Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 49

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (mountain)–Entry #17

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

This is my partial analysis of Marty across more than one hundred alt-Earths…

65 percent are unhappy

45 percent are suffering from some ailment

58 percent like ice cream

20 percent like licorice

95 percent read books

15 percent never become lighthouse keepers

13 percent die young

20 percent live into old age

18 percent get married at some point

90 percent have boyfriends or girlfriends

75 percent drink beer

5 percent drink only tea

10 percent have spent time in therapy or psych wards

85 percent are introverted loners

50 percent have been assaulted at one time or another

3 percent have been murdered

12 percent have been in rock bands

65 percent have no living relatives by the time they are thirty

40 percent wanted to be marine biologists before they became lighthouse keepers

80 percent believe in ghosts (perhaps influenced by my spying)

12 percent are drafted by various armies

20 percent have expert fire-arms skills of some kind

25 percent were athletes in school

35 percent came to the lighthouse trying to escape their pasts

70 percent of the lighthouse Martys start and maintain gardens

40 percent of them don't have secret spies who kiss secrets into them behind the lighthouse

60 percent of the two-dozen versions of Marty I have dared approach through my luna moths—talked to through my luna moths—recoiled in horror and basically ran away and then tried to rationalize the encounter as "nerves" or "not having eaten lunch".

39 percent picked up a rock or a hammer and smashed the luna moth to fleshy pulp.

1 percent calmly ignored the incident and continued reading their books.

I haven't approached the real "Marty," of course—I have kept her separate and uncontaminated by my experiments. Because I'm afraid of her reaction. Because I am trying to use the others to understand the real one. Because I am a manipulative and obsessive mountain, a mountain who has no authorization from the angels to breach the other realities with luna moths and yet is doing so anyway—altering observation logs, making records go missing, and watching for any gap in their attention to perform these ritualistic insertions of dialogue into places where they should not exist.

But. I. Cannot. Stop. Doing. It. Any more than I can stop my investigation of the angels. Both things could be deadly, but I don't care.

And beyond all of this, through all of the probabilities I search through, relentless as a common stalker, it is always there on the edges: the Grim Lighthouse. It is there when I am awake and when I allow my mind to diffuse into those separate cells that for me signify sleep. The Grim Lighthouse.

If the real Marty existed in a place composed mostly of light, then she must also exist in darkness.

I don't want to go there, but I know I must.

(Komodo interception and crude electronic replay of a luna moth transmission of the Grim Lighthouse, which would usually just be shot right into Doctor Mormeck's brain (a process that would kill a human). The vast distance the transmission travels accounts for the sound of intra-dimensional gales in the background. It is literally the sound of information passing through the ecto-substrate.)

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (mountain)–Entry #17 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 13, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #10

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

I piece the story together in the same way that I piece myself together…where was I? Where am I? Recovering…I am a recovering bomb. I have been an explosion addict through no fault of my own, and now I must start the hard work of living without the possibility of detonation…

***

I went back to the strange domed building, and no slumped-over dead dismembered German soldier lay there. The snow lay over the ground pristine, undisturbed. There was still a pressure in my head that I attributed to the Presence. A quick surveil uncovered that the strange dome was mere marker, mere beacon, and that whatever used it as such lived deep beneath the ground. I sensed a hollowness under the earth where no hollowness should exist: the sensors on the bottom of my komodo feet told me.

But to get there, I would have to abandon my komodo-self, the self I had not left for weeks. I did so with reluctance, for that skin, that flesh, had been splendid armor, had made me feel oddly invincible. To set that down for even a moment struck me as wrong.

Still, I did it, digging into the snow and dirt as komodo only to be immersed in the ground as a rather large earthworm that undulated down, down through the hard compacted soil, through the richness of it, and the occasional unexpected stone, like some kind of deep-sea diver turned terrestrial, ever downward, heading ever for the emptiness my brain could still feel below me.

Until I burst through and, half-morphed back to komodo, half-in, half-out of the ground, a root sticking me in my left ear-hole, took in the sight below me: a perfect scale model of Stalingrad before the war that gleamed in the ethereal, buttery light. No ruined buildings, no stacks of bodies, no artillery, no mortars, no tanks. There a government building, here a converted cathedral.

What would Pavlov have thought of that shining city, untouched by war? Why do I think he might have recoiled, been sickened, been made angry by it? Wanted to burn it all down.

The only anomalous details were a dead, dismembered German soldier slumped in the far corner, face awash in half-dried blood and frame hunched over by the ceiling, a giant in that context…and the thousands of tiny mechanical komodos swarming the streets…and the way they all craned their necks to look up at me…and the way they scuttled in a great metallic clang toward me, up the walls of the cavern, as I struggled to break free of the hole I'd made to enter…only to burst forth into their clutches and be carried down to the replica of th strange domed building below. They clicked and hissed and snapped at me with their jaws and I gullivered for them mightily, thrashing in their grasp but unable to break free. No change of shape or size made any difference, and I noticed from the corners of my vision that as I changed they would blur for an instant and, reforming, adapt to my newness. Soon, I would discover they, and the whole city below me, was created from nano-bots and it was at the pleasure of the Remnant that they appeared to constitute komodos at all.

Something in me rebelled at destroying that strange dome, and so I adapted to the size of its door as they led me inside. The ceiling that rose and rose had a greenish tint mixed with dark red smears, as if fungi had met dried blood and consummated a strange union. I felt as if I was looking from the inside out at a giant's disinterred skull.

Within, I met the Remnant, all twelve of them, and the pressure in my skull increased. They, too, were composed of nano-bots and had decided to take the form of generic miniature German soldiers—to reassure me or to terrify me?—and there was little to tell one from the other except by the eyes, which varied from violet to green and blue and hazel, as if human beings stared out from an incarcerating mask.

There was no preamble.

"Who are you with?" the one who by his medals purported to be a general. "Why are you here?"

And another, in a murmur, "Are you a spy?" And another, in a shout, "Are you with the angels?" And another, in a shriek, "Did you come here to destroy us?"

Before I could answer, the torture began. The mecha-komodos scrambled atop me and held me down, turning into shackles that changed in size and shape as I changed in size and shape, until finally I stopped. It was useless. I was just wasting energy.

"I'm a mountain," I told them. "I'm just an intelligent mountain from far far away. Nothing to do with you."

But they'd already stopped listening, before I started talking. The pressure in my head had gotten so much worse I was having trouble concentrating anyway.

Then the twelve Remnants disassembled into their nano-parts and entered my body, interrogating me from within, trying to parse information from my bloodstream, my brain stem, from my spleen and kidneys or their equivalent. None of it meant much, the organs within my body as much for show as their gleaming Stalingrad—what need has a mountain for organs any more than moss does?—but I let the form of them dictate my defenses as a way of confusing the enemy. I grew an extra liver. I put a second and third stomach in their way. I respliced veins to arteries and sent my heart down into my intestines to evade them. I let my claw-tips house my lungs for awhile. Instead of changing my body size and type I let my bladders erupt from my skin and wobble their like strange rescue balloons. All over my body organs burst forth like blossoms. I changed my blood cells into tiny sharks to attack the nano-machines. Within my body, the Remnants fought my remnants as I watched with eyes I grew out of the tissue linings of my circulatory system.

That war took as long in its way as the siege of Stalingrad. It was over in minutes, but within that micro-universe, it was days and weeks, my generals that were avatars of my own avatar making it a war of attrition, even as with each new maneuver the nano-tech of the Remnant took more and more intel from me.

But at a cost, for even as they extracted from me, I extracted from them, until the tale of their civilization I have previously recounted became clear, and the one recurring image that came to mind when I thought of them was of a lonely test-tube, the last vestiges of an angel-destroyed civilization, traveling end-over-end through space for millions years until their instruments guided them to Earth, and then alt-Earths (for they had retained their portal technology) as the principal current playground for the angels. Burning through all of their nano-parts was a dueling caution and thirst for vengeance. They had been shadowy and cautious enough to spook the angels, and clever enough to rebuild across many alt-Earths in their new mecha-form, so that the twelve I now battled were only one set of many cells of twelve—tiny, living underground, undermining what they could, taking over human bodies when they could, moving inexorably but slowly toward their goals.

Finally, they began to take over my systems, to extinguish or neutralize my cell-sharks, to force me to stop emitting organs, to engage in tissue-based subterfuge. Slowly, they began to get to the core of me, to come close to breaching the defenses that had kept them out of my central mind. And I found this disturbing, almost horrifying, because by now I existed unique and autonomous from Mormeck Mountain. I was, I realized in those last micro-seconds, become unique, and if I ever met up with the Mountain again it would be like greeting a brother or a close cousin, not a doppelganger.

That's when the pressure in my brain increased and I realized it came not from the Presence but from a more familiar source, set off by the proximity to the Presence.

That's when I detonated and destroyed the cavern and blew the top off of both the miniature dome and the dome aboveground, just another explosion in a world that expected them, that flourished on them.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #10 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 13, 2011.

The New Surrealism

I'm going to selfishly say what I want to discover is more strangeness in fiction, and by more strangeness I mean the rise of a new surrealism that looks at science fiction and fantasy both askance and and with affection, but is less concerned with building causality and logic and more concerned with restoring a "sense of wonder" without the baggage of the golden age of SF. A sense of wonder that's both ironic and cynical at times and that relies upon huge imaginations blasting out of the traps of "how would that happen" and "I have to figure out how that would work" and letting the dream-logic of charged images and amazing concepts flow. Anchored by compelling characters and stories that wormhole within each other and bestriding the landscape with confidence. We see some of this already in the most mind-bending of manga and anime, and in other manifestations of the imagination that understand there's always a backstory that will work because we live in a multiverse. There's always a reason, an explanation, for anything. On some level, in these post-post times explanations are less useful to us than journeys that expand consciousness, get at psychological truths, and convert the dross of the everyday into something amazing.

The New Surrealism originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 12, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (mountain)–Entry #16

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

Perhaps Gabriel can sense my discontent, because soon after my last entry, he came to me with a smile and an outstretched hand (tipped with sharp nails almost like claws).

"You want to know more," he said. "I can tell. You are growing bored watching one lighthouse on a backwater alt-earth."

"Mountains don't get bored," I replied.

Gabriel's curved smile grew until it seemed about to split his face in two. "Nonetheless…"

The avatar I sent with Gabriel was half-komodo, in honor of my lost avatar somewhere in the winter city. This seemed to make Gabriel twitchy, but I didn't care. He led me deep into the laboratory, to the library, which I'd never entered before. We passed many doors and passageways I found curious, from which sounds or smells emanated that required further investigation…but Gabriel kept an iron grip on my left arm the entire time, guiding me along at a brisk pace.

We entered the library, which houses a legion of titles brought back from thousands of alt-Earths, so many that I could not read them all in a thousand years. An angel's library is not like a human's library, and I still do not know who collected them, or why they were collected. Outside of the space was a hologram of a famous old library from an alt-Earth, with shelves and shelves in a golden light.

But within the pure white dome of the angels' library lay cases and cases. Huge mounds or middens of battered light brown cases with handles, like on satchels or suitcases. No apparent organizing principle to how they had been scattered and dumped, although each case had a title scrawled across the top, like Books That Started Wars or Versions of the Torah or Books That Never Existed or Books That Only Existed Once or Books About Cats or Versions of The Voynich Manuscript.

The cases contained what most humans would recognize as the glass sample slides that scientists place in front of the lens of a microscope, except somewhat thicker and thus containing more of a sample between the two plates. In running my fingers over one row of them in an open cases I found the slides oddly warm to the touch; they pulsed a little bit.

I had seen too many normal human libraries in my surveillance. "This isn't a library," I said. "How would I read the books?"

He smirked and placed what looked like a tiny eye-dropper in my hand. "The front of the slides are made of living tissue. Insert the dropper, extract a sample of the liquid and place it on your tongue."

He undid the latch on a case titled "Literature of Tlon", delicately pulled a slide from its place. There was a purplish stain captured within and it lazily squished and sloshed within its trap. "This is a book," Gabriel said. "Read it. Read all of them if you like."

Then he left.

I didn't at first like reading in this way, not that I was much used to reading anyway. I was always on surveillance and what I usually absorbed was visual in nature. I had learned what the angels needed me to learn through modules absorbed through the skin, so that there was no process of discovery. It simply existed in my mind where before it had not. I had, of course, had my avatars read various physical books from time to time, whatever they left around in the unrestricted parts of the library, so I knew the experience and had been transported by reading, too, a half dozen times…and in a way, I was eager. I think in that moment I believed that reading books might bring me closer to Marty. She loved books. She loved them so much I wanted to be a book she read.

So I jabbed the dropper into the membrane of the slide and it went right in and I retrieved some of the purple liquid, placed a drop on my tongue, and sat in an old rocking chair in the corner of the room while I "read" the book…ignoring a nearby bloodstain on the floor.

It was more like listening to great music than reading, in that the liquid form of the book took up a space in one's mind that bypassed the editor housed there. It bypassed the entry phase of reading, during which you are aware of, say, being in a rocking chair in a strange room, and that itch on your left hand, and those nagging problems in your life…all of those moments before a book sweeps you away into its own world, its own dream. That was gone, and I was just fully within the book, appreciating it exactly as it was meant to be appreciated, to the point of complete and utter immersion. It wasn't like watching a movie, not at all, it was still like reading, with that sensual appreciation of each word on the tip of the tongue, that moment of frisson when a sentence goes somewhere unexpected but brilliant, rewiring your brain, the mind creating the sensory experience, better than any hallucination or even my favorite thing on my favorite iteration of an alt-Earth. It was an ecstasy and a reverie that created pleasure I'd never experienced before.

When I finished that first book, with its landscapes of a fantastical place that on one Earth at least actually existed, I must admit to becoming an addict. I placed the next on my tongue, and the next. I scrabbled my way to case after case on those mounds in that domed room. I absorbed so many I lost count, and the reality of the rocking chair in which I sat during these expeditions seemed like some odd way-station in a sanitized virtual reality before my return to the world in my head.

I experienced so many lives and so many places. I read the books of those who had died obscure across all alt-Earths and those who had been famous, those who had died young and those who had died old. So much by so many. By so few. By all. And multiplied by the variations, so that here a short story writer who had never completed that tantalizingly titled novel had indeed finished and instead of being shot by Nazis during World War II had lived into old and somber age, to write even more novels, each more amazing and heart-breaking than the last. And here a woman who died in the Far East unknown, her writings burned by her husband before any could be published, was more important than the Emperor. And here the novelist who had turned away from his muse regained it on some other alt-Earth and rather than a hack he was a miniaturist, creating absurd yet haunting portraits of eccentric people. And here, too, that suicide in a river had never happened and what had come to her when she'd stopped in mid-stream and reconsidered was like a concerto bursting out of my very heart.

I only became aware of the tears running down my face after about the thousandth book I placed upon my tongue. It was an expansion of a story called "The Dead" that in only four alt-Earths had become the ending of a novel, and that novel was better than anything the writer had done in life on any of the other Earths.

Now I know that Gabriel meant to bury me in those books, thought he was burying me in facts, knowledge, information. But instead he was steeping me in emotion, giving me the full experience of what reading meant to Marty. Fiction, philosophy, biographies, histories, biology…

By the end, I wasn't drowned in any of it, not really. Instead, there was calm and peace at the core of me.

And yet an odd sensation, this incredibly strange feeling, enveloped me, and I realized that my avatar was weeping not just from sorrow at realizing I was all alone but also overwhelming elation and the epiphany that I was not alone…and that no matter Gabriel's purpose, my readings had not just moved me—they had moved me so I was not afterwards in the position I had been in before. I was no longer in the same location relative to the universes, to myself, to the angels, to human beings, to my avatar, to Marty, to anything. And for this I secretly thank Gabriel even as I despise him even more.

And I realize now that I must take a risk. The mountain must talk to Marty.

To every Marty.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (mountain)–Entry #16 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 11, 2011.

Tallahassee Cabinet of Curiosities Extravaganza!

For now I'll just let you suss it out from Jeremy Zerfoss's great poster, but more info soon. Should be great. Don't think we have any other Cabinet contributors within driving distance, but if I'm wrong, ping me and we'll add you.

Tallahassee Cabinet of Curiosities Extravaganza! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 9, 2011.

Donate to the World SF Travel Fund!

Go here. Find out about their peerbacker fund drive to raise enough money for a very worthy cause: bringing more international editors, bloggers, writers, etc., over to events in the U.S. or U.K. to promote cross-cultural exchange and communication. Donate!

Donate to the World SF Travel Fund! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 9, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #9

(original here)

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

They were the remnants of a matriarchal flesh-and-blood race of six-legged amphibious carnivores from a planet with a name that sounded like "Rastz". It issued from their mouths like a reverent and mournful hiss. Now in exile, they called themselves a word that meant the same as "Remnant" in English, but more defiant. Like a cross between "survivor" and "I survived because I danced on your corpse and spit on your grave."

The Remnant were one of those odd peoples who, despite the presence of a solar system brimming with habitable planets, turned inward instead. They developed intricate robotics and a crude system of cross-dimensional travel long before they thought of space flight. The Remnant wished to explore the universes contained with Rastz, and they sent forth emissaries to explore.

At first, they found every delight and torment possible: versions of their world more peaceful and more advanced than theirs, versions decimated by battles for last scraps of protein on otherwise exhausted continents and seas bare of animal life, all of it dotted with the burning fires of failed city-states gouging the earth for the last fossil fuels. They came to know the full measure of echoes…

But after about two hundred years, everything changed. On an outlier alt-Rastz, a rogue where the Remnant never developed civilization, a Remnant expedition came across a hill overlooking a bay. Upon the hill stood giant bears silent and unblinking, while below angels at play hunted Remnant for sport.

To the Remnant, angels looked a lot like the bleating livestock back at home.

To the angels, the Remnant looked a lot like what they'd been hunting in the bay, but with funny-looking toy weapons strapped to their ponderous sides.

Only one Remnant made it home, but the angels made sure she had a tracer on her. Suddenly, the Remnant knew the outer, wider universe all too well: it was filled with giant bears and beings who looked like food but had strange and possibly superior technology. And those beings were now after them.

Had they simply—"simply"—returned home and decided to stay there, turned outward, explored the planets in their solar system, forgotten they had ever stumbled across alternative Rastzs, perhaps the angels would have left them alone. But instead the Remnant decided to try to establish hegemony over the other alt-Rastz worlds and find ways to thwart the angels.

The angels saw what was happening and were not amused. They had conflicts of their own to worry about. They decided that, for their purposes, they didn't need Rastz—any Rastzs. They sent death and destruction. They funneled plagues through the portals. They sent transdimensional fireballs that scorched whole continents across alt-Rastzs. They suppressed evolution, sent it reeling back on itself. They took some versions and smashed them, sent others spinning out into the galaxy, unmoored from Rastz's sun. They didn't care. It didn't matter to them at all. They didn't care, either, when the Remnant sued for peace. It was a process. They had begun the process. The process must be completed.

And when it was all over not a single flesh-and-blood Remnant remained alive. And the only possible savior of an entire race existed within a habitat the size and shape of a test tube hurtling through space as far away from the dead Rastzs as possible, in only one possible reality. A test-tube spinning end-over-end filled with bioneered nanotech, filled with thirteen consciousnessess downloaded into Remnant micro-brains, surrounded by anything else that could fit on information-absorbing microtic tissue sheets. Thus swathed in sheets of the sum total of their civilization's history and knowledge the Remnant slowly traversed the universe unmoored, so small and insignificant that they did not register with the angels at all. Within each micro-brain burned just one thought: to rebuild, to expand, to seek vengeance.

The destruction of Rastz happened one hundred million years ago, if you take Mormeck Mountain's time-spool as the baseline. This all happened long before any Earth developed civilization.

This all happened well before any of our times…and yet…and yet…it all soon became very personal to me because the Remnant told me the story while torturing me for information.

None of which really explains how I found myself half-komodo, half-worm, staring down at an underground replica of Stalingrad. Or why the pressure in my skull at that moment meant that in a few hours of my capture I would explode like the perfect bomb, in a hellstorm of fire and flesh and shrapnel.

But reconstruction is a difficult process and I am just a remnant at the moment, so I will leave that story for the next entry.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #9 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 8, 2011.

Shared Worlds SF/F Teen Writing Camp Free Book Frenzy

(Short DIY vid shot by guest writer Ekaterina Sedia)

I'll have much more info and news from this year's SW teen writing camp, including the reveal of next year's guest writers, but for now here's a short informal video shot by guest writer Ekaterina Sedia of some of the students from Shared Worlds browsing for their free books.

Shared Worlds is located at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Publishers who sent free books this year included HarperVoyager, Tor, Pyr, Tachyon, White Wolf, Penguin (Firebird), Weird Tales, Angry Robot, Small Beer, Del Rey, Bull Spec, and Orbit.

SW is partially sponsored by a grant from Amazon.com. The camp was founded by Jeremy LC Jones and I serve as assistant director. The full writer/editor staff for 2011 included me, Ann VanderMeer, Nnedi Okorafor, Ekaterina Sedia, Will Hindmarch, Rob Rhodes, Jeremy Jones, and Minister Faust.

Shared Worlds SF/F Teen Writing Camp Free Book Frenzy originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 7, 2011.

ODD Anthology Update–Gregory Bossert Vid Pics

In case anyone was wondering, Cheeky Frawg will be releasing ODD?, our new antho of reprints and originals in October. The ultra-talented Gregory Norman Bossert—great writer and visual artist—has been working on the short film to accompany the release. It features an original song by Danny Fontaine based on lyrics I wrote (and he added to). The images are based on Jeremy Zerfoss's conceptualization of Myster Odd for the e-book's cover:

Here are a few more stills from the animated film, which is shaping up beautifully…

ODD Anthology Update–Gregory Bossert Vid Pics originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 6, 2011.

War of Moomin Against Totoro, Totoro Against Moomin

(No Jake von Slatt artifact was harmed during the events described in this blog post.)

Ever since Ann and I returned from the Carolinas with Jake von Slatt's Bassington & Smith Brain, featured in the The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities it's been nothing but trouble. Our cats will have nothing to do with it. It emits strange sounds and odors in the middle of the night. Flashes of electricity have appeared under the bell jar, appearing to reveal rips in the very fabric of space and time.

Even worse, the ongoing conflict between Moomins and Totoros previously detailed in this post has been brought into the house because of the presence of the Bassington & Smith Brain. It has quickly become the flashpoint for an ongoing, smoldering battle…as this series of still photographs demonstrates…

The Moomins and what temporary allies they could find within the house chose the high ground within the psychotronic field of the Jake von Slatt Bassington & Smith Brain, the emanations temporarily hiding their presence from the adorable enemy.

However, they were soon found out and Moomintroll made a great sacrifice in placing the belljar over the brain, to protect Moominpappa and friends, leaving himself exposed beyond the glass.

The stage seemed set for a long siege…with a clear numerical advantage, at least in terms of cute, disembodied heads, for the Moomins.

Moomintroll peered nervously around the bell jar, wondering which side the mecha-lizard might choose. Long, long ago, he and the mecha-lizard had gone on a drunken pub crawl through Helsinki and become fast friends, but he didn't know if the creature remembered.

As it turned out…the mecha-lizard did remember…

Suddenly, with its hired guns switching sides, the totoro seemed not only small, but utterly alone in its tiny, almost unbearable cuteness.

Leaving the totoro with only one option: to exponentially increase both its cuteness and its fluffiness, leaving Moominpappa seeming wooden and two-dimensional, despite his colorful and crazy past. "ROOOOOARRRRRRR!" said totoro. "Where's Moominmamma?" Moominpappa groused, then remembered she'd told him a few weeks ago she would have no part in this foolishness.

The stand-off continues as of this hour.

War of Moomin Against Totoro, Totoro Against Moomin originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on August 5, 2011.