Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 29

Tragic

“Anne, are you killed?

Alack, alack, what blood is this, which stains

the hard, yellow road-bed?”

She died ��� this was the way she died.

With a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose.

Though in life I used to hug her, now she’s dead I draw the line.

Alas, poor ghost!

No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse!

And they got very cocky, and went about saying you were done for this time! You would never come back again, never, never!”

���Surely,��� said I, ���surely that is something at my window lattice;

It’s only imagination. Low spirits and nothing else.

“For God’s sake, don’t let it in!”

..

Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.”

I saw on the YeahWrite website that they were doing a poetry slam this month involving centos, which is where you take lines from other works to create a new story. This was fun, although it ended up in a creepier place than I expected. .

The Confrontation

For Mr. Stamper, being��marched down a corridor by uniformed guards who intended him harm was just another minor setback in his career. He’d come to expect it. Indeed, he was mentally critiquing the guards’ performance. They weren’t checking side corridors they passed, for instance. Very bad form. Mr. Stamper might’ve had allies waiting to spring a trap. The guards clearly were not expecting a rescue attempt. Mr. Stamper had been in charge of prisoners once, and he knew that you��always��expected a rescue attempt.

His companion, squidling waitress Sarah May Raxenpaxerflirk, was somewhat less resigned to her situation. She gurgled in a state approaching panic as the guards marched her and Mr. Stamper along. She was going to be in so much trouble. They’d fire her from the Lady Amber for sure. And then, without a good reference, without funds to pay application fees, she’d��never��get into medical school. Then it occurred to Sarah May that if the guards shot her, as seemed very likely, she wouldn’t need to worry about medical school applications anyway. That wasn’t exactly comforting.

The guards halted at an open metal door. A tall uniformed rat-minion appeared. “Ah, yes,” he said stuffily. “Prisoners to see the Baron. Broke into the Shadow Vault, did you? The Baron is not pleased. Not at all.”

“Who is��he, then?” Mr. Stamper asked.

The rat spluttered indignantly. “You don’t know? How could you not know? He’s famous across nine systems! The idea!��� Somehow he gathered himself together, and gestured them forward into the office. The prisoners saw a glimpse of a large desk which dominated the room, and a small felinoid alien��which sat at the desk. The rat bowed deeply. “May I present the most terrible Baron Frederick von Fluffingfluff, Admiral of the Charlotte’s Moon, Ravager of the Fourth Nebula, Defender of the Nightmare Comet Incursion.���

“Ooh, kitty!” Sarah May said, before she could stop herself.

“Ooh, kitty?” repeated the��Baron��in a mortally offended squeak. “I am Baron von Fluffingfluff. I carry the sword of my fathers. I can have you and your thieving companion thrown into the thermal reactor of this ship and��vaporized!��I am��not��a��kitty!”��

Mr. Stamper tried to salvage the situation. “Milord, we apologize for the offense. We never meant to cause trouble. We were simply trying to get back to the gaming tables, and became lost.”

“Lost, you say? A likely story,” rumbled the Baron. At least he tried to rumble; his voice just couldn’t hit that low register. Sarah May made a hysterical giggle.

The Baron rose up in wrath. ���That is it. I will not be insulted by prisoner scum. Guards! Take them to the reactor, and let them��burn!”��

As the guards whisked him and the terrifying Sarah May out of the room, Mr. Stamper wished devoutly that the galaxy had a few more species like her and less like Earth pets. No one ever giggled at a squid.

This story is part of an ongoing series, which you can find here. Thanks for reading!��

First Time

Another high point in every superhero’s life is the first time he or she goes public. Rarely is it the first time they use their powers. There’s�� always the usual string of unexplained incidents: lives being saved in mysterious fashion, loud noises late at night, bursts of light where no light should be. For Gaseous Girl, she had performed 17 heroic rescues, averted 32 crimes of middling severity, and saved the planet from collapsing into an alternate hell-dimension before people finally noticed her.

She’d been asked to be a bridesmaid at her friend Elizabeth’s wedding. Elizabeth had chosen purple for her bridesmaid’s dresses. Madeleine wasn’t wildly fond of purple, but there were worse colors, so she made her peace with it. She dutifully marched down the aisle, took her place up front, and tried not to yawn as Elizabeth and what’s his face promised to love and cherish, to have and to hold, in sickness and health, etc. Then came the reception, a bit of dancing, various small speeches, and finally the throwing of the bouquet. Madeleine gathered with the rest of her unattached companions and watched as the flowers traced a lazy arc towards her.

Of course, the Owl Bandit would pick that moment to attack. Why he decided to rob a wedding reception no one ever knew. But rob it he did, or tried to. He stormed into the reception hall, waved around his Death Ray, and demanded that everyone get down right now, or else. Then he launched into what seemed a prepared speech about Society, and the Economy, and Systemic Problems, and several other grievances, the solution to which involved everyone there handing over their money and valuables to him.

Madeleine thought quickly. There were six different ways she could take out the Owl Bandit, but all of them involved going public. If she only had a mask or something she could make a stab at preserving her real identity, but she didn’t have one. Normally she carried a mask in her pocket just in case, but her fancy purple bridesmaid’s dress didn’t have a pocket. Granted, Elizabeth would not have expected her bridesmaids to cavort around in their dresses saving the world, but come on. What was she supposed to do?

There was only one solution. With a sigh, Madeleine carefully tore a strip of cloth from the dress. Two tiny flame bursts got her a pair of eyeholes. Wincing as she thought of losing her damage deposit, she wrapped the strip of cloth around her face. She had miscalculated. The right hole wasn’t anywhere near her right eye, so half her field of vision was swallowed up by purple cloth. It couldn’t be helped. Madeleine leaped to her feet, fire rippling from her hands. She had, at least, prepared her first line. “Back off, Owl Bandit, or know the fiery fury of justice!”

It had sounded ringing and heroic when she’d practiced. Now, in the reception hall, with people looking on, it sounded stupid. Fiery fury? Really? Oy. Madeleine wished she could do it over, but she didn’t have time. “Who the heck are you?” the Owl Bandit said in mild bemusement.

She had forgotten this part. She hadn’t picked a name yet. Madeleine almost face-palmed. All the work on her line, on costume design, on power practice, and she’d forgotten a name. Then the Owl Bandit mooted the point. “Whoever you are, prepare to eat death ray!” He promptly fired it at her. The blast knocked her right through the wedding cake. The cake was irretrievably destroyed. Madeleine, fortunately, wasn’t. She bounded up and burped fire at the Owl Bandit, knocking him into the sound system. He wasn’t a flying brick like her, so the impact put him nicely down for the count. Madeleine had a second line prepared, something about how evil never triumphs over good, but she gave it up with a sigh. Instead, she leaped over the maid of honor, ran through the reception hall’s main doors, and soared away into the sky.

She never could explain to the bridal shop how her dress had been ripped up and scorched so badly. “There was an accident with the unity candle,” she tried, and left it at that. She still had to pay through the nose for the damage. And so began her heroic career as Gaseous Girl.

 

 

Last Christmas

Last time, in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine had just time-traveled to Bethlehem on Christmas night. Little does she know that her arch-nemesis has traveled with her…

Catrina had always loved Christmas, the whole Christmas season. Even before she started having battles on Christmas, like the Snownado Affair on Mount Elevenses, or the Attack of the Evil Snow Monster, she had still enjoyed the holidays. And now she was here for the very first one. She raced down the snow-covered hillside of Bethlehem, dodging startled sheep as she went. She could tell by the absence of shepherds that she had missed the angelic announcement, and she was slightly disappointed, but Catrina consoled herself that she would still make it to the manger on time.

Then she skidded to a stop in the snow, held up by a sudden thought. Shouldn’t she bring a gift to the Christ Child? All the songs she heard said that people had brought gifts. It would be rude to show up empty-handed. Catrina swiftly checked her pockets. She didn’t have gold, or frankincense, or myrrh anywhere about her. She wasn’t entirely sure why a small baby would want myrrh anyway. Catrina also didn’t have a drum set that she could play for him (pa rum pum pum pum). She didn’t even have so much as a kazoo. She could whistle something if necessary…. then her eyes fell on Mlrning (the Shovel of Thor!) that was still in her hand. “Oh dear,” said Catrina. Could she really give the Shovel of Thor to the Christ Child? Even assuming she could part with it herself, should she? Wouldn’t it create a massive theological quandary? What would the baby Jesus do with the Shovel of Thor anyway?

Catrina stood puzzling in the Bethlehem snow, trying to sort out the problem. She had entirely forgotten about Susan. Her newly minted arch-nemesis crept up behind her, still holding the pistol from World War One. By her count, it had two bullets remaining. Two would be more than sufficient. This time she wasn’t going to have an ethical debate on the subject. This time, she would do it. This time….

Susan, it must be remembered, was only just beginning her career of villainy and mayhem. She had not yet become the mistress of all Character Hell, nor had she matured into the dangerously genre savvy nemesis Catrina would come to know and hate. She hadn’t completely grasped the nature of her existence as a fictional character in a story. As a result, when she aimed the pistol at Catrina and pulled the trigger, she somewhat naively expected that the gun would actually go off. She failed to realize that if it did, the bullet would hit Catrina right in the back and kill her, thus bringing a premature end to her story arc. Catrina had been killed before, it was true, but never in a pointlessly random way. Susan was, therefore, quite unprepared for the dull click as the pistol jammed in her hand. “What?” she shrieked, throwing it to the snow. “It should’ve worked! Why didn’t it work?”

She didn’t know what to do now. She could throw herself bodily at Catrina and try to end her by physical force, but the princess was carrying a very big shovel. Susan had enough sense to know that an unarmed person against a person carrying a big shovel wouldn’t go so well, even without the shovel being magical. With no other options, Susan turned reluctantly to her own memory. She had seen things when she had stared into the Swirling Vortex of Imaginary Time. The truth of her own existence was one of those things, and Susan had more or less gone mad because of it. But she had seen other things. A picture of what she wanted flashed in her mind. At that moment she saw the flicker of light that meant the Swirling Vortex of Imaginary Time was opening up again. Rather than try to shoot at it, or complain about the fact that it just kept on opening and closing like a temporal automatic door, instead Susan deliberately threw herself into it, concentrating very hard on what she wanted. For once, the time rift did as she hoped.

Far above Bethlehem, in a lazy orbit round the moon, a single spaceship hummed along its way. Captain Zzip Plettski was most perplexed. The alien lizard had only meant to scout the planet in preface to an invasion. His probes had so far reported a primitive people armed with pointy bits of metal. The invasion fleet’s forces, armed with plasma cannons and ray shields, would mop the floor with them. But now a new star, or star-like anomaly anyway had flashed into existence, so close to the planet that its gravitational fields alone should’ve sent the planet spinning from its orbit. Still, the planet remained in its course. The star was tiny, but very bright, and it was moving in a peculiar pattern that kept it fixed exactly above a certain specific point on the planet below. The alien captain couldn’t make sense of it.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Susan materialized on his bridge. “Hello, there,” she said. “You have weapons, yes?”

“Intruder!” Zzip cried. “Kill her!”

“Oh, please, do not be so stupid,” Susan said irritably. “I know things you need to know. For instance, I know what that star means, and what you should do about it.”

Zzip paused. He was surrounded by his bodyguard, and they had blasters trained on the human female who had somehow transported on his bridge. He had nothing to fear. And if she had answers… “Very well,” he said. “Talk.”

“It’s actually very complicated, so I am going to sum up,” Susan said. She had put together what the star meant, and where she and Catrina had landed. She didn’t much care that she was about to ruin the first Christmas, if she could take Catrina with it, and fictional reality besides. “That star is fixed above the spot where a baby is being born, a baby that will change the course of human history. Mainly because he’s God, or at least a lot of people think he is. He’s also about to be met by Catrina, who’s carrying the Shovel of Thor. I won’t try to sort out the theological dilemma, but basically that shovel is powerful enough to swat your ship from the sky like an insect. So I’d suggest you attack now and blast them into oblivion with whatever strange weapons you have.”

“Well, we do have an atomic missile or two that could serve…” mused the captain. But then he caught himself. “But we are not going to strike a planet without warning, just on your say-so! We are a scout ship, not the invasion fleet! And if these people have such weapons as you say, it would be the much wiser course to leave this planet alone!”�� He spun towards his officers. “Prepare the star drive. I declare this planet a failure as a potential colony site.”

Susan shrugged. “Oh well. I tried. By the way, those, er, atomic missiles you mentioned, would that big red button on the control panel have anything to do with launching them?”

“It does, yes,” Zzip said testily, “now, miss, if you don’t mind, I-“

Somehow the alien lizard captain had not picked up on how furious Susan was, and how much she wanted to blast Catrina. The instant he had confirmed her suspicion about the button, she leaped forward, vaulted over a surprised alien guard, scrambled to the panel, and slammed her fist down on the button. She got hit with a blaster bolt moments later that sent her collapsing to the deck, but she felt that deck shudder beneath her, and she knew she had launched the missiles. “Perfect,” she breathed as she passed into unconsciousness. “Take that, Catrina.”

The starship only had two nuclear missiles, for utmost emergencies. The button sent both of them diving down towards the planet, the little town of Bethlehem specifically, which had no idea that it was about to disappear in a nuclear fireball. Catrina, certainly, didn’t know. She had just reached the stable when she glanced up and saw the bombs descending. “What in the world?” she said as the missiles blossomed into light.

This has been another episode of the Catrina Chronicles. For previous episodes, go here. You can also find more Catrina stories at my Amazon page, and on Goodreads. And as always, thanks for reading.

 

Kaboom

���This is bad,��� Cindy said. ���Very bad.���

���Why?��� Maxwell said. ���I jump twenty years, swipe something, sell it back here. Easy!���

Cindy was right. He landed in World War Three. A nuclear missile hit the��time machine. Things got bad after that.

Mistletoe Can Be Deadly

Every superhero remembers the first time they powered up. For Madeleine, it was a school dance, Christmas Eve, 1997. She was sixteen. Her date had abandoned her for Lizzie Dern. Lizzie was a magazine model. Madeleine wasn���t. Q.E.D.

She had wound up standing alone in a doorway, staring out at the falling snow. Then she saw Lizzie and her date headed towards his car. She pushed the door open, just in time to hear bits of their laughing conversation. She caught the word mistletoe, and guessed the context quickly. Then she got mad. Real mad.

The police never found out who turned Ben Wizowsky���s nice new car into molten slag. They blamed the town���s local supervillain, the Mutant Crested Squirrel. It wasn���t the squirrel.

A Problem of Casino Security

Domingo Kirrexanvex enjoyed life as medical officer aboard the��Charlotte’s Moon.��He wasn’t breaking any medical frontiers, exactly. Most of his cases involved aliens who had partied a bit too hard for their biology, or who had suffered some minor ailment on board ship. Thus he was quite astonished when he heard that a squidling was in sickbay with Star Lord Flu. He was even more astonished when he recognized her. “Sarah May?”

He too remembered Magel Five. His happy memories of Sarah May, glimmering in the sunsets, received a bit of a jolt as the present-day Sarah vomited in front of him, immediately after squeaking his name. Domingo couldn’t decide whether to rush into her tentacles or lend her medical assistance. In his indecision, he had overlooked the otter at her side. Mr. Stamper could spare no time for romance. With a neat uncoiling of muscle and paw, he laid Domingo out flat. Then he pocketed the device that had given Sarah May such convincing symptoms. “Come on,” he said to the shocked Sarah May. “We only have to get to the vault.”

“But-” Sarah May began, her eyes widening tragically.

Mr. Stamper was already striding out of sickbay. Sarah May, with a heart-rending sob, had no choice but to follow behind. She was only slightly mollified by the fact that she wasn’t throwing up anymore.

The otter and the squidling made their way quickly through the bustling alien crowds. Soon they had slipped off the main gaming deck and into a warren of side passageways, until at last they found a secure elevator. Mr. Stamper expertly hacked the electronic keypad that granted��access. Inside, he simply had to push a button very helpfully labeled “Secret Vault”. ��As the elevator whooshed down, he wondered why this seemed too easy.

He soon found out. The vault of the��Charlotte’s Moon��wasn’t an ordinary steel box guarded with a combination lock and a big door. The elevator opened on a dizzying expanse of darkness. Mr. Stamper had a light in a pocket on his belt. He shone the light into the expanse, but the beam trailed away bleakly, fading out at an impossible distance.

“What is it?” Sarah May said, her voice quavery.

“A Shadow Vault,” Mr. Stamper replied. “It’s an extra-dimensional pocket in the space-time continuum.” He went through another paragraph of complicated terms like Tardisian fluxes and the Piper Multiverse Theory, but Sarah May didn’t follow a word of it. What she understood was that the Shadow Vault was impossibly big, and very dark.

“So the Orb is in there, then?” she asked.

“Yes. But the only way to retrieve it is if you create an Einstein-Selvik bridge to collapse the pocket and reverse the polarity matrix.���

Sarah May blinked. ���So, how do we���er������

���We don���t,��� said Mr. Stamper. ���It would take months to assemble the tech we need. We don���t have months.���

Suddenly the elevator door slammed shut on the Shadow Vault. The elevator, chirping in alarm, raced back several decks. When the door reopened, Mr. Stamper and Sarah May found themselves staring down the phaser barrels of a whole squadron of casino guards. ���I just want to say,��� Sarah May ventured, ���that this is not Domingo���s fault. He���s probably still unconscious.���

���Ah,��� Mr. Stamper said. ���That���s comforting.���

For previous entries in Mr. Stamper and Sarah May’s adventure, click on��The Angel and the Space Otter��category on the right. Thanks for reading!

The Incredible Problem of Not Being

“So…” Madeline said to herself, “I haven’t been born.” ��It was the only conclusion she could draw. It was exactly what had happened to Pamela Percy, and now it seemed she had suffered Pamela’s fate. It explained why her mother didn’t recognize her. Worse, this was the second time. Pamela was an interesting problem. Madeleine’s situation? This was a��pattern. Somehow, people were getting erased from time. Madeleine decided not to think about the fact that she still existed even though she hadn’t been born. This was why she hated time things.

Her first task, though, was to find shelter. Being resurrected had tired her out considerably. Her room wasn’t an option. Her room didn’t exist anymore. This gave Madeleine a jolt. Her��cat��didn’t exist anymore. She had saved her cat from a supervillain’s attempt to level Las Vegas with the Kaboominator. She had also, incidentally, saved Las Vegas. Some other superhero had probably saved the city, but Madeleine was sure no one would’ve saved her cat. She closed her eyes for a moment. She couldn’t think of her cat. She had to get herself back in the timeline first.

Madeleine thought of her friends, but then she realized that would be pointless. If her mom didn’t know��she existed, her friends wouldn’t know her either. So she decided to get a motel room. She would rest that night, then in the morning set out to find answers.

An hour later, she landed in the parking lot of a little dive on the outskirts of the city. The “Vacancy” sign blinked dull orange at her. Madeleine stepped into the dingy office and asked for a room. “Sure,” the manager said. “30 bucks.”

Madeleine checked her pockets. She didn’t have a debit card. She didn’t have cash. “Oh, crap,” she said.��Then she looked back at the manager. “Look, here’s the deal. I haven’t been born. This is new for me. Problem is, since I don’t exist, my bank account doesn’t exist either. Also my savings, my piggy bank stash, my coupon for two free gas station hot dogs. Those are sketchy anyway, no loss there, but still. I’ve got zilch. But once I get born again, so to speak, I can pay you. I don’t suppose…”

The manager was not agreeable to her suggestion. Two minutes later, she was out in the parking lot again. Her stomach rumbled. Madeleine wondered how that worked. If she had never been born, had she ever really eaten? At any rate, how could she eat now? Food cost money. She had none. That was a problem.

She wondered if the George Bailey approach would work. Madeleine shrugged, and dropped to her knees in the parking lot. “God?” she asked tentatively. “Er, dear Father in heaven? I’m not really a praying superheroine….I was in a church once, two years ago, Christmas. Then the Villainous Vicar attacked, and I accidentally torched a nativity scene. Sorry about that. More to the point… I would like to live again. Okay? Please? Can I live again?”

There was a short pause. She heard sirens howling in the distance. They seemed to be growing louder. That meant a fire, or a chase, or possibly a supervillain. “Hold that thought,” she said to the heavens. Then she bounded up and blazed off into the sky. Even if she hadn’t been born, Gaseous Girl had work to do.

The Caper Commences

Sarah May Raxenpaxerflirk had seen some big starships in her time. She had once waitressed on the��EarthFleet cruise liner��Myrmidon��during a particularly memorable summer. She had even��had a romantic encounter with one of the pool squids. Sarah May had thought she had found true love in��Domingo Kirrexanvex, she really had. Alas, ��Domingo had warped away to medical school and never looked back. Sarah May sighed, not for the last time, remembering that night they had watched the turquoise sunsets of Magel Five. Then, with a mental jerk, she brought herself back to the present. The��Myrmidon��had been��big.��Charlotte’s Moon,��however, made it look like a toy boat in a child’s bath.

It had been a dreadnought-class warship, built for some massive conflict in another quadrant. Sarah May hadn’t kept track of the details of the war, but she had seen holograms. It had been upsetting. She hadn’t heard who won. After the war, the dreadnought had been snapped up by a major entertainment corporation and turned into the biggest space casino this side of Betelguese.��Charlotte’s Moon��did a billion-credit business every night, and consequently had a security grid more powerful than some planets.

Sarah May was, as one might expect, terrified about sneaking aboard a heavily armed casino ship to retrieve the Orb That Should Not Be Named. Her guardian angel tried to reassure her. “It’s a cinch,” Constance said. “You sneak in, find the thing, and sneak right out again!”

“But can’t you just fly in and get it yourself?” Sarah May pleaded.

“No,” Constance explained patiently. “I can’t intervene in human affairs unless you, specifically, are in physical or spiritual danger. Of course, if you’re in danger, all bets are off!” She paused, noting that Sarah May didn’t seem reassured. “But I am not at all suggesting you should deliberately place yourself in peril so I can help. Not at all. Just… just do what Mr. Stamper says, okay?”

As the otter and the squidling waited in the teleport line to board the��Charlotte’s Moon,��Sarah May remembered her instructions. “Mr. Stamper, sir, ��� she gurgled timidly, ���what should I do?”

“Be quiet, please,” he said. “This part is tricky.”

He pulled a device out of his pocket and began to make adjustments to it. The line inched forward. Sarah May could see the security robots scanning everyone who stepped onto the teleport pad.��She made a quick deduction. “You’re going to change the teleporter so it beams us into the vault where the Orb is!”

“No,” Mr. Stamper said. “The vault is shielded against teleportation. Impossible to beam into. So is everywhere else except the entrance area and the sickbay.” ��He made a final adjustment. “Now: can you act seriously ill?”

Sarah May hesitated. “I don���t know������

“Actually, acting is a bad idea. Let’s go realistic.” The device��booped��quietly. Sarah, without any warning, threw up violently on the deck. Medical attendants rushed in. Mr. Stamper explained that Sarah was his ward and that she had been exposed to Star Lord Flu, but she hadn’t shown any symptoms till now. The closest medical facility equipped for SLF was on the��Charlotte’s Moon.��Both Sarah May and Mr. Stamper were beamed aboard without so much as a glance from the security ‘bots. “Right,” Mr. Stamper said once in sickbay. “Now we’re on board. Next: the vault.”

“I hate this,” Sarah May said weakly. A medical squid rushed forward to check her vitals. Then he paused. ���Sarah?���

���Domingo!��� She could���ve died. Instead, she threw up again.

 

For previous chapters in Sarah May and Mr. Stamper’s story, go here. Thanks for reading!

Making Friends

Oswald Stamper was not a church-going otter, but he had sense about him to realize an angel when he was faced with one. He had never been faced with one before, so he wasn’t sure what the rules were for this encounter. He stood in the small cockpit of his shuttlecraft, as Constance glared angrily at him. The smell of burnt wing filled the cabin. Behind Constance, Sarah May Raxenpaxerflirk tried to look as intimidating as the angel, but couldn’t quite control her quivering tentacles. “My apologies,” Mr. Stamper said, placing his blaster back in the holster on his belt. “I assumed you were intruders.”

“What, how did you think we got in?” Constance demanded. “Intruder window?”�� She paused, waiting for Mr. Stamper to burst out in gales of laughter. The otter only stared silently. “Intruder window,” Constance repeated. “Get it?”

Mr. Stamper still waited. Constance rolled her eyes. “Oh, never mind. The point is, I’m not a bad guy. I’m literally on the side of the angels, ’cause I am one. Now, I had a whole eloquent speech prepared, but you shot at me with a blaster, so let’s just skip that. I need your help. I’m looking for the Orb of the-“

“You can���t say that,��� Mr. Stamper cut in shortly. “Not ever.”

Constance blinked. “Oh really?”

“It’s known as the Orb That Should Not Be Named. It wouldn’t be called that unless something bad happened when you said its name.”

Sarah May had a sudden realization. Her eyes widened. “But… she said its name back on my moon!”

“And it exploded,” the otter said. “Point proven.”

“You exploded my moon!” Sarah May shot at Constance, very much upset.

“Let’s not argue about who exploded whose moon,” Constance said. “Fine, I won’t say the thing’s name. I want to find it. Some really nasty people are trying to find it too, it seems, so I want it first. You, Mr. Otter-“

“Stamper.”

“Yeah. You are, I hear, really good at finding stuff. Can you help?”

The otter sighed. “I am, as a matter of fact, already on its trail. I have discovered a clue. It is buried in the shadow of Charlotte’s Moon. This data chip-“

Constance was so surprised her halo slipped out of position. “Hey, I know about Charlotte’s Moon! I have a friend, Clarence, works Search and Rescue. He’s been there. It’s no moon.”

“Let me guess. It is a space station.”

“Something like that,” Constance said. “It���s got a defense grid like nobody���s business. But if we can sneak aboard���” Her eyes lit with the joy of adventure, remembered from her treasure-hunting life long ago. “We’ll get in, swipe the Orb, and get out again! It’ll be fun! What have we got to lose?”

Mr. Stamper, as an otter of sense, knew better than to ask such questions, and was surprised at Constance’s na��vet��. More often than not, the answers never turned out to be pleasant. Little did he know how right he was.

I’m back from NaNoWriMo, thus my month-long absence from blogging, and I’m picking up with my story arcs again. For previous chapters in this story, see The Angel and the Space Otter. Thanks for reading!