more fear-inspiring: thousands of people under
direct radio implant control from an evil shadow conspiracy, or
thousands of people under direct radio implant control from Top 40
music and wacky morning DJs.  After a bit of thought, he gave the edge
to the DJs, and shuddered.
     "Manny and Guido told me," said Chalandra, "about the link
between The Programmer's workstation at BPSC and our systems at the
Los Requemados branch of Harxxon.  Initially, we suspected a saboteur,
but then we discovered that we had this bronze-gold wiring all through
our building.  Gigawatt confirmed it was nectarisite, and it had
enabled The Programmer to tap our systems for the CPU he needed to do
*his* calculations, and to gather intelligence.  As far as we've been
able to tell, the wiring *grew* into our system and somehow hooked
itself up."
     "Like, whoah."
     "The Los Requemados site is compromised for now," Chalandra
continued.  "Perhaps permanently; we don't know yet.  But the _Vander
Harkness_ is so far free and clear.  Probably because it wasn't hooked
up to our LAN yet..."
     "Because the _Vander Harkness_ is not yet flightworthy," Gigawatt
said.  "Despite the protests of your core engineers---"
     "Both Bhossi and Cla'rabhele say it'll work," said Chalandra.
"It's their engine design, after all, and they say we implemented it
as well as can be expected, for a species that relies too much on
having opposable thumbs."
     "The engine keeps all our raw tonnage in the air," China added,
"and it generates the sound containment field that keeps us all
stealthy-like.  Any more cake left?"
     "A couple slices," said Gigawatt.  "I... oh, just one slice."
Iris, who had snagged a piece while China had been talking, shrugged
and sat in an empty chair next to her.
     "Doesn't the government frown on this sort of thing?" Yury asked.
     "I don't think so," China answered.  "The frosting is FDA
approved yellow dye number six, I think..."
     "I mean this big flying tub thing," Yury said.  "Raises the
spectre of private corporate armies inside national borders and all
that."
     "We're not an army," said Chalandra.  "Not in the sense of being
another Blackwater, anyway, Marta's proposal for developing an armed
branch notwithstanding.  This is, officially, an ongoing exercise
in corporate team building.  At least, that's what Homeland Security
should be telling President Bush right about now.  NSA doesn't like
it, the CIA and CUA freakin' hate it, but they've been ordered to
stand down.  Only Homeland Security gets to liason with us, by
executive order..."
     "Like, isn't Homeland Security, like, where Karina Selanova went,
like, after she left here?" Rad asked.
     "Gee, did she?" Chalandra asked.  "What a coincidence."
     Though Rad by no means was what might be considered the most
acute angle in the geometry text, he did figure things out once in a
while.
     "So, like, though she doesn't, like, work for you, she, like,
still works for you, like, right?"
     Chalandra's eyes narrowed, then relaxed.
     "Something like that," she said.  "More of a partnership, now,
than when she was my Security Veep.  Keep it under your hair helmet,
okay?"
     "Like, yah, sure."  It did explain, he thought, how Karina had
known earlier that he and his family were going to be attending a
'welcome back' dinner at Dave's Place tomorrow night.
     "Speaking of my predecessor," said China, "she's on line one.
Hey, KS, what's the what?"
     An image of Karina Selanova appeared on a screen next to the one
displaying Dodger Stadium.  She glared at China.
     "I don't go by my initials," said Karina.
     "Yeah, and I'm not Chinese," China replied.  "What's the what?"
     Karina glanced at something offscreen.  Rad thought, from the
look of the wall behind her, that she was in the same office he had
met her in earlier that day to discuss his daughter's illegal
jetliner-buzzing activities.  If the day had worn on her as it had
worn on him, her cool demeanor did not betray it.
     "The 'what' is that we're picking up some significant readings
from Dodger Stadium," said Karina.  "Very heavy activity on the
frequencies given by Dr. Gigawatt."
     "Which, like, means what?" asked Rad.
     Gigawatt stroked his goatee some more, in the universal manner of
aged people with goatees who are about to say something portentous.
     "It means," he said, "that something is coming through.  From the
Hidden Empire.  Something... big.  Bad.  And very probably oncoming."
     "Hey," said a woman in a red jumpsuit at the cake table.  Her
badge identified her as 'Darleen Thomas.'  "Where'd my cake go?"

                                 ***

     The jungle below was the same, as was the stormcloud-obscured
sky.  Capella was still frozen in mid-imperious gesture.  The demon
howler monkeys were frozen in mid-whatever-the-demon-howler-monkeys-
were-doing.  Akane--still in the sundress Rumi had dreamed up for
her--balanced on the rail of the ship, apparently trying to do so
without willing herself to float.
     "There you are," she said.  "You must have woken up for a few
seconds."
     "What's going on, aunt?" Rumi asked.
     "Another minute and this all would have dissolved," Akane went
on.  "I held it together for you."
     "Why?"
     Akane met her eyes.  Rumi wondered what Akane saw.  A fifteen-
year-old girl she had not seen for over ten years?  Herself at age
fifteen, unaware of what strangeness and danger was to come?
     Regardless of whom she saw, Akane seemed to know an all-purpose
question when she heard one.  She hopped from the railing and landed
next to Rumi.
     "I learned dream-casting when I was on walkabout," she said.
"For the three or four years I wandered space and time just seeing
what was there to see.  I always intended to come back sooner, but
there was so much there, and always something I thought I couldn't
pass up.
     "Then I met one of my future selves."
     Rumi blinked.  "What..."
     "Thing that happens, when you bop around space and time.  Future
selves.  This Akane said she was in her six-thousand-nine-hundred-and-
seventy-seventh full life--full life, in this case, meaning a life I
lived from birth onward, and not just coming back over from death to
life because I wasn't done with the life I was on yet.  She was living
on Irixna-94 in the Andromeda Galaxy as a dark matter sculptor.
Looked like I did at age twenty... except for the neck tentacles."
     "Neck tentacles?"
     "I didn't ask.  I'm assuming she did it for the convenience."
     Rumi sat down on the deck, and Akane did likewise.  It seemed
the only sensible thing to do after neck tentacles entered the
conversation.
     "She told me," said Akane, "that on Earth, in Los Angeles, in
July 2007, this situation would happen.  The Programmer was mixed up
in a plot that was going to get really messy unless my adopted
brother, your father, intervened.  All I had to do was give him an
instruction at a certain point..."
     "Uncle Eivandt's barbeque," Rumi filled in.  "The day after we
came to Earth."
     "Right," Akane said.  "I'd had a mail drop all set up, under the
name 'Miranda Satori,' and sent the picture.  Then, per further
instructions from future-me, I put a message in the bratwurst you
ate..."
     "How did you do *that?*  Go all the way back to the brat-making
plant and--"
     "Yes."
     "Oh."  Rumi thought for a moment.  "I'm not sure I really wanted
to know that."
     "We may not have long," said Akane.  "Ask things you really want
to know while you can."
     "Okay."  Rumi had a lot of questions, but was unsure which to ask
first.  "Why didn't dad say anything to me about you being alive?"
     "It's supposed to be a secret," Akane replied.  "And it is...
pretty much.  I think maybe ten people... eleven, now that there's
you... know I'm not as dead as my corpse that they buried might
suggest.  And before you ask about that, as implied before, I've got
this serial-lives immortality sort of thing going on, owing to
existing outside of existence, which would take way too long to
explain.  Essentially, I'm alive, most of Earth thinks I'm dead, and
I'd like to keep it that way."
     Rumi, who knew some of the circumstances of Akane's apparent
death, just nodded.
     "What about Esteban?" she asked.  "Is he one of the eleven?"
     Akane shook her head.  "He doesn't know who I am, exactly.  He
just calls me 'the Green Lady,' because that's how I show up in his
dreams.  How I show up in dreams in general, usually.  I'm still
working on tint control..."
     "And you visit him in his dreams because... your future self said
so?"
     "She suggested casting for him, yes.  Which didn't happen for a
while.  I came back to Earth, found my Rammykins, had a dustup with
the M.I.B., and then we went away.  Once we were settled--"
     "Wait," said Rumi.  "'Rammykins?'"
     "Yeah," Akane replied.  Rumi watched her aunt's face as she
talked.  Before, there had been something enigmatic and shaded in her
beauty, a guarded look that Rumi thought she understood.  But when
Akane said the word 'Rammykins,' it was as though something lit behind
her eyes, melted the shadows away, and coated her tongue with treacle.
"Ramrod, I mean.  We went away together.  Someplace the world can't
get at us.  Well, it could, if it knew, but it doesn't, so it won't.
Even your dad doesn't know where we are."  Akane grinned, and Rumi
felt vaguely ill.
     "Once you were settled, you cast for Esteban's dreams," Rumi
prompted.
     "Oh... yeah, I did," said Akane.  At once, her expression
resumed its purposeful form.  "He was easier to find than I expected.
His connection to those pants of his made him stand out.  I showed up
in his dream, which was as weird and significant as this one, and...
helped him figure some things out."
     "Are all the dreams you visit... um... 'weird and significant?'"
     "Not always.  But more often than not.  I think it's an effect of
me being part of the dream.  It becomes something important--past,
present, or future.  That's how I know who she is..."  Akane gestured
to Capella, whose imperious gesture had not budged.  "...and who
Erasmus Fancy is, and why I read the journals of Richard Cartier.
Esteban's in the center of a long-running, mostly secret drama that
runs deep into time and the Earth, and he's just barely started
working out what to do about it.  He's got one friend, Lemon, who
knows about it and is helping him, but aside from that..."
     "His brother doesn't help?"
     Akane shook her head.  "Esteban doesn't want to ask.  It's
because of Los Pantalones that a werewolf bit Miguel in the first
place.  The pack he's now in was charged with guarding them until they
'recognized' their true owner... which turned out to be Esteban."
     Rumi remembered something.  "Esteban said... you told him I was
'okay.'  Does this mean... I turned up in one of his 'significant'
dreams?"
     Akane nodded.  "More than one.  It's up to Esteban if he wants to
share on those.  The first one... well, it was the kind where I
figured he really ought to at least know who you were."
     Rumi opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again.  "You don't
mean..."
     "I 'vetted' Lemon, also," Akane went on.  "Didn't know him, so I
actually had to drop in on his dreams.  The boy's okay, but... wow.
Some serious strange going on inside his skull, and I thought I knew
from serious strange.  And because Lemon turned out to be like I said,
Esteban believed me when I told him he could trust you."
     Rumi thought of mentioning that Akane did not really know her,
either, but let it slide.
     "Okay," said Rumi.  "I think I've got it.  Not sure I understand
that much of it, but... did you really come back to Earth just to do
this?"
     "No," Akane admitted.  "It was something else my future self
said.  Understand, we didn't talk a whole lot... the neck tentacles
kind of creeped me out... but she told me things.  She... we... have
eidetic memory, because of what we went through in the course of
becoming what we are now.  She can recall everything about her six-
thousand-nine-hundred-and-seventy-seven lives, she said.  Where she
went.  Who she loved.  Ways she's died.  Afterlives she's hung out in
while deciding where to incarnate next.  Don't ask me how she--we--
store all this memory, 'cause its a lot more than one brain can hold,
but there you go.  And you know what she told me?"
     Rumi shook her head.
     "He... Ramrod... we never love anyone more than we love him.
Never in six-thousand-nine-hundred-and-seventy-seven lives."
     This time, her face did not turn dreamy.  If anything, it grew
more serious.
     "And when he's gone, he's gone.  No afterlife, no
reincarnation... he goes into the darkness and is done.  Which meant I
have only one lifetime to spend with him... this one.  I returned to
Earth that night."
     Rumi waited, as though she would say more.  About how she so
casually and quickly leapt the gulf between galaxies, if nothing else.
Instead, Akane looked at the nose of the ship, where one end of an
immense electrical arc was caught in frozen splendor.  "I forgot to
mention," Akane said, "the _Subtler Than Light_ is drawing the energy
in, not projecting it out.  That temple below us is Mayan, part of the
Palenque site in Central America, but its kind of remote, and the
tourists don't get to...."
     The bronze-gold swam into Rumi's sight again.  She tried to will
it away, and to her surprise, it receded.  Though not entirely.
     "Aunt," Rumi interrupted.  "I'm waking up."
     "Okay, then," Akane replied, as if her news had not been
unexpected.  "I'll cast for you again when this is over."
     Rumi thought she might have time for one more question.  Maybe
even the unanswered question of 'why.'  *Why* had Akane-6977 told
Akane-1 to do what she did?  Was the future without her involvement
with tracking down The Programmer so much worse than the future with
her in the middle of it?
     But what came from her mouth was something else entirely.
Something she had not been aware of thinking until she spoke.
     "When this is over," she said, "visit my dad.  He misses you.  He
doesn't say anything about it anymore, but he... he does."
     Akane seemed surprised for a moment.
     "I've been meaning to cast..." she started.
     "No," said Rumi.  "Visit.  In person.  You can do that, right?"
     "I---"
     The bronze-gold rushed across Rumi's field of vision again, and
this time it would not leave.  She tried to think of it as the name
she had learned--nectarisite--but there was nothing metallic about it.
It was just a feeling, a color, a sensation... and it was breaking up
to reveal the night.
     The night... and three concerned faces.
     One she recognized as that of Esteban Veracruz.  He was upside
down to her, his hair hanging down.  He smiled as soon as she opened
her eyes, and she thought she felt herself smile back, just a bit, in
response.
     One face was that of a Reptiloid... sort of.  It was not the
Reptiloid she had seen in her vision, Rumi knew, if only because its
leathery-scaly skin, instead of being a uniform shade of olive green,
had vibrant colors billowing across it.  As she watched, it settled
into a sort of fluttery blue-and-silver pattern.
     The third was... Akane.
     No, not Akane.  Well, sort of Akane.  But with very long, very
blonde hair, kept from her face in a ponytail.  Her bronzed skin had a
slightly weathered look, and in her eyes and curled lips Rumi thought
she could see an amused and detached cynicism that Akane had not
possessed.  At once, she knew who she had to be.
     "Aunt Shadebeam?"
     "Got it in one," Shadebeam Moroboshi replied.  "Esteban here says
you went flying and passed out.  Damn good thing his pants were
working and he flew up and caught you, then."
     "Los Pantalones were working because she fixed them," said
Esteban.  Rumi noticed now that the safety goggles she had seen on him
earlier were around his neck.  He had a shirt on now, depicting what
appeared to be cartoon apes identified as 'Gorillaz.'  Two straps
crossed his shoulders, which Rumi guessed to belong to a backpack.
"I came here because there was no answer at Templar's or Hal's or...
or anywhere."
     "Where's here?" Rumi asked.  She sat up fast, and was amazed to
feel... good.  And energized, as though she had drank some of her
mother's chitaba coffee.
     "Take it easy," said the Reptiloid, the voice tone identifying
him as male.  The colors of his scale-skin began to lazily whirl.
"You've had a rough---"
     "She's okay, Slith," said Shadebeam.  "I cast a healing spell on
you.  There wasn't any bad damage that I could see when Esteban
brought you in, but I thought---"
     "To repeat, where's here?" Rumi asked.  She pushed against the
ground with psychokinetic force, and was on her feet in a moment.
After noting she was still in the day-glo orange t-shirt and blue jean
shorts she had been wearing that afternoon, she took in her
surroundings.
     Everything around her seemed to be in an 'under construction'
state.  She had been on a blanket laid on smooth, hard-baked desert
ground, in what appeared to be a hub joining several winding paths.
On her left, several Hottentotian engineers--recognizable to her
because of the small, conical horns on their foreheads--drank a
bubbling blue liquid and discussed a structure that looked rather like
a giant spider with slots on its legs for dispensing drinks.  On her
right whirled the pointy end of an enormous underground transport, and
she wondered if it had just arrived.  And in the distance...
     In the distance, a savage-looking prehistoric giant man was
standing next to a very tall and unfinished wooden pyramid.  Other,
much less giant humanoidish beings were on said pyramid, and the giant
appeared to be helping them fit a large log into position.  It was a
log much larger than was typical for the upper end of a pyramid, and
Rumi realized it was to be the start of antlers.
     "I'm at Burning M00se," she said.
     "What's going to be Burning M00se," Shadebeam corrected.  "In
about three weeks from now.  Right now, this is just Malaga, New
Mexico.  Home to me and Slithis for the past seven years."
     Rumi tried to process the information.
     "New Mexico?" she asked.  "What am I doing in New Mexico?"

NEW MEXICO?
GIANT SPIDER?
NECK TENTACLES?
RAMMYKINS?
CAKE?
DEMONIC MONKEY EYE?
NECTARISITE?
RAVENOUSITY?
DWELLER IN THE SHADES?
PAPARAZZI?
T-REX ON A SEGWAY?
...THE HELL?

SUPERGUY.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious.com
swede3000 at earthlink.net
LJ Superguy Discussion: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list