Thursday, 18 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
Continued from Muse Fanfiction, v. 2007.2.
These are not RRRs but solo projects which share the same thread. Start your own, or just stop by and visit.
Date: January 8, 2008
Categories: Fan Page / MuseBlog business, Fiction, poetry, and fanfiction, Nonrandom Craziness, The magazine
Here’s the first portion of my Muse Fanfic. I’ll compile the rest later.
Alice walked purposefully out of the revolving glass door and into East Dearborn Street. It was one of the few actual roads left in Chicago, preserved for historical purposes. The site of the original Muse office.
And, therefore, the site of the new one.
Muse Incorporated had offices in Sydney, Brasilia and San Fransisco, but its home base was still where it had been for the past 29 years. At three thousand feet of concrete, steel and glass, it was the tallest building in the world.
Alice had dreamed of working for Muse when she was younger. It was second only to her wish to become an author. Both dreams had, eventually, come true.
“Be careful what you wish for,” she muttered, walking briskly down the sidewalk and to the subway entrance.
In an ambitious plan to check urban sprawl, a mayor of Chicago had removed most roads and opened developing space where they had been. This plan would not have been feasible before 2013, but since the invention of APTUs, or aerial personal transit units, and the improvement of public transportation, it had boomed.
Alice went down the steps to wait for her ride.
She didn’t have long to wait. With a hiss of brakes, the maglev train came to a halt in front of the platform. She paid the doorman two muses and stepped inside.
Alice selected a comfortable gel-padded seat near the door, opened her briefcase and took out her computer. It was barely the size of a baseball, but when she pressed the activation button, a holographic keyboard and desktop appeared.
Alice touched the Musesoft Word icon on the screen. A motion sensor on the computer detected where her finger had been placed and opened the correct program. Bringing up her latest manuscript, she began to write.
Absorbed in her half-completed novel, Alice only noticed the train stopping when a loud chime sounded in the car. Shutting off her computer, she put it back in the briefcase and stepped off the train.
Alice emerged from the subway on the edge of Muse Park. She liked this part of Chicago. It was an escape from the corporate rat race that she spent half of her day in. The Park’s wide, green stretches of grass and gnarled old trees helped her to relax. Not to mention the quaint, colorful little cafes that lined its circumference, Los Dos Iguanas in particular. She usually ate lunch there, and today was no exception.
Stepping under the sign depicting intertwined lizards, she took a seat at the counter and ordered a fruit salad and a sandwich. They were speedily delivered, and just as speedily set to. Work always gave her a good appetite.
She was halfway through the salad, her sandwich having long since been reduced to a couple of crumbs on the plate, when a loud laugh erupted from a nearby table. She turned around in curiosity, and nearly spewed partially chewed pineapple across the floor.
A red-haired young woman was talking energetically to the laugher, a man whose wild auburn hair and pale skin made him look like a mad scientist. “Now, I’m getting kind of freaked, so I take the pecan pie out of the shopping cart, put a scoop of walnut ice cream on top and WHAM! Nutter a la mode!”
Alice swallowed hastily and gasped in delight. “Kiki! Beavo!”
The red-haired woman turned around. Her mouth dropped open. “What the… Alice?”
“Alice?” the man said quizzically. “As in MuseBlog Alice?”
“Duh. You are so slow sometimes, Beavo.”
“Well, Kiki the perfect, Alice is not exactly a unique moniker, is it?”
Kiki turned to face Alice. “My gosh, we have so much to catch up on! How’s your novel going?”
“Not bad. How’s yours?”
“Brilliantly. Fancy meeting you here!”
“Actually, I come here every day. The big surprise is me meeting you. Don’t you live down in San Francisco nowadays?”
Beavo cleared his throat. “Don’t mind me, ladies. Just sitting here being nonexistent.”
“Sorry, Beavo, but I haven’t seen Alice in ages,” Kiki said.
“Pardon me,” Alice interrupted, “but I’m dying to know something. How do you come to be here?”
“Just to get the inside story on how the Windy City is doing Muse-wise.” Kiki gave a disgusted snort. “It’s worse than I expected. Look at that!”
Alice looked out the window. A giant video billboard, supported by three hot air balloons, was slowly drifting past. Ads played across its surface, accompanied by a booming, amplified voice. “Hi, kids. I’m Kokopelli. You all know who I am, but you probably don’t know that I use Crest toothpaste. Keeps your teeth shiny and white!” Kokopelli grinned, showing a set of perfect teeth. Alice winced. “Gonick is turning over in his grave.”
Beavo agreed wholeheartedly. “I know he’s a fictional character, but-” He paused. “It’s like seeing a friend die.”
Kiki nodded. “Or worse. At least if the Muses had died, they’d have kept some self-respect. But ever since Romana Prokopiw disappeared and that upstart Ronald Tardiff took her place, they’ve been exploited mercilessly.”
Alice fell silent, reliving memories. The fiasco had started with the disappearance of Romana Prokopiw in 2012. Disgusted with the new Editor’s commercializing of Muse, Diana Lutz resigned with a sizable portion of the Muse staff. Panicking, Ronald Tardiff offered DL the rights to certain Muse trademarks. After a bitter legal battle, Diana Lutz kept the rights to Urania, hot pink bunnies and Muse Contests. She left and set up a new magazine, Urania, based in Geneva.
The MuseBloggers had been torn. Some had stayed with Muse, some with Urania, and some were utterly disgusted by the entire affair, including most of the GAPAs. When both Muse and Urania attempted to conquer the world at the same time, the neutral MBers carved out a stretch of territory for themselves that eventually comprised Iceland, the UK and Scandinavia. Urania ruled Europe, Africa and Asia, while Muse commanded the Americas and Australia.
“And here we are,” Alice muttered.
“I know,” Kiki said. “Mostly Harmless, Mostly Schmarmless. This is not what Muse is all about.”
“Speaking of which,” Beavo said curiously, “how’s your day job going?”
Alice sighed. “Not good. I’m just trying to keep my head down and do what I’m told until I get promoted into a position where I can make a difference.”
“Say,” Kiki inquired, “you think you could give us a tour?”
“Of where, and why?”
“The Muse office.”
“Yes. But you haven’t answered my second question yet.” A suspicious look entered Alice’s eyes. “You just want to get the inside scoop for that column you’re writing in the San Francisco Chronicle!”
Kiki grinned sheepishly. “Yeah. My pen name’s Ruby Jewell. So, can you set us up or what?”
Alice sighed in exasperation. “Oh, all right.”
They finished their respective lunches and went back to the subway station, chatting happily.
Once on board, Beavo listened to his musePod while Kiki and Alice continued working on their novels. The ride didn’t take long. Alice calculated that she had about a half hour left of lunch break- plenty of time to give her friends a tour.
Entering through the revolving glass door, Alice pointed out several points of interest in the lobby, such as the giant marble statues of the Muses and the reflecting pool. It was something of a bittersweet experience for them all, to see how much their favorite magazine had been twisted.
Kiki’s enthusiasm, however, could not be curbed for long. “Let’s go up to the observation deck on the top,” she said, dragging her companions to the elevator.
The elevator stopped only once, on the thirtieth floor. A group of editors walked in, among them none other than Ronald Tardiff. “That’s out of the question!” he was blustering. “We couldn’t aggravate Urania like that!”
“But it would give us a decisive advantage in the Cold War,” said one of his advisers. “You can’t ignore- ” She noticed the other people in the elevator, and stopped.
The editors rode up to the hundredth floor and got off. Alice was about to turn away and forget about the incident when Kiki slipped through the closing door.
Alice and Beavo reached out and grabbed the sleeves of her shirt. “What are you doing?” Beavo hissed.
“If we follow them, we might be able to get a clue as to what the next few issues are about!’ Kiki whispered excitedly.
“You don’t get it!” Alice exclaimed. “This is not just a nerdy magazine anymore, it’s the ruler of three continents! We could be intruding on government secrets… Wait!” Kiki slipped out of her grasp and rushed off.
Beavo said something that the GAPAs would have deemed zap-worthy and ran after her, Alice following cautiously.
Alice and Beavo came to a halt at the end of the corridor. It branched out in two directions. They were baffled momentarily, but then Beavo caught sight of a flash of red hair going toward the right. He took off, dragging Alice behind him.
Kiki was concealed behind a potted plant, watching the Editors head into a conference room. The last one through the door tossed his keys, wallet and an e-file onto a side table carelessly.
Almost before the door swung shut, Kiki was at the table and had snatched up the file. She flipped it on, the sheet of electronic fibers crackling as it displayed the data. Eagerly, she looked down at the surface.
Then a cacophony of alarms, unbelievably loud, sounded from a hidden micro speaker in the corner. Panicking, Kiki dashed back the way she’d come, almost instinctively snatching up the keys and clutching the file tightly. Beavo and Alice were ahead of her, and all three had vanished into the connecting corridor by the time the editors burst out of their office.
“You- idiot- Kiki!” Alice puffed. She slammed into the elevator doors, frantically pushing the call button. Beavo impatiently pushed her out of the way and slid the slim form of his musePod into the gap between doors. He managed to pry them apart far enough to give his fingers purchase and shoved them abruptly back.
Then staggered back in astonishment as the express elevator whisked past, hurtling downwards. He leaped into the shaft, pulling Alice behind him. Kiki, making a choice between an apparent death drop and angry Muse editors, took the death drop.
Normally, a fall like that would have killed all three. However, the elevator had already begun to brake, which meant that it was going down just slightly slower than Kiki, Alice and Beavo. Thus, their landing on its roof was gentle, and by the time it stopped, they had only a few minor bruises. It came to a halt on the ground floor. Alice wasted no time in clambering up the cable and exiting through the elevator door on the second floor, again using Beavo’s musePod as a makeshift pry. Not a moment too soon: just as Kiki hauled herself through the door, the elevator whisked up again.
They believed that they were safe, at least temporarily, until Alice looked out the window and saw the police APTUs circling outside. Obviously, the e-file was more valuable than it appeared.
They ran as though a pack of genetically engineered killer tenrecs were after them, hurtling down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the side door into the APTU parking lot. About fifty of the saucer-shaped vehicles were docked there, resting on their rotating engines. A police APTU buzzed into view, sirens wailing, a speaker blaring. “Attention. Do not attempt escape or we will fire.” Alice panicked momentarily, then noticed the keys dangling from Kiki’s hand. She snatched them in a sudden burst of inspiration, then made a break for the CEO’s easily recognizable luxury APTU. Opening it, she leaped into the driver’s seat, impatiently motioning for Kiki and Beavo to follow her. Both did so, Beavo scrambling over the top and into the passenger seat, while Kiki took the single seat at the back. As the police swung around again, Alice revved the engines. The propellers spun, lifting the APTU off the ground. They steadily gained altitude as they flew away from the lot, weaving between video billboards with inches to spare. The bulkier and less maneuverable police vehicle wasn’t so lucky, pulverizing Kokopelli’s perfect smile in a burst of electric sparks as it hit the Crest advertisement head on.
~~~
“No!” Widdershins yelled as her conker shattered and shrapnel ricocheted around the room. A cheer rose from the GAPAs, groans from the MuseBloggers. Paul Baker stepped across the arena to pick up his trophy, sweating after the grueling ten-minute bout.
Seated in the audience, TMFA grinned. “Wow,” he remarked to Traggle. “The Administrators have really outdone themselves this time.
The brown-haired woman nodded cheerfully. “No kidding,” she said. “This might be the best Kokonvention ever.”
“I disagree,” TMFA pointed out. “The best was probably July 2010.”
“This one has better attendance,” Traggle asserted, pointing out the audience of more than a hundred MuseBloggers, adult veterans and teenage newcomers alike.
“The attendance has nothing to do with it,” TMFA countered. “The ice cream alone gives Jul. ’10 the crown. And don’t forget the concert.”
“How could I forget the concert? I still haven’t cleaned the banana cream out of that watch!”
“I’m sure Gimanator and Agrrrfishi were very sorry afterward, but that isn’t the point. The point is that no Kokonvention could top Jul. ’10.” TMFA paused. “What’s on the schedule next?”
Traggle scanned down the itinerary. Tour of New Reykjavik, Pie-making, Conker Tournament…
Then she grinned. “Something that will utterly convince you that even July 2010 can’t match this one.”
Rebecca Lasley strode into the arena from her front-row seat. “Hi, everybody,” she said into the microphone, with a casual air that would never have suggested she was co-ruler of several fairly large islands and a rather enormous peninsula. “We’re all very glad to have you with us today. You’ve seen what we do and how we do it. Now, you’ll get to see it up close and personal. On that note, it is my pleasure to announce the GAPA-FOR-A-DAY CONTEST!!”
She handed the microphone to Robert Coontz, who graciously acknowledged the wild cheering before beginning to speak. “Thank you. To assume the exalted position of a Great And Powerful Administrator- how many of you haven’t dreamed about that?”
No hands were raised. Robert continued.
“Thought so. Well, it’s not just a matter of being handed a login code. You have to prove yourself before getting the reward. Rosanne, will you tell them the tasks we have come up with?”
Rosanne took the mike. “First, you are required to make up a song about a well-known fantasy or science fiction book set to a popular show tune. The thirty-two most creative and/or funniest will be selected by us to determine the semifinalists. Next, you must write a short story on any topic. The other MBers will choose the sixteen best to select the finalists. These will compete in the finals: making up a poem in Middle English. Points will be given by us for correct grammar, humor and creativity. The eight highest-scoring will be supplied with laptop computers, Photoshop and Paint programs, and a bitmap image of a classic hot pink bunny.”
She smiled at the crowd. “I think you can guess what you’re supposed to do with those.”
“Well?” Traggle asked. “You think we should enter?”
TMFA considered. “Why not?”
They made their way through the teeming throng of Musers to register, and then went back to their seats. Traggle bent her head over her work almost immediately. “Hmm… Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell… set to an English folk tune… or what about His Dark Materials?”
TMFA tapped his pen against the paper, still blank. He knew that a lot of people would be doing LOTR, so he didn’t want to seem unoriginal… What about Abarat? He hadn’t read that in a long while, though…
However, his song was not to be. The door of the arena flew open, and three vaguely familiar people trudged in.
~~~
“I’m not going to throw blame,” said Robert. “What’s done is done, and we may as well make the most of it. May I see that e-file?”
Kiki wordlessly handed it over.
Robert tapped the activation square in the corner and gasped in surprise. “It’s just a bunch of colored lines! Wait… I think I can discern one word… bold type, right in the middle. See it?”
The other Administrators peered over his shoulder to read the enigmatic polysyllable.
PHTHALOCYANINE
Rebecca suddenly snatched the e-file. “I have a hunch.”
She walked over to the computer that sat quiescent on the dark wooden desk of the Administrators’ conference room. “Activate. User Lasley R.”
The computer hummed to life, projecting a holographic screen- but no keyboard. It seemed to be completely voice controlled.
“Photoshop won’t be good enough for this,” she muttered, then said out loud, “Activate Gauguin.”
A complex graphics program came up on the screen. Beavo peered at it curiously. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said.
“That’s no surprise,” the administrator replied, attaching the e-file’s interface to that of the computer. “I wrote it. Download item 3968.”
A picture of the e-file appeared on the screen.
“Filter. Color: Phthalocyanine blue.”
Rebecca gasped. There, on the screen, was a recognizable map of the North Atlantic. Prominent lines connected Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles, Scandinavia and Switzerland, all labeled in minute and completely incomprehensible script.
Robert leaned over Rebecca’s shoulder. “Interesting. It seems to be a complex substitution cipher. Rosanne, what do you think?”
The other Administrator walked over and began to mutter about Gronsfeld ciphers, homophonic substitution and other incomprehensible terms. Rebecca got up and shrugged her shoulders resignedly. Paul Baker gestured to a comfortable chair beside him, inviting the bloggers to sit down. “They’ll be a while. Cup of tea?”
***
Two hours later, Robert took off his glasses and moaned. “We go through every cipher known to man, finally get something that resembles English… and it’s gibberish?”
Paul peered over his shoulder. “That’s Chaucer.”
“What?”
“That’s Chaucer. Phrases from Troilus and Criseyde. Someone is using one of Chaucer’s works as a codebook.”
“So all we have to do is get the codebook, and we’ll know what it says!” Beavo exclaimed.
Rebecca slumped back in her chair. “Is this map worth it? We’re violating half the Bering Treaty just by looking at it.”
“This is not just the work of an eccentric guest editor with a bent for cartography and cryptology,” Robert replied. “Those are Muse military codes. You can draw your own conclusions, but mine are that if we don’t find out what this map is for, the Bering Treaty won’t just be violated, it will be torn into tiny little pieces and burnt.”
Rosanne rubbed her temples. “I don’t know. There’s something fishy about all this. If the map was that important, why would they have left it outside the conference room? And why was the encryption so perfectly fitted to our skills? It’s almost as if someone wanted us to find it.”
Alice tuned out and sipped her tea. The warm chamomile did little to melt the coldly burning spike of anger inside her. She was probably the unofficial Public Enemy #1 in Muse. There was no way she’d ever be able to return to her quiet, cozy apartment in Chicago. She gained some comfort from the fact that her cats would be found and taken good care of. The animal shelter system was one of the few governmental divisions that hadn’t been completely messed up by Tardiff. Still, she hadn’t felt this lost since her house burned down almost twenty years ago. New Reykjavik was nice, and the Admins. were the best hosts one could ask for, but it just wasn’t like home.
She forced herself to put it out of her mind. She had a duty as a Muser to find out exactly what this map meant.
Looking up, she saw that Robert was dialing a number into a videophone. He put the headphones and goggles on and began to speak.
“Hello?”
He paused, then said “I’d like to speak to Diana Lutz. Wait! Tell her it’s Coontz. Hello? Yes, I know you’re busy, this is important… Wait, let me send you the file…”
He turned to the computer. “Activate MuseMail. Compose Mail. To: dianal@urania.gov. Subject: None. Attach file. Item 3968. Send.”
He spoke into the mike again. “Did you get it?… What do you think?… Exactly. It worries me too… Hello? Hello? What do you mean, “send someone over?”… Hello?”
He deactivated the videophone. “She said she’d “send someone over.” I guess we’ll just have to wait until whoever it is comes.”
Robert turned to the other Administrators. “Well, in light of recent events, we’ll postpone the rest of the Kokonvention till tomorrow. It’s pretty late.”
Alice wholeheartedly agreed. The flight across the Atlantic had taken several hours, and decoding the map had brought them solidly into the night.
“Dinner at He Sleep as a Marmot?” Rebecca said, referring to a popular inn and restaurant a few blocks away.
Beavo nodded. “And then bed,” he said, yawning. “Driving an APTU a couple thousand miles can be somewhat straining.”
~~~
Alice awoke, unsure for a second where she was. Her alarm clock was playing the tune of “Let it Be,” with slightly altered lyrics. The bedspread was a violent shade of hot pink, and framed pictures of hot pink bunnies in various guises were tastefully placed all over the walls. An e-book reader was lying on the nightstand, currently set to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
“Man, the GAPAs really know me,” she said upon viewing the last item, then got out of bed.
Once Alice had taken a brief but refreshing shower and gotten dressed, she exited the luxurious guest bedroom of the Administrators’ Building and stepped out into the quiet corridor. Beavo was shambling out of his room, his auburn hair even more explosive than usual. “Wha’ time is i’?” he inquired incoherently.
“Six-thirty,” Alice replied. “I set the clock a little later than usual. I figured I could afford to.”
“Later?!” Beavo’s eyes shot open, then dropped into their previous position. “Yo’r i’sane,” he mumbled.
“Get that hair under control,” Alice instructed him. “We meet with the GAPAs in half an hour, remember?”
She walked to the elevator and pressed the button for the second floor.
The elevator was prompt. The doors slid open in thirty seconds precisely, revealing the kitchen. It was empty- the GAPAs had either breakfasted early or weren’t up yet. Alice opened the freezer curiously. After shuffling through massive cartons of mint chocolate chip ice cream, she finally discovered a box of frozen waffles sandwiched in at the back.
Clutching the box, she made her way over to the autochef. She slipped four waffles into its receiving tray and began issuing commands. “Well done. Medium amount of Grade A maple syrup, dark amber.”
The machine whirred. “Initializing.”
The tray suddenly vanished into the autochef’s depths. Alice turned around to wait, and saw Beavo finally arriving from the elevator. “Oh. Good thing I gave the AC extra waffles. Is Kiki up yet?”
“Uh huh. She’s gone to meet the rest of the MBers who are coming to the conference.”
“Who’s coming, exactly? I don’t remember.”
“I’m not sure, but the GAPAs said all the most senior bloggers that could be contacted would be here.”
The autochef beeped, and four perfectly cooked waffles slid onto a plate, rich syrup spilling off them.
Beavo looked down in disgust. “Is this all?” He took two waffles off the plate, handed it to Alice, and put his own waffles back on the receiving tray. “Extra syrup.”
“Initializing.”
In a short amount of time, the waffles slid out, barely recognizable as solid objects beneath dark and limpid pools of sugary amber.
Beavo regarded them with satisfaction. “That’s better.”
As Beavo was mopping up the last drops of syrup with a shred of waffle, a Self-Motivated Audiovisual Telephone (Holographic) sped into the room along the thin metal track in the ceiling. It stopped in front of the counter and buzzed busily as its projector warmed up. “One way message to deliver,” it said. “From: GAPA Coontz, R. To: Occupants of Kitchen. Accept?”
“Yes,” Alice said.
A shimmering, three-dimensional picture of Robert appeared in front of them, cut off at the waist by the counter. “Change of plans,” he said. “Diana’s agents are going to be landing at the APTU pad up top. Come to the roof in fifteen minutes. Message ends.”
The projection cut out. “Response?” the SMATH asked curiously.
“Yes,” Alice replied.
“Standing by to record at the tone.”
“Begin.”
The SMATH beeped.
“We’ll be there as soon as we brush our teeth,” Alice said. “Message ends.”
The SMATH shut down and shot along its track, disappearing into the next room.
A few minutes later, Alice and Beavo emerged from the elevator box on top of the Administrators’ Building. There were five MBers already standing there, along with the GAPAs. One was Kiki. The others… Alice recognized a few. “TMFA, Widdershins… ” she muttered under her breath. “Who are those two?” she inquired of Beavo.
“Traggle and TNO, I think,” he mused. “What I’m wondering is, who are we meeting with?”
“Look!” Kiki shouted suddenly.
A large black dot appeared in the sky, rapidly coming closer.
It flew diagonally down and forward until it was directly above the Building. Then it dropped straight down, coming to a slow halt on the landing pad.
It was a large APTU, meant for two or three passengers. Completely black, it had no license plates or other identification except for a legend in flourescent green letters on the driver’s door.
C.U.B.E.
“Confidential Urania Bureau of Espionage,” Robert said, half annoyed, half in awe. “What is DL planning to do this time?”
The doors slid open, and two women exited the vehicle.
One was blond, with hair that was obviously intended to be neat but couldn’t quite manage it. The other had brown hair and hazel-green eyes. Both looked professional and efficient, dressed in dark suits with nametags. The first woman’s name was apparently Songbird- probably a codename, Alice thought. The other was Spice.
The blond woman stepped up to Robert. “You’d be the GAPA?”
“Er, yes, quite correct. Have we met?”
“Probably- I went to a few Kokonventions. Which Musers do you trust?”
Robert was obviously a bit unsettled by the woman’s blunt manner. “All the ones I know well are up here.”
“Good. We’ll need everyone we can get for the infiltration.”
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1 – Wow, that is so cool! Can I be in the next part?
Just one thing I don’t understand, though. On whose side are all the MBers? Neutral, or what?
0
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2- Some of them are on Urania’s side, some on Muse’s, and some on Iceland’s. It will be explained in more detail in the next part, which is coming right up.
0
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“Infiltration?” Robert sputtered. “Wait. If DL is trying to pull me into one of her crazy schemes without so much as a by-your-leave, you just tell her- ”
“Sorry,” Spice interrupted. “Everything’s been taken care of. The team is quite simple. Alice, Kiki and Beavo, because they know the territory; us, because we have experience; and anyone else you trust, as backup.”
“Backup? There’s risk involved?”
“Certainly,” Songbird confirmed. “We are, after all, trying to break into the headquarters of a corrupt government. Of course, hopefully, it won’t come to breaking and entering, but we of CUBE have no qualms about- ”
“Quiet!” Rosanne strode to Robert’s aid. “They’re adults, and it’s completely up to them whether they want to go on this crazy ‘mission’ of yours.”
TNO spoke up for the first time. “Well… we’re Musers, after all. Real Musers, not the ones from the corporation.” She laughed bitterly. “Funny, to think that Musery is being threatened by Muse itself. Anyhow… ” She took a deep breath. “I think I speak for most of the people here. We have a duty to find out about this.”
Robert turned and regarded her. Alice was thinking. Go back to the very place she’d just escaped? This was insane. But then again… TNO was right. They were Musers, after all.
“I agree.”
“So do I,” TMFA said, followed by a chorus of affirmations.
Spice smiled slowly. “All right.”
She pressed the Hotpinktooth cell-phone receiver in her ear. “Send the transport. We’re ready to go.”
A static-fuzzed reply crackled through the phone. Considering that it came from halfway around the world, the reception was very good. “Deploying Terpsichore.”
Spice turned off the phone. “Our ride will be here in two hours. In the meantime, who’s up for a game of Mostly Harmless Monopoly?”
~~~
“Hah! I have a bunny on Kokopelli Street! You owe me two thousand dollars!”
Beavo groaned. “I’m bankrupt. You win.”
Alice didn’t get time to celebrate her victory, as a beeping noise came from the SMATH mounted on the wall. A full-size hologram of Spice crackled into life. “Terpsichore’s here. Let’s go.”
Led by Rosanne, the assembled Musebloggers trooped out of the lushly furnished Game Room en masse and down a red-carpeted hall to a large steel door. Paul Baker entered a code into a keypad on the wall, and the door rolled back quietly, revealing a small, secluded harbor.
The tranquil surface of the inlet was abruptly broken by a conning tower that exploded from its depths. A door opened in the side of the metal cylinder, and a masked, helmeted person stuck his- or her- unidentifiable head out. “Hurry up! Terpsichore leaves soon!”
He or she pressed a button on the side of his or her high-tech helmet. “Submarine Ortholinus boarding.”
The Musers filed in.
TMFA stepped through the door and found himself on a narrow metal stairway. It was tight enough to be claustrophobic, but fortunately it widened out after three turns and ended in a small door.
The door was bare steel except for a gel pad in the center. Songbird pressed her palm into it. After a few encouraging beeps, it slid aside, revealing a room bigger and more splendid than anything TMFA had imagined in a submarine before.
The carpet was luxurious and soft, patterned with stars and planets. Enormous, plush pink couches, with pillows in the shape of HPBs, were scattered about the room. The floor was flat, but the walls curved up into the ceiling, giving TMFA the distinct impression that he was inside half of a cylinder. A basket filled with back issues of Urania sat in the middle of the hall, and a refrigerator hummed quietly at the end. TMFA didn’t have to open it to know that it was probably stuffed with delicious food.
“Our guest suite,” Songbird said, “and our off-shift quarters. Bathroom’s down there, computers there, library there.” She pointed out three trapdoors in the floor. “We’re heading to Denmark. The Terpsichore will be waiting for us in Copenhagen, and will take us to Beijing. We’ll be briefing you there. Enjoy your stay.”
She and Spice left the room.
TMFA sighed. He wished Iceland had a magazine, but the GAPAs had never gotten around to it.
TMFA’s reverie was interrupted by Widdershins speaking up. “I’m getting some lunch.” She crossed the extravagant carpet and pulled the fridge open, provoking a stampede of hungry MBers.
Several minutes later, TMFA sat back on the couch with a contented sigh. He then pulled up his feet smartly as a swarm of vacubots popped out of hidden slits in the wall, buzzing around the room and sucking up the various crumbs hidden in the rug.
Alice was the only one not present. Beavo inquired as to her whereabouts in the middle of a mouthful of dessert.
“I think she told me she went down to the library,” Widdershins mused.
In fact, Alice had just left the library and entered the computer room through a connecting door, clutching A Pillar of Darkness by Susanna Clarke. She stood in the dimly lit chamber, perusing the Mandelbrot screensavers that played silently across a dozen monitors.
She glanced down at the floor and realized she was standing on a sheet of glass directly above a large plasma screen. Live images from satellites orbiting the globe were combined into a strikingly beautiful, constantly changing world map.
A yellow dot, tagged with the name Ortholinus, progressed slowly and steadily southeast through the Norwegian Sea. Trying to figure out where it was going, Alice bent down and caught sight of a red dot on the city of Copenhagen. It was labeled Terpsichore.
Alice got up and logged in to the Internet on the nearest computer. Without thinking, she typed in “musefanpage.com” and hit ENTER.
404 Not Found
With a sigh, Alice turned around and went back into the library.
((Much more later.))
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I like being bossy! I should try that out in real life some time.
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I don’t think I know how to sputter. I need to work on my sputtering.
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6- One can only sputter in cases of extreme shock, anger, or near drowning.
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ZOMG I’M A MAIN CHARACTERRRR
Sweetness. And I can’t believe you remembered Ruby Jewell, too! That was on the first Alter Ego thread. And I HAVE to email this to Romana. The thing about her disappearing was HILARIOUS! I love it, PC.
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8- You’re Kiki, I presume.
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((Aaaaand here’s the rest of the story so far. Enjoy.))
The sub continued its steady progress through the Norwegian Sea for about an hour. Beavo was the first to notice a slight change in its course at the end of that time.
He was staring out the porthole, watching the jagged seabed rocks slowly slip by, when the sub began moving upward dramatically.
The Musers sitting on the couches were lucky- they didn’t suffer anything worse than a mild squishing, padded by the sofa cushions. The few people standing around lost their balance and were pressed to the floor by the sudden acceleration. Beavo clung the metallic rim of the porthole to keep from falling over.
The sub rocketed out of the water, the view in the porthole vanishing into white foam and spray. Trickles of sea-water poured down the reinforced plexiglas, obscuring the events taking place outside. Strange clanks and crunches echoed through the room.
When the last of the water drained away, Beavo saw to his astonishment that they were in the cargo hold of some enormous vehicle.
“What the hey… ” Beavo murmured, awed.
“What you’re looking at is the interior of Terpsichore,” Spice said, making him jump. He hadn’t even noticed her entering the room. “Pride of the Uranian space-plane fleet.”
“But that’s impossible!” Widdershins gasped. “To fit the submarine inside it, the plane would have to be… ”
“Colossal.” Songbird nodded. “We’re years ahead of Muse in almost all areas of technology- but what they lack in advancement, they make up for in sheer firepower, which is why the Cold War exists at all. We’re lifting off. I suggest you sit down and brace for the acceleration.”
“But what’s the point of using this gigantic, superfast thing to take us to Geneva? It’s like driving a Formula 1 to the grocery store,” Kiki piped up. “We are going to Geneva, aren’t we? I mean, that’s the capital of Urania… ”
Traggle looked at her strangely. “You’re a bit behind on world affairs… ”
Alice looked up from her 800-page book. “All we’ve heard about Urania for the past five years is Tardiff’s propaganda. Enlighten us, please.”
“When the Cold War began,” Songbird explained, “DL realized that Geneva was too close to Muse for comfort. So we moved the capital to Beijing. We’re separated from Muse on one side by two continents, and on the other by the Pacific Ocean.”
“But Australia’s a Muse territory, and that’s about as close to Beijing as Muse was to Geneva in the first place,” Beavo said, puzzled.
Spice smiled. “Good thinking, but Australia doesn’t have any military force to speak of. It’s the Americas that we’re worried about. They’re the center of Muse’s power. Beijing is safest. And that’s where we’re heading now.”
The C.U.B.E agents sat down on the couches without further ado, and Beavo hurriedly followed suit.
~
The weight they had felt under the acceleration of the Ortholinus was as nothing to this. Beavo was driven back into the couch, lungs starving for air. Alice couldn’t move a finger without becoming exhausted, and her book was an impossibly heavy weight on her lap. Ominous creaks and groans came from the metallic structure around them, as well as from the mouths of other MBers.
After an eternity of five minutes, the weight suddenly lessened, and for the first time in his life, Beavo entered zero gravity.
It was not an enlightening experience at first. He flailed around in midair like a crippled fish, going in every direction but the one he wanted to. The rest of the guests were no better off. TMFA gazed enviously at Spice and Songbird, who had immediately pushed off the floor upon escape from the Earth’s pull. They were now gracefully gliding through the welter of confused Musers, making minor course adjustments pushing off the occasional bulkhead or drifting HPB pillow.
“We apologize for the lack of artificial gravity,” Songbird said, “but we haven’t been able to invent it yet.”
Oh, very witty, Beavo thought bitterly as he collided with the wall for the fifth time.
~
Thanks to the infinite adaptability of the human race (as well as a quick lesson from Spice), the company soon adjusted. Widdershins and Alice became particularly expert; they were soon floating upside down, discussing A Pillar of Darkness animatedly as the book in question drifted in front of them.
To Beavo, the sensation of weightlessness was still extremely odd. He felt as though he had a bad cold in the head- Songbird had assured him that it was due to the blood rushing upward more forcefully than usual, as the heart was used to compensating for the constant downward pull of gravity. He also was beginning to feel a bit nauseous.
This feeling steadily increased to a point where it could no longer be borne. Beavo wrenched open one of the trapdoors and propelled himself awkwardly down the hall below, heading in the general direction of the men’s washroom.
~~
Beavo emerged a few minutes later, slightly pale but not in bad shape, to see Traggle drifting in the passage outside. She smiled slightly. “You too, huh?”
Beavo laughed nervously, his normally messy hair now looking as though someone had plugged it into a high-voltage socket. “Yeah. Probably just nerves- I don’t usually get seasick.”
“No wonder. You realize what we’re getting ourselves into?”
“Well, let’s see. We’re about to infiltrate the third most secure building on the planet- which is owned by a megalomaniac, by the way- find a top-secret codebook, also in possession of said megalomaniac… ”
“And get out with both the book and our lives,” Traggle completed. “Assuming it’s even a book. It could be a computer program whose source code is stored away in a databank half a mile below the Chicago Deep Subway.” She sighed. “This is crazy. To be frank, I’m scared.”
“All of us are. Well, except Spice and Songbird, maybe.”
“Of course. They’re experienced C.U.B.E. agents, whereas we’re just typical MBers. Why on earth are they taking us all? Wouldn’t they be harder to detect if it was just both of them, instead of a huge crowd?”
Beavo shrugged. “Who are they, anyway? One of them looked vaguely familiar. Songbird. Where have I seen her before?”
“She said she’d been to a Kokonvention,” Traggle mused, pinwheeling slowly in midair. “She must be an MBer. Most of the higher-ups in C.U.B.E. are ex-Kokommandos- oh, drat it…”
Her necklace had fallen off and was languidly slithering towards the far wall. She pushed off the floor and snatched it up mid-flight. “We really should have thought before we did this. Who knows whether we’ll all come out alive?”
Beavo shuddered. “Well, we all can depend on each other. Musers stick together. We ought to hope for the best…”
“And prepare for the worst.” Traggle ricocheted off the ceiling and floated gracefully through the trapdoor.
~~
“Come on! You can’t pretend you haven’t always wanted to know what happened afterward!” Alice exclaimed.
“That’s the point!” Widdershins shot back, gesticulating wildly. “It completely ruins the mystery! She shouldn’t have done a sequel!”
“Still, you have to admit that the scene in Pity-Me where Norrell loses his temper- and his wig- is pretty funny. And the one where Stephen Black goes before the Raven King…”
“I’m not saying it didn’t have its good points- in fact, the plot and the writing were excellent. It’s just that the whole premise ruins it.”
“Keep it down!” Kiki snarled. “Some of us are trying to read!”
Widdershins performed a 180 degree spin in order to read the title of Kiki’s book. “Another one? Don’t tell me he’s still writing those pieces of- ”
“NO!” TMFA launched himself between the two women. “You are not having this argument in here! I’m still paying off the damage bill from He Sleep As a Marmot! Do you know that the manager sent me an itemized list of everything that got sm- hang on, gravity’s coming back… ”
In fact, it was a very gentle downward pull at first. Most of the hovering Musers slowly sank to the floor. Which was a good thing, as it turned out, because the attraction quickly reached normal Earth levels.
“Terpsichore’s beginning to glide,” Spice reported, sticking her head through the door. “You’d best follow me.”
Still shaky from their sojourn in microgravity, the rest of the group staggered toward the door.
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9- yes, dangit. now my alter ego is RUIIIIINED. you have no idea how many times I’ve done that now. grrrrrrrrrrrrg.
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Cool! A new one! I must go copy and paste my old one. For future reference. Sec.
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Got it. Hold on.
Ten young adults crowded into a small deli in downtown Chicago and ordered nine cups of hot chocolate and a Sprite. As soon as the middle aged waitress disappeared behind the counter to place their order, they began to babble excitedly among themselves.
“Do you think he’s gonna go through with it?†asked a young, businesslike woman. She was the only person who was actually sitting at the group’s table; everyone else was standing, kneeling, or a mixture of both using their chairs as support.
“I don’t think so,†said a tallish man. “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t!â€
“Yeah, he would!†Another man, a bit more tanned than the others shook his long black hair indignantly. “He’d do anything to get control of Muse.â€
“That’s what you think,†interjected the shortest of the bunch, a woman who might have been called “Goth†if she hadn’t been in her late twenties.
“That’s what I know,†retorted the long haired man.
“Will you guys quit acting like kids for a second and pay attention to what’s actually happening here? Whether Darxxor and his gang are gonna go through with this plan or not doesn’t matter, we still have to stop him. If he doesn’t try to take over Muse this time, he’ll concoct some other whacky operation and try again.†The woman speaking stood to face her companions.
“Who do you think you are, my mom?â€
“Oxlin is right. We need to focus on Darxxor himself, not his bizarre plans.â€
“Who do you think you are, Beev? Einstein?†Two fingers protruding from the sleeve blacker than it’s owner’s hair pointed toward the man who had just spoke and made a circle in the general direction of his forehead.
“Very funny, FS.†Beavo reached up and smoothed down the explosion of keratin he called hair.
“It’s Frigid Symphony, Kat.â€
A woman laughed and leaned over the table to grasp Frigid Symphony’s hand. Her wavy brown hair cascaded over his arm.
“I don’t care who you are, you’ll always be my Frigedy,†she simpered. A hint of sarcasm broke through her adoring facial expression.
Frigid Symphony caught the hint and shook her hand away. “I am not Frigedy!â€
“Are.â€
“Aren’t.â€
“Are.â€
“Aren’t!â€
“You’re acting like kids again!†warned Oxlin.
“Shut up, Widdershins.â€
“Make me.â€
Across from Oxlin Widdershins a redhead rolled her eyes as she jangled twelve brightly colored wristbands. “Why don’t we leave those four to their bickering and actually do something productive. Personally, I think we should catch up on information we’ve gathered these past twelve years.â€
Taking the woman’s advice and ignoring the bickering four, the six left of the group huddled together on their side of the table.
“So, as I understand it, we’ve all been living in different parts of the world, correct?†started the redhead.
“Yuh huh,†agreed a two while the three nodded.
“Right on, Kiki!†said the last.
“Let’s hear a list of places,†she continued.
“Ontario.â€
“New Delhi.â€
“Wow!â€
“Yeah.â€
“Keep going!†instructed Kiki.
“Kansas.â€
“Wyoming.â€
“Washington.â€
“Am NOT!†yelled Symphony, ducking the small vase aimed toward his head. Water and flowers streamed over him, barely missing the doorway. The whole package crash landed on a tiny table near the door, upending a ‘Lazy Susan’ condiment stand.
“Shh!†cautioned a passing waiter, on her way to serve a disappointed couple who no doubt were expecting a romantic evening and ended up in a tiny deli with a whole bunch of seemingly weird people who all had strange names.
“Right here in Chicago,†Kiki finished. “New Delhi, eh?†She indicated the short woman. “Interesting location, Ebeth. What brought you there?â€
“I was bored.â€
“Ah. True Muser, eh?â€
There was an awkward silence (from that side of the table, anyway) where the six were thinking how classic it was of a Muser to move to somewhere in India because he or she was bored.
Breaking the pensive pause, their waitress returned, stepping over shards of glass and a smear of catsup on the carpet. She unloaded the nine mugs of hot chocolate and the Sprite. This silenced the previously squabbling side of the group’s table as eight picked up their cups in unison and proceeded to drain them of their liquid. The ninth raised his plastic bottle.
The tenth, the woman at the end of the table, reached up and twiddled with her medium brown hair. “It’s always to hot. I’m gonna wait first. Beavo!†She opened her eyes wide at what she could see of the auburn haired man – that is, his hair.
“Not these they ain’t.†Sporting a hot chocolate moustache, a face emerged under the crazy hair. The man clunked his mug down on the table. “They were just right.†He proceeded to tip his chair backwards at a dangerous angle and rested his knees right below his empty mug.
“Are you guys done arguing? Because we’ve been reviewing.†The tallest woman flashed her green eyes.
“Reviewing what?†inquired the woman with wavy brown hair.
“Locations, Shadowkat,†answered the woman.
Frigid Symphony snorted. “The only location a groundhog like you would be underground,†he muttered.
“I heard that. And it’s not funny. Just because I chose the name Groundhog…â€
A tall blond man stood, joining Oxlin, Frigid Symphony, Kiki, and Shadowkat. “And where were you guys?â€
Kiki suppressed a smirk –“Grow much, Canix?†and sat down.
Oxlin was the first to speak. “I live in Amarillo, but I was on, eh, a business trip in, eh, Mexico when I was called here.â€
Beavo spoke next. “New York, New York. Best place in the world.â€
“I beg to differ!†Kiki stood back up.
“Other than Chicago, of course.â€
She sat down again.
“I was hanging around in Jamaica until this meeting was called here, and I was having a good time too,†griped Shadowkat.
“Ooh, Jamaica.â€
Frigid Symphony sneered. “Jamaica? I never really left Sweden and there were so many places I lived that I can’t name them all. A calculator couldn’t name them all.â€
Kiki took charge again. “Okay, great. Now that we’re all settled, I have another question.â€
“So do I!†Alice piped up.
“Me too.â€
“Me three!â€
“Okay!†Kiki grabbed a bottle from the man she had called “Canix.†“We’re gonna use Prarilius’s bottle here. If you have the bottle, you can speak.â€
Instantly, there was a lunge for the bottle, and Kiki pulled it out of reach.
“Me first. Okay, my question is who called this meeting?†She looked to her right to Prarilius Canix, Canix looked to Alice, Alice looked to Ebeth, Ebeth looked to Groundhog, Groundhog looked to Oxlin Widdershins, Widdershins looked to Frigid Symphony, Symphony looked to Shadowkat, Kat looked to Beavo, and Beev looked back to Kiki.
“Nobody?â€
They all shook their heads.
“Let’s get out of here. We could be being watched. If nobody here called this meeting, somebody else did, and I don’t know their intentions. Why don’t we all scooch over to my place.†Kiki stood for the third time and reached in a bright yellow leather purse. “I’m assuming that we all took the bus or a cab?â€
They all nodded.
“Okay, we can take a bus again.â€
Her hand emerged with what looked like a twenty dollar bill. Except for a few small alterations.
First of all, the woman in the picture was easily distinguishable from Andrew Jackson. Second, the small letters under her face confirmed that she was not Andrew Jackson, but Urania. Third, the words “The United States of America†were replaced by “The American Region of Museâ€. And the last of the variations were the two signatures and small type near the bottom. These were not the signatures of a Treasurer of the United States or a Secretary of the Treasurer.
But no occupant of the small deli seemed to notice these differences, and the bill was left under a cocoa mug as the ten bundled up with various scarves against Chicago’s famous wind.
• Cinnamoon sighed, and kicked the wall.
“Ow, ow, ow!” She hopped around, clutching her good-until-a-second-ago foot. “Stubbed my toe, stubbed my toe!”
She collapsed into an overstuffed, scarlet armchair. Massaging her big toe, she went over the facts in her head.
1) Somebody had broken into her house while she was asleep.
2) They had left her wallet containing fifty dollars, box of jewelry containing priceless items that she never wore, and her silk kimono alone, although all were in plain sight.
3) She had been awoken when the theif tipped over a family photo hidden in a closet, which had smashed.
4) The closet the theif had attempted to break into contained her complete collection of Muse.
5) She had chased the theif, and he (or she, for all she knew) had dissapeared seemingly into the east wall of her kitchen.
6) She, or any other object she had tried, could not dissapear through the wall as the theif had done.
With these facts, she considered how far she had gotten.
Which, of course was nowhere. In desperation, she had kicked the wall, only to displace her APC, or all purpose cleaner. She considered her luck that it wasn’t broken, it had cost her a pretty penny.
• Cinnamoon suddenly jumped out of the blue armchair. She hadn’t really looked around the place where the theif dissapeared, maybe he left something behind.
She raced to the kitchen. Immidiatly, she slipped on a copper pot and went sliding into the new APC.
“Foohey.”
But as she picked herself off of the shiny black cube, a glint caught her eye.
“What’s this?”
She slid her fingers under the APC’s stand, and moved them around a bit.
“Aha!” She exclamed, closed her fingers, and withdrew them.
A shiny silver keychain with a small pie on the end was clasped in her fingers. And she had definatly never bought this. It must have been from the theif. Wrapping it in her scarf, she pranced out of the kitchen and up the padded stairs to investigate the small object.
*****
Plink!
“Damn.”
Pentitonik reached into her glass of water and pulled out a shiny, silver keychain with a pie at the end. “I’m always dropping this,” she explained to the hooded man sitting in front of her. “Shall we resume the game?”
“Naw, I think I’ve had enough,” he said and stood up. “See you.”
“Bye!” Penty waved at the stranger she had just played a wonderful game of Mostly Harmless with. He dropped his half-dollar size copper Pie into a slot near the door of Dunkin’ Donuts, grabbed the newly materialized Personal Ground Transportation Scooter (more commenly known as PGTS), and speeded away.
She cleared off the board and dumped the contents into the cardboard box it had come in. She then placed her keychain ring with the pie chain in her purse. And following the same routine as her shady game companion, she scootered to her apartment.
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13-Can I be in it? I would write my own, but as of now, I have no original ideas. Let’s see…
—
Prologue:
Dear MuseBloggers,
We write these words in 2012, just before the start of the Hot Pink Madness. How do we know what will happen in the years from the writing of this letter to its discovery 8 years from now in 2020? We just do. We’re Great and Powerful Administratora, remember?
By the time you find this letter, we GAPAs will be long gone. I’m sorry about the blog, but you’ll have to find a way to cope without it. Our lives are in too much danger right now, and so are yours.
Your challenges will be many, and your chances will be few. Remember to stick together as a group, and never let your differences wedge you apart. Remember, we’re all Musers here.
May the pies be with you.
Sincerely,
Robert Coontz, Rebecca Lasley, Rosanne Spector, and Paul Baker
To be continued later.
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Oops! I messed up the HTML on the last tag. Help me, HTML Gnome? 
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I think I’ll start one. If anyone would like to be in it, I need your current age and a physical description. If I need something else while writing, I’ll ask you.
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16-I’m 12. Blond hair, glasses (I might have contacts in your story if you want). Rather short.
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16- 12, look at top of last thread for other.
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The procession rattled up the metal stairway and through the hatch at the top of the conning tower.
They emerged in an enormous, echoing, cylindrical room that vibrated like a wind chime. A robotic trolley was winching itself across the floor, bearing a large staircase almost identical to the one inside the Ortholinus. With a metallic thunk, bolts shot out of the landing and fastened the top stair firmly to the bottom of the hatch. Spice led the way as they descended.
TMFA swallowed nervously. He wondered if this was an inner room of Terpsichore, or if it took up the entire fuselage. The latter situation seemed more likely when he thought about it. No space plane could be that huge. If that was the case, then there was only a thin barrier of titanium between him and a long, terrifying drop.
Songbird stopped and pulled open a hatch in the floor. A smaller cargo bay was revealed below, with a lightweight, ten-seat glider tethered inside it. The Musers descended a corrugated steel ladder and boarded the aircraft at the direction of the C.U.B.E. agents.
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14-Yup. Physical/personality description, pleez.
As I said before, I need more people in my Muse Fanfic. Takers?
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16/20- chin length, straight brown hair. cliped back on the (my) left side. very pale face (the sort of pale that has a wierd pinks and blues mixed in). brown eyes. 5’7″, 14. sullen. feels realy realy awkward and nervouse in unfamiliar situations (meeting new people as an example) which can sometimes be as trival as getting a fork from a cafeteria she’s never been in. gets frustrated with people very easily. especialy if they say things about her friends or talk to much. is somewhat funny. laughs a lot if she’s in an uncomfterbal situation. has abominabel spelling. uses long words.
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Once they had all taken their seats (TMFA noticed that the floor was some sort of translucent plastic, and that the chairs were comfortably padded and came with complimentary almonds and cans of Urani-Blast soda), Spice and Songbird vanished into the cockpit.
A few seconds later, a pair of doors in the front of the cargo bay began to slide open. Turbulent wind whipped through the crack and rushed under the glider’s wings.
Spice re-entered the cabin. “Everyone comfortable?” she asked.
“Yes,” Kiki exclaimed, “but… but… this doesn’t work! If we’re planning to glide away from Terpsichore… it’s going too fast! We’ll be caught in the slipstream.”
“That’s what this is for,” Spice grinned, hurriedly retreating to the cockpit. “Hit it, ‘finch.”
Alice looked at Kiki. “Finch?”
Beavo gazed out the window, popping a can of Urani-Blast. “Why are the wings folding back?”
And then the single Oppenheimer-Simmons quick-burn rocket engine below the fuselage ignited, propelling the glider out of the fully opened bay doors.
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22- Very interesting story!
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20-It’s in 17
I need characters for mine, I guess. Age and physical description pleeeease. ^_^
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When the shaking stopped and the MBers dared to open their eyes, they saw that the plastic had depolarized, effectively rendering the aircraft transparent. Below them was the dark, syrupy Pacific Ocean, with a tiny twinkling light- the jettisoned rocket engine- receding towards it. Above, a colossus of darkly gleaming metal roared away into the night sky. To the left, a massive tangle of brilliant electric light denoted the city of Beijing, Urania.
The glider swerved and dipped, hurtling closer to the city. As it approached, Alice could make out individual buildings- steel needles frozen in time mid-stitch, then decorated with miniaturized Christmas lights. APTUs wheeled around them like startled birds.
TNÖ was the first to catch sight of it. A slender metal arm, impossibly large, jutting from behind a dark trefoil tower, supporting a huge and apparently functional telescope. She was about to draw TMFA’s attention to it, but just then the glider soared over the triple rooftops, and the Musers could see for themselves.
The statue was over one hundred feet high, its skin made from steel, its robes from copper, its hair plated with an incredibly thin layer of gold. Its face was more human than the original, but the characteristics of its features- upturned, angular nose, curly, blond hair, high forehead- made it easily recognizable.
Traggle found her voice first. “It’s Urania.”
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20 – Sure!
physically – Short, very curly brown hair, brown eyes, glasses, sort of like Hermione in the Harry Potter movies
personality – Shy around strangers, but talkative around friends, places huge emphasis on academics, loves music, will occasionally randomly burst into song
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I am open to becoming a character in ANY repeat ANY fanfic. Description:
Appearance: Blond hair, bluish-grey eyes, fair skin. Cracks knuckles a lot. Often wears jeans, tennis shoes, short-sleeved T-shirt with an unbuttoned plaid flannel shirt over it.
Personality: Compassionate and tries to be helpful, but can be extremely scathing and sarcastic if one gets on nerves. Very intelligent and a bit vain. Cautious and paranoid.
Important facts: Allergy to all dairy products (cheese, milk, chocolate.)
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20- Girl, brown hair cropped to about half an inch, hazel eyes, blocky brown glasses (Think 70’s architects), fast talker, good at endurance running.
Interested in mysteries, archeology and space.
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I’ll gladly be in any fanfics.
Girl, shoulder length brown curly hair, brown eyes, heavy eyeliner, white eyeshadow, relatively short, wearing jeans, and some combination of a t-shirt and sweater decorated with skulls
Personality: depressed, short-tempered, spaz, occasionally hyper, self-conscious, and wicked smart, also hopelessly/constantly in love
Interests: chemistry, cryptology, a little bit of computer programming, writing
mainly, I’m a nerd. A crazy nerd. A crazy gothic hopelessly romantic nerd.
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You must be in Lasley House, then.
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30- me?
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Or Spector House, perhaps. Quite a few crazy gothic hopelessly romantic nerds are in there. In fact, they’re everywhere at Muse Academy, come to think of it. Sometimes it seems as if they run the place. I don’t know how we’d get along without them.
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Hmmm…I need a main character. Any MBers want to volunteer?
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33- Me! Me! Please?
Name: Alice
DoB: August 21, 1993
Appearance: Brown hair that reaches about six inches or so past her shoulders, very blue eyes, a turned-up nose. Her outfits vary dramatically depending on her mood, from average to extraordinary, but no brand names.
Personality: very quiet and reserved when in public, she is either fading into the background, showing off, or being ignored. She tries to be friends with everyone, and when she doesn’t like them or doesn’t want to be around them she becomes distant and hardly says anything. She is often made uncomfortable by other people being rude to each other, but she isn’t assertive enough to protest.
She speaks in a dialect all her own, constructed of Elizabethan, Spanish, or anything else that catcheth her ear. Her accent is that of a Pacific Northwesterner with a lisp who unconsciously slips into a British accent at random moments.
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*lurks on thread for unapparent reasons…*
so is this just a compilation of POSC’s stuff? none of Alice’s?hmmm
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33-Kay, sure. *raises hand*
Name: Beavo (the Online Stalker Spy Dude Person)
DOB: April 8th, ’95
Physical Appearance: Exactly five feet, a-bit-lower-than-ear-lobe-length hair, a-bit-darker-than-auburn color. Usually crazier than it should be, but had come under a loose control via gel and beanies. Explosive in the morning. Pale face/body, skinny arms and legs. Sometimes mistaken for anorexic. Small bony hands with stick-out knuckles and pop-out vains. Very long fingers that evolved from nonstop six hour typing frenzies. Never has completely clean hands; almost constantly bearing messages, pen marks, marker marks, or dirty nails. TINSY feet.
Face: The perfect circle kind plus a squarish chin. Dark brown eyes. Nothing to pinch on cheeks.
Clothes: Usually wears some sort of dark colored baggy long sleeve shirt. Also dark blue baggy jeans with black cloth belt. Goldish colored frame buckle. Black ankle socks, grey shoes with black laces and green HAWK across the back and sides. Black zip up hoodie with grey inside.
Personality: Outgoing, sarcastic, cynical and funny in public/school, but insightful and serious in private/at home. Supposedly sarcastic and cynical no matter what location. Can occupy self at any given time at any given location with any given objects. Can find something funny out of ABSOLUTLY EVERYTHING but chooses not to burst out laughing when discussing the Halocoust because of the fact that his mother is partly Jewish. Has less respect for authority than most (jokes around with teachers, kids parents about age and appearance, curses in front of parents) but respect all the same. Paranoid constantly although it’s generally concealed. Strongly cares about certain topics. WARNING: TO NOT ANGER IMMENSLY. WILL EXPLODE.
There, I poured my heart out to you. Now ignore me while I go sit in my corner, collecting dust. Go on! *sob* I can handle it!
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(31) Wait a minute. Skulls… chemistry… La Mort, you’re in Coontz House, aren’t you? Hail, worthy Coontzite!
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*SAMPLE from FANFIC. TO BE FINSH LATER*
POSOC started up a flight of stars. he knocked on to the door.
“come in” came a voice.
POSOC came in.
“sit down” said the man, who’s Name was The Man For Aeiou, but POSOC didn’t know that-yet.
“sir, why did you call me”
“well, well, well. don’t call me Sir, Captain Canix!”
captain canix? thought POSOC i haven’t heard that name since 2007!
“Canix, do you know who you’re talking to?”
” a museblogger, of course. someone from museica, I bet. maybe some one from my ship. was on before 2008… I don’t know!”
“look around. the bookshelfs?”
good, good. he remembers the blog and museica. thats better than the last one though TMFA as he waited.
the bookshelfs were full of… software!
” you’re TMFA! The Man For Aeiou! Captain of the Black-footed Ferret after I retired!”
“yes. I have called all the MBers I recall. you are the only one who remembers the blog at all. beavo, he just remembered pies. alice, only the magazine. most, nothing.”
“but why are you doing this? you’re the richest man in the world! what do you need with the rest of the musers?”
” for the past year I have been getting error messages. but there was no error. it was a dialogue between to people. it looked like this” he flipped the pad of paper he had in his hand.
“CHAD: what she say!
CRRAW: HELP! program the IA to three-two-one-four!
CHAD: Make Sure We Don’t Loose Her TOO! KoKonono is just not the same with out Kokopelli’s flying pies! and Feather. he never knew what was coming.
CRRAW:I’m trying
AEIOU: Bluber!
CHAD: She can talk!
AEIOU: Yes, now I can!
and
Chad: WE HAVE IN! AEIOU, quick! say the message!
AEIOU: Hello, TMFA. I am AEIOU. the muses are dieing off. send help! SEND FOR HELP! you must find the GAPAs! They have the key to SAVE THE MUSES! SOS!”
“I have asked you here to help me. the GAPAs need us, and the muses need the GAPAs!”
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that was long…
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30,32,37- Geez, make up your mind. I’ve always thought of myself as a Coontzite anyways.
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(40) Excellent.You’re a credit to the house.
(21) Weird pinks, eh? You’ve never had to be *shudders* debunnified, have you?
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so i’m thinking of doing a series of mostly harmless drawings and i was wondering if you guys wanted to give me your description. it doesn’t have to be what you really look like it can be all “green fur and large fangs. is like a ginormous wolf” but i’ll probably somewhat modify it to my artistic skills. so if you’re interested please put KAG PROFILE in bold at the top of your description so i can find it easily when i scroll down.
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oh and one more thing. please mention any weapons/ objects you would probably be holding.
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KAG PROFILE
Use the description earlier in the thread. Here it is again:
Short, very curly brown hair, brown eyes, glasses, sort of like Hermione in the Harry Potter movies
I would probably hold a sword 
I’m going to probably start my story tonight.
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34 and 36 – All right. I guess I’ll have both of you as main characters.
—
Alice sighed, and leaned backwards. Suddenly, a pink shape whirled by, and she was so startled that she conked her head on the rock wall behind her.
“Ow!” she said, jerking away, her long brown hair trailing. “Dumb Coontz.”
“I don’t think he meant it,” said another person, coming into the room. “Turning hot pink can’t have been good for his nerves.”
“Yeah, but that dumb cat should have had enough time to get used to it. The Hot Pink Madness has been over for almost two years now.” Alice frowned, and then stood up. “Well,” she said. “I may as well do something. Are there any other bloggites her right now?”
“Nope,” Beavo said sadly. “It’s just us two. All of the others have left already, and we haven’t heard from any lately. Now that the HPM is over, they’re slowly creeping away. Do you think things are safe yet? We’ve lived here for almost three years.”
“Nope,” Alice said, gazing sadly at the rock ceiling of the building that she and Beavo currently called home. “Nothing has been safe since the GAPAs disappeared. Without them, all kinds of things can slip through unmoderated…”
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Here’s my beginning:
It was a beautiful day in late June. Every reasonable kid would be outside playing. But a short, blond, 12-year-old girl called Cat’s Meow was not. It was a good thing too, because as soon as she got on to one of her favorite websites, a little website called MuseBlog, she read the notice. “Important message for all Musers: The Muses have been kidnapped. We are unsure of their location, but we know that if we do not do something soon, they will be lost to us forever.” Cat’s Meow gasped. This was very bad…
At this same time, in another part of the country, another twelve-year-old girl was reading this same message. She had curly brown hair and was known as speller73. Oh no, she thought, I have to do something. I have to tell someone…
Queen Francois the First had just finished a row of her knitting when she heard the phone ring. She grabbed the phone. “Hello”
“Hello, Queen Francois?”
“Oh hi, speller73, what’s up?”
“I have bad news.”
“What?”
“The muses have been kidnapped.”
“Really? This is terrible.”
“I know.”
“What can we do?”
“I’m not sure, but get on MuseBlog ASAP.”
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46-Awesome!
“I have bad news.”
“What?”
“The muses have been kidnapped.”
“Really? This is terrible.”
“I know.”
Wow! They sound sooo worried! 
It’s still good. xD
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Hmm. I ought to continue mine. I got distracted.
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KAG PROFILE
Physical Appearance: Exactly five feet, a-bit-lower-than-ear-lobe-length hair, a-bit-darker-than-auburn color. Usually crazier than it should be, but had come under a loose control via gel and beanies. Explosive in the morning. Pale face/body, skinny arms and legs. Sometimes mistaken for anorexic. Small bony hands with stick-out knuckles and pop-out vains. Very long fingers that evolved from nonstop six hour typing frenzies. Never has completely clean hands; almost constantly bearing messages, pen marks, marker marks, or dirty nails. TINSY feet.
Face: The perfect circle kind plus a squarish chin. Dark brown eyes. Nothing to pinch on cheeks.
Clothes: Usually wears some sort of dark colored baggy long sleeve shirt. Also dark blue baggy jeans with black cloth belt. Goldish colored frame buckle. Black ankle socks, grey shoes with black laces and green HAWK across the back and sides. Black zip up hoodie with grey inside.
I ought to continue mine as well (that is, if anyone likes it) (no, I’ll continue it even if it makes your blood curdle becasue I WANT TO).
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KAG PROFILE
Short brown hair, brown glasses, hazel eyes, doesn’t wear jewlery. I’d probably be in a scuba suit, getting ready to dive.
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KAG PROFILE
I’ll probably be holding a blue mp3 player with black ear buds.
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KAG PROFILE
Name: Alice
Brown hair that reaches about six inches or so past her shoulders, very blue eyes, a turned-up nose. Her outfits vary dramatically depending on her mood, from average to extraordinary, but no brand names.
If you could dress her at least once in a very full, ankle-length cloak (no hood), she would be eternally grateful.
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KAG PROFILE
Wearing enormous tan greatcoat, fashion sense reminiscent of Jack Sparrow. Shaggy turquoise hair, sea-gray eyes. Carrying several flintlock pie-launchers and elegant dueling sword of Quintifructian steel. Prairie-dog paraphernalia prominent. Large boots.
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Even Beavo stopped cleaning spilled Uraniblast off his sweatshirt and gaped visibly. “Holy… That’s amazing!”
The glider spiraled down, making three circuits around the enormous statue before extending its landing gear and screeching to a halt on a small airstrip that lay in the shadow of an enormous, blue-glazed metal ball.
With a hiss, doors opened at both ends of the cabin, and the Musers straggled out.
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54-Sweatshirt? SWEATSHIRT? *gags*
Hoddie’s more like it. *scoff* Me, in a sweatshirt.
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55- A hoodie is a type of sweatshirt, is it not?
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56-No! No! No, it’s not, you’ve got it all wrong! *rages*
A sweatshirt is basically a long sleeved shirt made out of different material and a bit baggier, with tighter openings.
Now, a hoodie, is so much better. It resembles a long sleeved shirt only barely. It has a zipper on the front, it’s much baggier, and it has a hood. It’s the new-and-improved sweatshirt.
It’s like calling a photo copier a printing press.
*wanders away, muttering “stereotypes”*
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Yeah, POSOC, how could you?
Haha.
Yes, I’m poking fun. Don’t take it personally.
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I’m fashionably clueless. No, really. For example: if you wear it between your neck and your waist, it’s a shirt.
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*gasp* I am most certainly NOT wearing a shirt! I would never do such a thing! I’m offended!
I’m poking fun too.
Although, seriously, a hoodie and a sweatshirt are different, and I would never be cought dead wearing the latter.
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60- And then there’s the hooded sweatshirt, which is another matter entirely…
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60- A lot can change in 15 years.
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This is not connected to my normal fanfiction.
Alice hung over the wooden railing, staring into the weeds. There was a glass bottle lying on a tuft of grass, and Alice thought she could see something inside it.
She shivered slightly. The sun was hot but the wind was cool, and her bathing suit was wet under her sundress.
“Hi.” Alice turned. A girl was standing there.
—
Oh drat. This is as far as I can go without embarrassing myself. I was going to write a lovely little scene in which we discover that the entire intergenerational elderhostel which my dad is leading is made up of MuseBloggers, but I can’t get any further.
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47 – This is the first fiction that I’ve tried to write for something other than school. That’s not how Queen Francois the First talks either.
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64-I know. I was just kidding.
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here is a little something i stole from The Amulet of Samarkand and made it ‘Musey’ and not that KOKO would ever be that mean so im sorry koko if you think i made you seem to mean.
Nathaniel passed his hand over the disk twice and muttered the invocation. At the third time of asking Feather’s face appeared, spinning as if on a roundabout. Feather raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.
“ain’t you dead?’ Feather said
“NO”
“”Pity”
“stop spinning!” Nathanial snarled “I have a task for you”
“hold on a sec” said Feather, he screeched to a stop suddenly. “who’s that with you?”
“that’s feather another one of my slaves”
“I’d like to think as much” feather replied.
Feather frowned “that’s Kokopelli? The one from the tower of Urania?”
“Yes”
“ain’t he dead?”
“no”
“Pity”
“he’s a fiesty one” Koko stretched out and yawned.
“watch it, I pick my teeth with Muses like you” Koko said
“yeah?” Feather made a face. “Well I’ve eaten Muses like you for breakfast, mate”
There’s more, MUCH MORE, to the story but ill stop.
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66- Niiiiiicee…
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66-I don’t really get it. Would it make more sense if I had read the original book or whatever?
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66- Sounds familiar. I wonder why. *giggle*
Gosh, I should read that series again. Just so that I could despise Nathaniel for two thirds of the series and then cry when he dies. Yeah.
Actually it was quite good. Even though Mr. Mandrake was a hateful person and Nathaniel wasn’t much better until the very end. It was thrilling.
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68- I think that it was mistyped somewhat. It seemed like there was two Kokos and two Feathers.
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70-Yeah, that’s what threw me off, but I was wondering if something in the original book was like that or something.
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Anyone want to be in my fanfic?
Anyone at all?
oh, please say male/female. I am really really bad with that. sorry.
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72-I’ll be in it. Male.
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me. male.
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72- See my earlier post. Male.
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72- O’ course.
I’m a female. You can tell from my name. Of course, Alice *can* be a boy’s name, but it’s not generally used as one.
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Here’s my really wierd story
Two men were walking in a dark alley. One man was blind and a multimillionare. The other one carried around an ak47. “Well, do you have the bag?” The man carrying around the ak47 said “Yes sir, we have kokopelli and feather in the bag.”
Hah, fellow musers, even though the muses are like Chuck Norris, they still are well captives.
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Profile
11 years old. Red hair, white skin(that sounded racist), and a tendency to kick ass. Give me a nice gun and a black belt in Karate
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I’m a male with vicionus. Make me part werewolve
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Just put me in our I’ll put you in Norris, Chuck. : lol :
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50- i’m really sorry to ask but are you a boy or a girl?
thanks guys. if there are anymore KAG Profiles could you please specify gender. i’m really sory but some peoples genders i actualy don’t know because it’s not overly obvious.
beavo: you are so american with your spelling of colour! 
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72-Sure! I’m female.
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72 – Sure. female
And now for more of my story…
In Canada, another girl had read the news. She was 14 years old and her name was Kagcomix, though she was generally called Kagy. Kagy didn’t know what to do. Her mother didn’t know that she was a MuseBlogger nor would she even consider letting Kagy meet someone she met on-line.
I think that’s enough characters for now. How should they meet?
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KAG PROFILE
Female
Some sort of cross between a stereotypical vampire, and the Grim Reaper: tall and thin; long, dark, curly hair; preferably gray eyes; all clothes are some combination of black, red and silver
Weapon: dagger, sickle, and/or bow+arrow
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Kagy, I’m a girl if you need that.
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The figure paused in the middle of the hallway. In the shadows, it could have been anything. There was another creature with it, so big it dwarfed the first. It was not human.
“It’s fine. You really should stay.” The smaller figure spoke. It was definetly human, a female somewhere between her 3rd and 4rth decades. ” I will feel perfectly safe there, I promise, K4. Or are you K36? Never mind, I never could tell any of you apart.”
The lady and her companion continued down the hall into a patch of light. There the larger figure appeared a rather odd shade of magenta, 7 feet tall, and with large ears.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
More later.
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74- Female.
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(86) This one is good and creepy. *shudders*
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86- *dies*
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88- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The lady sighed. She was lying, though there really was no point, as the bunny knew it just as much as she did. She was not going to feel safe in the room a the end of that dark, deep hallway by any stretch, but the point was, she would feel safer without her bodyguard.
Hot pink bunnies were never meant to be bodyguards. Everyone knew that. What Alice, for that was the lady’s name, knew, that only 31 other people knew, was that no one knew what they were for. One thing was for sure, though, now was not the time to find out. Better to keep them away from power just now.
The bunny emitted a low humming sound. Alice, who listened to this as if it were normal conversation, looked rather disgruntled.
“For God’s sake! I know I need to be on time!” Alice bit her lip. “Ok, if you wait in the hall, I’ll get you pie. 3 pies. Fresh baked, Lemon meringue. And then I won’t report you for insolence.”
The bunny emitted another sound, only this time it was an eerily accurate mimic of a teleauthority officer, but with more of a smug bite. “Bribery of a civil servant. Threats in a public area…”
Alice just crossed her arms.
The bunny twitched.
A brief staring contest ensued.
The bunny twitched again, which Alice took to be some sort of consent.
“Thank you, K4.”
The bunny, who was, in fact, K42, stepped aside to let Alice enter the room.
And she did.
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I have an interesting future, no?
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With bunnies as your body guards, I would say so, Alice.
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well, she sure has gotten high in the hierarchy*bad pun* but bunnies waiting on you…wow. And now for something completely different. Alice’s fanfic.
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93- Yeah, but it’s 20 minutes past the time when I would usually be in bed, so I’ll deal with that later.
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94-…*awkward silence*
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Songbird strode purposefully up to the side of the enormous globe, which upon closer inspection proved to be made up of a multitude of overlapping tiles. She placed her hand on a panel that seemed identical to the others. But it must have been substantially different, because at least seventy of the blue-glazed tiles folded up and slotted away into hidden apertures. Songbird and Spice didn’t hesitate before stepping in.
When Kiki entered, the first thing she noticed was the walls. They were exquisitely painted to show a map of the world, but every continent and ocean was perplexingly portrayed in mirror image. That and the spherical shape of the room- Kiki realized that the ball must have been completely hollow- combined to create a most unusual impression. It was as though she were standing at the Earth’s core, and all of the molten, white-hot rock surrounding her had been rendered transparent, allowing her to see the underside of the crust.
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96- Cool.
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*waits for Alice*
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98- Argh! Okay! Here I am! Okay, now I know where I was, so I can write later.
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I need a few opinions for the fanfic I’m planning to do after this one.
How do you think that history would be altered if, in 1775, Benjamin Franklin received a copy of every Muse ever published?
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100- Well… He’d probably end up with a lot more knowledge than he ever had. Discoveries would be made earlier than they really were.
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Premature Industrial Revolution? During the American Revolution? Awesome.
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Beavo looked dismally around his apartment. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cleaned it, and it showed. The only tidy part of it was the telepost terminal, and that was only because he never got any t-mail. Boxes, both cardboard and plastic, sat among the heaps of experiments gone bad and jumbles of paper scrawled with various stories and letters. What had gone wrong?
“I hate this,” he muttered darkly.
“It needs to be done,” said the telepostman. He wasn’t bad for company, but sometimes it bothered Beavo that his only companion was hologramo-mechanico. He picked his way to the terminal and turned it off. Then he selected a cardboard box at random and began to sort the things inside.
An hour or two later, he was feeling a little better, and the room was looking considerably more tidy. The boxes were stacked against one wall, the paper was overflowing the garbage can, the window was wide open, and the experiments were tidied away in more boxes.
“Curse the population rise!” he said to the telepostman. “I need more room.”
“Quite,” said the TPM.
Beavo decided to sort one more box. It was full of photographs from his childhood. Himself as a baby, himself as a fourth-grader, all the things that grandparents and parents are supposed to have but always wind up in the house of the child.
Near the bottom of the box, Beavo found a small bundle of pictures tied together with a rubber band. His curiosity peaked, he pulled the rubber band off and discarded it on the floor, then flipped through the pictures. They appeared to be of a friend’s birthday party when Beavo was fourteen or fifteen. The usual kind, laughing teenagers, pictures of the cake, the presents, the games. But Beavo noticed on the back of his right hand a word in blue ink. It was Muse. It meant nothing.
He went over to the TPM and showed him the pictures. “This mean anything to you?” he asked.
The TPM peered. “It looks like a birthday party,” he said.
“Something like that,” sighed Beavo. “But it means something, I know it does. Muse. Muse. Muse. Muse. Not the Muses surely, from the magazine? What were they called? Un-aria, Not… There were nine of them, I think.”
A persistent yodel broke into Gimanator’s dreams, followed by the cacaphony of an orchestra of mixed inttruments which hadn’t practised and were all trying to play different tunes. Gimanator put his pillow over his head and shrieked into thew matress, “SHUT UP!” but of course there was no effect. Bianca dug her claws into his back.
As Gimanator pulled on his jeans and t-shirt, plucking a stray cat-hair from his collar, he reflected on hologramo-mechanoids. He had more reason than anyone else to be glad of the rise of this particular technology – after all, his dad had invented them, and if they hadn’t been quite so popular Gim might not have been able to attend such a good school – but sometimes he missed the days of snooze buttons.
He fed Bianca, toasted half a bagel, and strolled out the door.
“Morning, Beavo,” he said cheerfully to the auburn-haired young man he passed in the hallway. Beavo looked distractedly at him.
“Hi Gim,” he said finally, after Gimanator had been looking oddly at him for at least three minutes.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gimanator.
“Nothing,” replied Beavo. He went into his apartment and shut the door. Gim shrugged and stepped into the elevator.
With one foot in the elevator, Gim stopped.
“Beavo?” he said. He turned and strode toward the door marked 12A. He lifted his hand and knocked loudly.
The door opened and his friend stood there, looking excited and slightly wild. Gimanator involuntarily took a step back.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Beavo, and began to shut the door. Gimanator stuck his foot in it.
“What do you want?” asked Beavo, opening the door fully again. Gim did not withdraw his foot.
“I don’t want anything, Beav. But what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s what you say, but something’s gotta be, otherwise you’d be in school. Where I should be right now.”
“All I’m missing is a lecture on social status. I’ll be fine. But you, I believe, are missing something slightly more important. Something like a very important test. Go.” He pushed his friend out into the hallway.
“Oh well,” said Gimanator, sounding hurt. “I tried.” He started back to the elevator.
“Gim?”
He turned around. “What?”
“Do you remember Muse?”
Gim frowned and his eyes became troubled. “Muse? What about it?”
“The kid’s magazine,” prompted Beavo. “There were nine Muses, remember?”
Gimanator’s face cleared. “Oh! You mean that Muse. I thought you meant…something different.” He did not stop to look at Beavo’s puzzled expression, but raced on. “Yes, I remember Muse. Didn’t it go out of business a few years ago?”
“2010.”
“Yeah. I think I stopped reading it a while before, though. I don’t remember being terribly broken up about it.”
“That’s the weird thing. I don’t think I cared. And I can’t find any of my back issues, either.”
“Funny.”
“But what were trhe names of the nine Muses? I keep thinking there was one called No-no-pelli, but that can’t be right…”
“It is. There was Ob, No-no-pelli, Not, Yawn, Un-aria and the rest, and they all had evil counterparts, like Kokopelli, Bo, and Pwt, but one for each Muse.”
“Yeah,” said Beavo, but it’s weird you didn’t remember it either…a little fishy.”
“Quite so.”
“It’s all coming back now, though. Who else read it? I think I knew some people…”
“Yeah, some friends of yours, I think. You didn’t read it for the longest time. We were hard pressed to get you to subscribe…”
“WAIT a minute!” yelled Gim. Beavo flinched with the noise of the bellow.
“Whoa, what’s the matter?”
“Muse went out of business in 2010. But we met for the first time in 2012. And yet I distinctly remember knowing you before Muse went out of business.”
“Oh -”
Whatever was about to come out of Beavo’s mouth missed its chance, because suddenly everything went black for a good…long..time…
The young man woke in a dark room. He groaned and rolled over, only to strike something soft and warm. He pulled back with a shudder, but it was too late. The thing had been disturbed. “Wha’ss gownon?” it asked.
“I beg your pardon?” said the young man.
“I said, what’s going on?” the thing articulated. It now sounded distinctly human.
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“Lovely. Who am I again?”
“I’m not sure. Come to that, I’m not sure who I am either.”
“Even better. Do we know each other?”
“I might be able to tell if I could see you, but I can’t. Since I don’t know myself at the moment, it would be fairly safe to say that no, I don’t know you.”
“Well, that’s nice. Splendid to meet you, by the way.”
“Likewise.”
They sat in dark silence for a while. Then–
“We must have amnesia.”
“Of course.”
“Amnesia gives one wonderful manners.”
“Indeed.”
The silence was longer this time.
“I wonder if we’ll ever be rescued.”
“I wonder if we need to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is there a door?”
Further inspection revealed a doorknob about four inches above their heads, and a ceiling much to low to allow them to stand.
“It’s probably locked.”
“Have you tried it?”
He tried it.
It was locked.
“Maybe we do need to be rescued after all.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The Man For Aeiou strode down the hallway, fluorescent lights humming above his head. Doors slipped by on both sides of him, and behind them he could hear the clack and buzz of the machinery. He sighed as he remembered “Mostly Harmless”. How could that idealistic plan have transformed into something as wicked and black-hearted as this?
He reached the end of the hallway and stepped into an elevator, glad to escape the harsh white walls of the ground floor. The elevator was darker, paneled in actual wood.
He pressed a button labeled “B” and the elevator sank smoothly into the dungeons.
A minute later, he walked out into pitch blackness. With a mutter, he pulled out a flashlight and switched it on. The beam of light showed a hallway the twin of that above, but dingier and minus the light. There was no sound of machinery on this floor.
He shone his flashlight on the doors as he walked, more from habit than necessity, because he knew exactly where to go. He stopped at the door numbered 42, reflecting on the sick humor of it all, and knocked. Silence as usual. But, unlike usual, he heard another noise, coming not from room number 42, but 43, across the hall.
TMFA crossed to it in three steps, and knocked, eager and scared. “Hello?” he asked, not too loudly for fear someone should hear. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Who’s that?” asked a voice, and it was echoed by another.
“Name’s –” TMFA began, but thought better of it. “Who are you?” he said instead.
“Gimanator,” said the first voice.
“Beavo,” said the second.
They sounded hopeful. Although it would seriously jeopardize his safety, he knew he had to rescue them. If you had done your rescuing a year ago, you might not be the only Muser left right now, his stupid conscience nagged him. But he couldn’t have rescued anyone a year ago. It was all too precarious. And anyway, it was better he just rescue these prisoners now, than regret whom he hadn’t rescued a year ago.
“Hello?” asked Gimanator from behind the door.
“Be quiet,” said TMFA. “I’m going to rescue you, but they can’t find out.”
“Who can’t find out?”
“Them. I can’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try us,” urged Beavo, but TMFA shook his head and desperately searched his pockets for a lockpick.
There wasn’t one, of course. Typical. He groaned.
“What’s the matter?”
TMFA closed his eyes in exasperation. “Shut up, please,” he said. “I’m thinking.”
After a moment of thought TMFA straightened up. “I don’t have a key,” he said, ” so I’m going to have leave now. I’ll be back tomorrow – sooner if at all possible. I have to get a lockpick.”
And then he was gone, and Gim and Beavo heard footsteps echoing in the hall. A sliver of light that had shone underneath the door disappeared.
“So we got rescued after all,” said Beavo. “I didn’t expect it so soon, but I’m not going to complain.”
“We haven’t been rescued yet,” warned Gim. “This fellow might not follow through. We don’t even know his name.”
But hours later, there were hurried footsteps in the hall outside, and a beam of light shone under their door.
“Hello? Gimanator? Beavo?” It was their rescuer.
“Hello! Have you got a key?”
“No. A lockpick. But they serve the same purpose.” The lock rattled. The rescuer cursed softly. The lock rattled again, and this time the door opened.
Gimanator and Beavo flinched in the bright light, and stood up stiffly, still squinting.
TMFA saw two men of his own age, both slightly dusty and blinded by the light. He tilted it towards the floor so that their eyes could adjust.
“Hello,” said Gimanator. He had dirty blonde hair, and wore a t-shirt and jeans that were covered in cat hair. Beavo had wild auburn hair in rather desperate need of cutting and his clothes were black.
“Come on,” said TMFA. “We’ve got to go before they find out you’re gone.” And what will they think then? he asked himself. Will they remember that a Muser betrayed them before? He didn’t like to think about it. So he turned and walked quickly down the hallway instead. Gim and Beavo followed.
“Who’s they?” asked Beavo.
“The Muses,” TMFA said curtly.
Gim stopped. “The Muses…”
“Hurry up. We don’t have much time.”
Gim shrugged and started moving again.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“The Man For A – The Man For Uoiea,” he said. No one knew his real name anymore. He couldn’t hint that he remembered the original Muses, much less that he supported them. “You can call me TMFU,” he continued.
The exited the dark corridor through a small door with a broken “exit” sign hanging above it. Gim and Beavo heaved sighs of relief at the sight of sunshine and the smell of fresh air. TMFA (or TMFU) shut off his flashlight. “Make a run for it,” he told the other two. “This area is fairly safe from them, but you’ve got to go quick or they’ll see you.” He darted a nervous glance at the high windows of the grey building behind them.
“Thanks for saving us, by the way,” said Beavo.
“Yes, thanks,” added Gim.
“You’re welcome. it’s the least I could do. Leave. Now!”
Gimanator nodded once. Together the two sprinted off.
The Man For Aeiou stepped back through the door.
At that moment a young man with blonde hair and grey eyes was walking briskly through the countryside of the direction of the Muses’ lair. He had been biding his time for the past seven years, surreptitiously doing research on Muse magazine and on his old companions, and he had finally discovered the location he was searching for. Unfortunately for him, his car had broken down several miles back and he had been forced to continue the journey on foot. His feet were beginning to hurt.
Rather reluctantly – he had hoped to reach his destination before noon, and that wasn’t going to happen – he stopped to rest.
He must have dozed off, because he woke when he heard soft voices and the cracking of twigs. Ever so slowly, he opened his eyes.
Two persons were attempting to slip by him, college-age men who both looked rather bedraggled and out of breath. Mud was splashed on the hems of their pants.
“HALT!” bellowed Prarilius Canix (this being the name of the walker).
The auburn-haired sneaker jumped about a foot into the air. The other looked no less surprised but slightly more composed.
“Who are you?” asked Canix.
“Er . . .”
Canix was very good at looking menacing. His eccentric tan greatcoat only aided this.
“Gimanator,” said the second sneaker (the one who didn’t jump). He extended his hand. “And you?”
“Prarilius Canix,” said Prarilius Canix. he took the hand and shook it.
“Nice to meet you,” said Gimanator.
“Sort of . . .” muttered his friend under his breath.
“What’s your name?” Canix asked.
“Er . . . Beavo.”
It hit Beavo at this moment that he remembered his name. He knew he hadn’t when he was in the cell at first. What else did he know? He fumbled through his mind, grasping at the slippery strings of memory. He was in college . . . his apartment was a mess . . . his friend was Gimanator . . . And then images of his younger days, but there were gaping holes in his memory. The morning before they were captured was nothing but static, like a broken TV.
“Gim!” he yelled, jumping to his feet. “What do you remember?”
Gim, deep in conversation with Prarilius Canix, looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“What do you remember? Of life?”
“Lots of things . . . almost everything . . .”
“When we were captured? Before we were captured?”
Gim frowned. “Nothing.”
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Continuing from there…
Prarilius Canix looked intrigued, but his words did not betray his interest. He waved in the general direction from which Gim and Beavo had come. “What lies that way?” he asked.
“A sort of fortress,” said Gim.
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Spice approached the reception desk that stood in the middle of the room. It was a very nice reception desk, made of some sort of synthetic mahogany, but it lacked the important detail of a receptionist behind it.
That is, until a most unusual personage literally appeared out of nowhere. “Ah!” he (or she, or it- it was quite hard to tell) said. “Agent Spice! Her Excellency has been waiting for you for hours.”
“We were unavoidably detained,” Spice said coolly, ignoring the astonished gasps behind her. “We’ll be right there.”
The apparition saluted with an ear and vanished.
Alice regained her voice first. “Was that- ”
“A hologram,” Songbird reassured her. “He’s the most lifelike form of artificial intelligence we’ve managed to program. One of the most intelligent, too. He can find the prime factors of a thirty-digit number while simultaneously hacking into Muse surveillance satellite feeds and singing Happy Birthday backwards in Cantonese. In theory.”
“But- he was a- Why?”
“Well, they’re the only original Muse trademark we’ve got left, besides Urania and the contests. We thought it was appropriate. The elevators are over here.”
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Alice, your fanfic is so good! I really love how it keeps switching perspectives.
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100- That would be very cool. People at the time of the American Revolution seeing photos from the surface of the moon!
Alice, your story rocks.
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106- Thank you!
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107- Thanks!
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107- Actually, I’m thinking Ben Franklin would keep it secret (as the general public would think he was hoaxing them) except from a few of his Freemasonic colleagues.
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110- That’s cool, too. Secret Groups just ooze cool.
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And then they would form a splinter group based on the Freemasons, but with Muse ideals. Which would become the Freemusers, a secret society all its own. Which would become the guiding force behind a new political party.
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112- Sweet.
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112- just a little twisted.
And now for my Fanfic (cont)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alice felt as if the pressure in the room was going to crush her. She looked at her hands to keep from looking anywhere else.
If she had looked up, she would have noticed the sharp outlines of black-clothed figures against the somber gray walls.
Someone spoke a word of welcome. It made Alice feel brave enough to glance up just enough to see the person who had spoken. It was a man approximently the same age as she, with rumpled clothes that gave him a very, very false feeling of ridiculousness. The enormous halo of brown hair with a few premature threads of gray just added to the effect.
The man sneered. ” Looky here, it’s our ‘government representative’ ” Alice’s blood ran cold.
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My blood runs cold! Truly.
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And so does mine, even though I’m not there. *shudder*
It’s really good, keep going!
Meh, I’m probably not even gonna try to continue mine. It was horrid anyway.
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oh. eh. okay. I’ll stop bugging you. Sorry, but I do enjoy your fanfic.
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117- Mine? I did write recently. Honest. Post 104. And once I figure out what’s going on I’ll continue.
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118-oh, no, I saw that. You’re just procrastinating, and I I feel I’ll just make you grumpy if I bug you.
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119- No, you’re not making me grumpy. Slightly guilty, sure, but not grumpy. And I’m not procrastinating right now, or at least not on my story. I’m procrastinating on my homework, but that’s another story.
I think I’ll write now. *glowers at radio* *stuffs writer’s block under bed*
———-
P. Canix wore a satisfied smile. “Good. That’s what I thought.”
“Why?”
“Why did I think that?”
“No, why did you want to know?”
His face grew sober. “I’ve spent the past seven years looking for this fortress, and I want to know if it’s not where I think it is.”
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120-the more I read of this , the more it seems like I’m the uninformed one. *laughs to self* oh well. I don’t mind one bit.
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121- Oh, Beavo’s uninformed too. And you will both soon become informed.
BTW, you have a secret. A very deep, dark secret. But I don’t know what it is yet.
Ta ta!
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122-i’m assuming it has something to do with my dad…
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116- You did figure it out though, right? If not- 
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123- Maybe so.
Be nice, Beavo.
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115- Nothing like a good old fashoned black helicopters and Men in Black conspiracy tale to scare you silly.
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125-Beavo???Are you talking to me????Wha????*falls over, in his being confused*
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hmm…. mabe i’ll make a muse fanfiction…… hmm……………..
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128-oh. cool. I’ll be in it, i you’re recruiting. Even if you’re not, I’ll still read it, so…
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128- I’ll be in it, if you want. Post despcription later
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125-Me? Nice? Hey, didn’t you even READ my whole self-description?
Ooh! Pick me, Kagy! If you’re recruiting, of course.
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I’ll write soon.
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Heh, I won’t.
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I guess I’ll write some more.
“Is anyone going to come?” said Queen Francois in the small conference room that she and speller73 had rented.
“Patience, grasshopper,” replied speller73.
“Can you at least check MuseBlog to see if anyone said they would come?” asked Queen Francois.
“Sure,” said speller73 as the page loaded, “Kagy says that she would come but she can’t, and…”
They were interrupted by the entrance of a short blond girl. “speller73?” she said.
“That’s one of my names,” speller73 responded.
“Oh good. I’m Cat’s Meow.”
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The trip downward passed mostly in silence, as most of the MBers were still stunned by the appearance of the unusual receptionist. When the doors hissed open, a man with golden-brown hair and grey-blue eyes, wearing a flannel shirt and designer glasses, was there to greet them.
“Hello, everyone. Her Excellency is waiting for you, and- ”
The receptionist appeared. “I already told them that. You’ve gone redundant, Meriwether.”
“Shut up, Lionel.”
“No.”
“I said shut up.”
“Since when do you give the orders around here?”
Meriwether sighed. “Asimov had the right idea. Look, Lionel, we both know that I could, in theory, take the elevator down another hundred floors to the databanks, and reprogram you to obey all orders issued by members of Urania’s staff.”
“But you won’t, because it’s too much work and you’re in a hurry.” The apparition executed a rude gesture with his ears and disappeared.
Meriwether conducted the group across a pink plush carpet resembling that of the Ortholinus, down a corridor to a faux-wood door with the number 1 embossed upon it.
Below, hanging from a nail, was a sign declaring THE BUCK STOPS HERE.
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135- Very interesting!
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GAPAs- have you ever met Diana Lutz? If so, can you give me a description of her?
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yeah, I’ll just wait for Alice…
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ΡÖŞÎĈ (137) She’s tall, dark purple and cloaked in a web of mystery and fine electrical wires. Oh yes, and she’s got adamantium claws.
Actually, I haven’t seen Diana in years. It’s possible she’s changed. Robert and Paul have seen her more recently.
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139- Urk.
Robert? Paul?
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Tallish, dark-haired, uninterested in fashion, and intense. I’m not sure about the wires or the claws.
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Profuse thanks.
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Songbird and Spice led the way into the room. Once all of the group were inside, Meriwether shut the door behind them.
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138- Wait no longer. I am here!
Where was I again?
Oh. Right. Got it.
“We might be able to help,” said Gim. “What do you think it is?”
“Dangerous.”
“Yeah,” said Beavo. “We could’ve guessed that.”
“How much of it did you see?” asked Canix.
“Not a lot,” Gim admitted.
“We didn’t see anything,” Beavo cut in. “It was pitch black.”
“Did you meet anyone?”
“Sure. A guy named TMFU. The Man For Uoiea. Nice enough fellow.”
“Uoiea! So it is what I think it is. Terrible shame about TMFA, though.” This last bit was muttered under his breath. Beavo raised his eyebrows. Gim looked sharply at Canix. But neither mentioned it. It didn’t seem like the time.
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yaaay. I should put this on the threads we need more traffic on…
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145- Seconded.
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A tall, lean woman was lounging behind a paper-cluttered desk (the items upon it ranging from Urania Publishing articles waiting to be approved to top-secret missile defense reports), drinking coffee from a chipped mug and frowning. Her hair was still mostly dark, but shot with silver at the temples and forehead.
Upon sighting the cavalcade that had invaded her office, she sat up straight. “Spice, Songbird! Finally! Are these them?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” Songbird said.
“Are they trustworthy?”
“All the GAPAs vouched for them,” Spice replied, with a nod.
“All right. Lionel! Item one!”
Lionel appeared out of thin air, seeming to be a slightly paler pink against the imaginative decor in the office. His alabaster eyes suddenly shone with darkly prismatic colors, which expanded into a chromatic whirlpool of light, completely obscuring Lionel himself.
The hologram resolved into a short video of a blank, white smart-card, lying against a stainless steel tray. A yellow light blinked periodically from the upper right corner.
Diana Lutz pointed suddenly at Alice. “You worked for Muse. Do you have one of these items in your possession?”
Alice opened her wallet and pulled out an identical card. “Yes. It serves as a key to the Muse building. All the workers have them.”
“What is the procedure when a worker is fired?”
“Well, they usually deactivate and retrieve the card, but I wasn’t exactly easy to find.”
“Deactivate? You’re sure? They don’t scramble the code?”
“No. I think they’re occasionally re-used.”
“So it’s not a permanent deactivation. May I have that?”
Alice handed it to her.
Diana activated an oddly large computer, almost the size of a football, that lay on her desk. Into its holographic keyboard, she typed L10N3L.
A HPB icon appeared on her screen. “You called?” It was Lionel, only in a more conventional, 2D form.
“Turn this back on.”
Lionel appeared to peer down at it. “Place it against the laser scanner. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll see what I can do.”
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Rosanne- Would you be so kind as to give me a bit of information as to your ancestry? (I don’t need names, dates or places, and furthermore*, I am enough of a MB veteran to know not to ask for them. Just general ethnic background would do.) It would help to make my next Muse fanfiction more realistic**.
I realize that this is a somewhat personal question, so don’t answer if you don’t want to.
*I love “furthermore.” It’s an awesome word.
**Of course, making one of my fanfics “more realistic” using details is, in the famous words of Eoin Colfer, “like trying to mop up the ocean with a tissue.” Yes, I know they’re completely impossible. It’s a perfectionist thing.
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144- does canix think I am now really TMFU?
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149- Yup.
My English teacher would call it “dramatic irony”.
POSOC- *studies writing* How do you DO it? It’s like you use a completely different sentence structure than anyone else does.
I plan to become a studier of writing styles. I will start with POSOC and Pan, since I always notice how different theirs are from everyone else’s.
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I create relatively simple sentences, beef them up with adjectives, and then tack enormous, clunky clauses on all sides with large, emphatic commas.
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151- And you use in ordinary speech the words that I reserve for essays and presentations.
Now I have to look up predicate.
Aha. I see.
OK. I get it now.
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152- I’m like this off the blog too.
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153- You’re one of those people whose mind works really fast, aren’t you? Like, oh look, a problem. Insta-solution!
Are you any good at improv?
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154- I’m very good at improv.
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154 – Good idea. There’s got to be some way we can do improv on MuseBlog.
Whose line is it anyways: MUSEBLOG EDITION!
Cat’s Meow: Hello contestants!
(2 minutes later)
Alice: Hi.
POSOC: Hi.
(2 minutes later)
Cat’s Meow: I’m your host, Cat’s Meow, and welcome to Whose line is it anyways: MUSEBLOG EDITION!
-lots of flashing lights-
Cat’s Meow: (Sorry for the double post) I need a sentence from the audience, please!
(2 minutes later)
Kagy: Sorry, can’t think of anything.
TMFA: Umm…..
(10 minutes later)
RtH: HA! I thought of something! Okay, here’s my sentence: “As they walked down the street you they were suddenly abducted by aliens.”
(2 minutes later)
Cat’s Meow: o.o
Alice: Okay then…
POSOC: Interesting. Now what shall we do?
(10 minutes later)
Cat’s Meow: Oh! Sorry! I had to go eat dinner. Anyways…your starting point is…-drumroll please-
(2 minutes later)
Grant: *starts a drumroll*
(2 minutes later)
Cat’s Meow: Thank you Grant. Anyways, you have to create a scene involving the sentence “As they walked down the street you they were suddenly abducted by aliens.” Begin!
(5 minutes later)
Alice: *pretends to read from a book* Once upon a time there was a girl and her dog Sammy.
(2 minutes later)
POSOC: Sammy and the girl were walking outside, when there were flashing lights spotted up above. “Oh, what a predicament!” the girl declared.
(10 minutes later)
Alice: Sorry, I gotta go. We can finish later!
(5 minutes later)
Cat’s Meow: This didn’t work very well, did it?
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Anyway, whether or not you’re an improv genius is pretty much irrelevant. I now can sort of almost mimic your speaking style (not that I KNOW your speaking style) for the fanfic.
*thinks*
It would probably be better not to try.
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156- *failure* Oh, the pain! It rips at my heart, my life crashes down around my ears!
(Forgive the above. I needed to be dramatic.)
Anyway, I’d already decided that improv on MB wouldn’t work (YES, I considered it), because there would be too much time to think of a response and it wouldn’t be improv at all.
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Improv=somuchfun! Me luves improv.
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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! I didn’t know so many people here liked improv! I suppose I try to update that list of improv games, no?
Actually, I have the list, just not the instructions for them all.
Freeze
One-Minute Die
Questions
Commercial
Clerks
Gibberish
One Two Three
Sitting Standing Bending
Tap Tap Die
Corridors
There and Back Again
Typewriter
Experts
Slideshow
Party Quirks
And those are all the improv games I know.
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although the improv, I thought was pretty funny…
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I know an improv game where you can say one thing, the other person can say two, and you have to insult each other.
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YeaH! Improv!
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There was a beep. Lionel smirked. “I thought that was going to be hard.”
Diana Lutz plucked the card off the scanner and tossed it to Alice. “We’ll get you to the north coast of Australia. Meriwether and Lionel have already made out fake identification for all of you. You’ll go to Sydney Intn’l, and you’ll take a first-class space plane to San Francisco. Then you’ll take the subway to Chicago. Songbird and Spice will explain the rest of the plan to you when you get there.”
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164- The whole thing so far has been very good, keep it up!
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165- It’s tough. I got bored with the story a while ago, but I still have to write their long trip to Chicago, the infiltration of the Muse building, and the final series of frenetic plot twists. Ugggh.
I might just skip the trip and do a “ONE WEEK LATER” thing.
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great. now who’s fanfic do we have coverage of? not PCPOSOC, not alice…
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167- What?
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or I’m really confused since I haven’t seen Alice post a piece of hers since 2 days ago…
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169- Yeah, that would be about right. I’m sorry! But I’m having trouble writing anything.
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what? do you just have trouble with the storyline? need help???
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170- No. It has nothing very little to do with the storyline, it’s more of a general thing. I hate everything I write and I’m too busy to become inspired.
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This is muselover and I’ve FINALLY started capitalizing my posts. (Some people will be happy about that…) Here I go, and thanks for the tips in the the 2007.2 thread for this, Prarilius Canix. I think I will use the Chad/Gimli one.
Koko and Bo got back safely to the other seventeen (minus Feather and Gandalf) and they soon noticed that Feather was missing. (SO SORRY ABOUT NOT EXPANDING ON BO AND KOKOPELLI!!!!!!)
Whoops..am being called downstairs. Check back later!
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I’m back!
They got out, each grieved at Gandalf’s supposed death, and went toward Lorien. The Company went in and found sixteen elf bows pointed at them. Koko poked one of their arrows and said, “Wow, nice fake bow-and-arrow! When you shot, will a stick with a paper hanging down from it saying “SWISH”? The arrow came closer to his head and he grew silent. “What is this strange two dimensional creature?” the elf next to him asked incredulously.
Next, back to Feather in Gondor.
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Also, whoever responds to this post first gets to be in my fanfic! (And I mean this post, right here.)
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175- Responding.
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175- I’ll be in your fanfic.
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175- It’s probably too late, but here’s my response.
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Congratulations, ΡÖŞÎĈ! (Also, sorry to KaiYves and Alice. I may have another slot that you can be in!)
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I guess I’ll be trying to make a fanfic, I’ll post it maybe next month…. Anybody wanna be in it????? I’ll include anybody who asks.
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Feather was trapped. He tried to keep flying, but the people of Gondor threw him into a dungeon. He stayed there for a long time, and after three days, he heard footsteps coming down the stairs. “Who’s there?” he called. “My name is ΡÖŞÎĈ,” he said. “Urania might help me with pronouncing that name,” Feather thought…
There you are! Aren’t you proud to have rescued Feather?
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I wanna be in your fanfic, beatlesrockr!
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180- yes!
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I asked beatlesrockr first, The Man For Aeiou!
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184- but he’ll put anyone who asked. and call me TMFA.
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172-oh, poo. Nuts. Rats. any other sort of clean expletive. such as crap. I want you to keep writing…
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186- Oh, I’ll get back to it eventually. Give me time.
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187-okay. I’ll keep checking back.
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186-Please do not use that “c” word, because in my family it is not as clean. Robert, please replace it with c*** instead, or something like that.
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We GAPAs aren’t crazy about it, either, but MBers seem to be, and we get worn down sometimes. Maybe we should put it to a vote, or at least a discussion.
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189- please do not act like that. I have a pie and I don’t what to throw it!
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189-sorry. it was just something in the list. perhaps you you meant- “seen as clean”?
*awaits Alice’s fanfic*
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*is uncomfortable* Ummm… Okay. Let’s see.
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There was a long and uncomfortable silence. No one could think what to do next. Canix was wondering whether he dared continue his mission in front of two strangers, Gimanator was mulling over Canix’s mysterious comments, and Beavo was trying to remember the events of the morning. Then they all spoke at once.
“I really must be going.”
“Who’s TMFA?”
“I can’t remember anything!”
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New to this thread… I’ll join any story.
KAG Profile:
DO NOT LOOK IF YOU ARE TRYING TO GUESS ME ON THE FROGGY THREAD (guess me… Frog? Nah, me)
Tall for my age (11), mediumish length dark dark dark brown hair, brown-framed glasses, Kokopelli t-shirt, jeans, striped socks , brown eyes, long and thin, ever-changing watch.
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Oh yeah, and female.
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sorry for the “*uncomfortable*”. I just eagerly await the fanfic, an POSOc isn’t here…
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197- Yeah, I understand. I’m not trying to make you feel bad or anything.
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198-well, no… same to you….huh?
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134- i totaly want to coooommmmeee!!!!!!! make me run away form home to help you guys or something. it would make an interesting plot twist with the canadian police also looking for me!
156- i am insane at improv. and modest too! but seriously i am good at it.
160- i hate freeze. i know all the structures for the CIG (canadian improv Games) they’re: life event, story event, theme event, character event and one other that has escaped my mind for now. the CIG is totaly amazing. too bad y’all are american!
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(Note: following sequence may or may not bear uncanny resemblance to The Eternity Code. Caution is advised.)
~
ONE WEEK LATER
The interior of the APTU was dark, noisy and musty, and TMFA’s posterior had been numbed by the countless pockets of turbulence they’d hit on the way from the subway to East Dearborn Street.
“How old is this thing?” Traggle bellowed over the roar of the engine.
“It looks like one of the prototype multi-seaters,” TMFA opined. “2015 at the latest.”
“Quiet back there,” Spice hollered. “This is a manual-only model, and steering it in the Windy City is tough enough without you jabbering.”
Alice stared gloomily down at her shoes. “I look ridiculous.”
“Well, the important part is that you don’t look recognizable,” Songbird said soothingly. “A little makeup and dye, a slouch, tinted contacts and sloppy dress- all are small, insignificant things, but they combine to make up a complete illusion. You look exactly like a janitor.”
“This is completely insane.”
“For heaven’s sake, you’re a MuseBlogger. Insane is good,” the CUBE operative admonished. “All you have to do- ”
“Don’t go through it again. I know perfectly well.”
The vehicle landed with a bump. Alice disembarked and shuffled across to the Muse building.
There was a crackle from the tiny speaker in her ear, which in all respects resembled a hearing aid. “If you can hear me, tap twice.”
Alice tapped on the device.
“Excellent. This is Meriwether. Lionel and I will be advising you throughout the mission. Enter the building now, please.”
Suppressing the butterflies in her stomach, Alice flicked out her card and slid it across the scanner. The doors hissed back into their slots, and she slouched through, pushing a cart in front of her.
“Start mopping the floors in the restrooms. Be unusually thorough- our present objective is to kill time. And look inconspicuous.”
Alice tapped twice on the “hearing aid” to acknowledge the order.
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Ugh, what’s the point? I never did do well with linear writing. The story that seems to be going somewhere only seems that way because I’m writing several points in the middle and the end without finishing the beginning.
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202-*pop* *sigh* oh well.
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203- I’m sorry, Gim. I’ll continue to try, but I find my story lacking in inspiration, or interest, or anything good. Even the writing style sucks. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m not a bad writer, really.
Maybe I should spend more time writing and less time thinking about how hard it is to write. Then I would be better at it.
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time for brainstorming!
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*waits for post for brainstorming time*
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I have gotten the timeline of my alternate history Muse fanfic up to 1815. It will take place around 1825. I just need to fill out the events of ten more years (and finish my previous fanfic, which is almost at the climax), and then I’ll be ready to start brainstorming.
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yaaay. fun fun. do hurry.
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Nine hours later, and Alice’s apprehension and boredom had been increasing exponentially. It was almost a relief to leave off her interminable mopping and descend to the ground floor, where the last clump of overtime workers were straggling out the door.
As they vanished down East Dearborn Street and into subway entrances or private APTUs, Alice moved across the lobby, beneath the statues of the Muses, their shadows wavering in the reflected light from the pool.
A figure passed in front of the window; Alice ducked beneath the statue of Gates, the Muse of Business who had replaced Urania after the Schism. Then a bright pink flare appeared from the person’s outstretched hand. The light winked on and off three times. It was Songbird, giving the agreed-upon signal. Alice emerged from the shadow and crossed to the door, pulling her card-key out of her pocket.
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She slid it into the required slot. A light flashed green, and the doors hissed open.
Spice and Songbird stepped in, dressed in black, their faces set and hard, each carrying a bag of supplies. The other MBers cautiously followed them.
As soon as they reached the center of the lobby, the CUBE agents dug into their bags, pulling out headsets and hologoggles. Alice put one set on; the others had already donned theirs.
There was a click. “Boo!”
Alice jumped as a three-dimensional, hot pink bunny the size of a small ottoman appeared out of thin air and landed on the floor with a soft thump. She knew he was simply an illusion, created by the projection of slightly differing images on her lenses and cunning synchronization of sound effects in her earphones, but it still made her shudder.
Lionel turned, bouncing on the spot. “Let’s move, people. Alice, where’s Tardiff’s office?”
She gestured toward an elevator. “Three hundredth floor.”
The group crossed the lobby at a run, squeezing into the boxlike compartment. Lionel bounded in after them, shrinking conveniently to fit.
TMFA whispered in agitation. “Won’t the use of the elevator show up in their computer logs?”
Lionel smirked. “No.”
Spice removed a small computer interface from her bag and pressed it to the corresponding one on the elevator keypad. Lionel hovered above her head, black zeroes and ones flickering through his pale eyes. “Downloaded and accessed. Wiping records.”
Up and up they flew, growing heavier as the elevator increased in speed. The brakes came on at the 270th floor, bringing them to a gentle stop at the very pinnacle of the Muse office.
The doors whisked open. Spice and Songbird led the way out into the corridor. Lionel bounced next to them, ears flying back, nose angled into the wind. Alice, unable to see, switched on the night-vision filter in her goggles. Everything became an eerie green, with the exception of Lionel, who turned a hideous brown that reminded her of old vomit.
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The door at the end of the hall was large, extravagant and very, very thick, locked with a state-of-the-art security system. Spice pressed Lionel’s interface against the keypad. After several agonizing minutes, a series of thunks came from within the door. Songbird pushed it open, carrying a scanning bar in one hand and a gun in the other.
“Nothing in here,” Lionel snapped. “I’ve hacked into their main computer system and wiped the video discs. People- start searching!”
The Musers hung back at first, but Spice and Songbird lunged forward to the synth-mahogany desk, pulling out drawers and rifling through their contents.
Lionel’s eyes flared white. “I found it! It’s on a storage server buried under the foundations. Beginning download- ”
And then hidden doors all around the office whisked open. Hulking figures burst out of them, and gunfire echoed through the chamber.
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I’m all alone on this thread!
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No you’re not. I’m here. Now, stop complaining and get writing!
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213- I might as well be alone for all the writing (or absence of it) that’s been going on recently, “Spice.”
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You’re not alone. I’m here and following the story eagerly!
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Oh, thank goodness. I’ll write as soon as I can.
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216-to be sure. even the sick and throwing up enjoy reading your story. When they are allowed at the computer.
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Hey! What happened to my post? I said,
“Who want’s to be in my fanfic?”
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218 – Ooh! Pick me! Pick me!
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218- Moi.
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218- I do!
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Ok. Please post a description, or direct me to the post where one can be found. I have to go, so I can’t start writing, but hopefully tommorow.
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The next few minutes were something of a blur for Alice. She remembered being knocked over by a powerful fist, then having her arms hauled behind her back and cuffed to a point three feet above the floor. When her vision cleared, she spent several seconds examining her surroundings.
The room was the epitome of opulence. Crystal chandeliers dangled from the ceiling. Red velvet carpet sprouted from the floor. Potted plants clustered thickly around bookcases filled with priceless original manuscripts. Alice’s eyebrows rose when she saw a miniature gryphon scuttle through the leaves and flap across to the other side of the room. Either I’m hallucinating, or Tardiff’s broken the International Ban on Radical Genetic Modification, she thought. But then, why should I be surprised?
Nine bulky personages stood around the room: six men, two women and at least one android. Each carried a large and very businesslike gun. Craning her neck, Alice could see the other Musers staggering to their feet. Each, like her, was handcuffed to a yard-high pillar of steel which appeared to have extruded itself from the carpet. She thought she could see flaps of cloth where the rug had been pushed aside. The edges were pre-cut. While the pillars were retracted, the thick carpet would conceal the openings.
The Interrogation Circle, Alice thought woozily. And I thought it was just an urban legend.
Her heart rate jumped when she saw the Musers chained directly behind her, on the other side of the circle. Spice and Songbird. Neither was moving. For a second, Alice panicked, realizing that the gunfire had been directed at them. Then Songbird stirred, and Alice relaxed. Of course. They’re wearing Kevlar vests. Standard procedure.
“Confiscate and deactivate all their equipment,” said a voice that everyone in the room recognized: Alice, Beavo and Kiki from countless television shows and news reports; Widdershins, Traggle, TMFA and TNO from Internet articles; and Spice and Songbird, as they stirred into consciousness, from dozens of mission briefs and profiles on the Urania’s Most Wanted list. “Then leave.”
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Oh dear.
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The Meriwether household had a very unusual bookshelf.
There was nothing outright different about it. It did not sprout books and it did not put out roots and most of the books on it were very ordinary fare, a dictionary and thesaurus, Harry Potters 1-6 (number seven was somewhere under Jon’s bed), Encyclopedia Brittanica, and a collection of stories by Washington Irving, among other books. Even the quantity and size of bookshelves in the house was really nothing to get worked up over, and not one of the five Meriwethers would have admitted or even realized that they had an unusual bookshelf.
Indeed, on the day that our story opens, Lia Meriwether was finding the bookshelf exceedingly boring. It seemed to have absolutely nothing she hadn’t read, and so after standing on a chair to look at the top shelf she really had no choice but to go into her parents’ bedroom and squirm under their bed and stare at the socks and shirts and get so much dust in her nose that she wouldn’t stop sneezing for two hours, and then to search her own closet, and, having found no books of interest in either place, to go back and sit on the couch and stare fixedly at the bookshelf as though something more interesting than Nutrition Facts: How to Eat Right would appear if she stared long enough.
And after a few minutes Lia got up off the couch and went into the kitchen and made herself an interesting experimental soup with too much pepper and ignored the bookshelf completely until 9:53 PM, seven minutes before lights out, when she remembered her lack of anything to read.
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At this point she was so desperate that she grabbed the first book that came to hand, raced down the hall, jumped onto her bed and got under the covers and barely had a moment to look at the book before her mother’s hand reached through the door and switched out the light.
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Wow. Interesting.
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Ha. It is a Muse FanFiction, no matter what it looks like right now.
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228- Any teasers?
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229- Not telling.
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218-Me! Me! Me!
Your beginnings never cease to amaze me, Alice.
POSOC, you’re not alone on this thread, I check it almost every day. Keep writing!
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so wait…did Alice restart? Oh well, I’ll be in cinamoon’s fanfic if there’s space. If not, just forget it.
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231- Yeah, my beginnings are great. It’s just afterwards they start to disintegrate.
But thank you.
This one will be different.
I check this thread daily as well. I just don’t say much.
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232- I started another, actually. Starting over didn’t help.
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234- And does the surname have anything to do with the head programmer for Urania in my fanfic (who, in fact, is me)?
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234- What? No. Wait… There is someone named Meriwether in your fanfic! *bursts out laughing* No, no. You don’t even want to hear my thought process for Meriwether…
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237- Yes I do.
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And now, half-asleep in first period math class, Lia reached into her bag and pulled out the small, bedraggled paperback. The front cover was missing, and the cover page. The binding was faded, and the back cover had only a picture of several smiling young men and women. Lia could determine nothing about its plot. She didn’t even know if it was a novel. It could be anything, she supposed, but Lia was a practical, pessimistic girl. “It’s probably a cookbook,” she said quietly, and, hiding it behind her math homework, began to read.
It was not a cookbook. Nor was it a novel. When the bell rang at 9:30, she was unsure of how to classify it, and sat there puzzled.
“I didn’t know you liked math class so much, Lia,” joked her teacher. “You’re usually out of here like a shot when the bell rings. Is something wrong?”
“What? Oh, nothing’s wrong,” Lia assured him, and swept her books into her bag. She stuck the paperback in her pocket and slowly walked to her next class, still thinking.
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237- OK, but bear in mind that I have been raised on the Lewis and Clark trail for the past seven years… My thought process is entirely involuntary…
Common surnames > Clark > Lewis and Clark > Lewis > Meriwether
There it is. Black and white.
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239-right. merry and pippin. fool of a took.
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240- That’s Meriadoc. Completely different.
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Sorry, but how does lewis get to Meriwether?
Okay, I’ll scratch out a beginning.
“Beavo!” Alice hissed, “I can see your hair still!” Beavo sighed, and, grabbing a handful of dirt and leaves, rubbed it into his red mop. Then, at the sound of approaching footsteps, he dropped to the ground beneath the bush by Alice.
“They’re coming,” he breathed.
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242- last/ first name?
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(242) Cinnamoon,
Meriwether Lewis was half of the team of Lewis and Clark, who explored western North America during the Jefferson administration.
He’s a cousin of mine, by the way. Rebecca’s, too, probably.
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Profile:
Miss Swann of the Mystic Isle
Female
DOB: May Twenty Eighth, 96
Short blonde hair with spikes. Pink and turquoise highlights. Wears a generally Tonks garb, with a grey and black striped scarf. Carries canaries; my only weapon ;-]
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Cinnamoon~
4’11”, female, verrry dark brown hair, brown eyes, a little underweight, 11 years of age, generally wears jeans and a shirt of some sort , sometimes a light jacket or sweater, lime green tennis shoes, glasses that are too big for her (yes, speaking in third person here) face, smart-aleck…
I think that should be enough, don’t you?
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241-I arrive at what I want to arrive at, regardless of restrictions. If I want merry to be meriwether, he shall be. For now. because it’s incorrect.
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241-I arrive at what I want to arrive at, regardless of restrictions. If I want merry to be meriwether, he shall be. For now. because it’s incorrect.
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233-Mine aren’t that bad either, but the rest of my story?
Bad.
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244- Ah…
243- Bear in mind that my knowledge of American history extends to: There was the revolutionary war, and then the civil war.
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250- Then you’d never understand the RRR SMAS-TT. Apropos of which, that RRR needs some serious revamping. I love alternate history, but it’s just so caking hard to write…
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Here’s an idea, for someone who lacks a plot:
Mostly Harmless got off to a great start. The United Kingdom fell reasonably smoothly after a prominent Muse writer became prime minister, and the USA followed on its heels with the Muser Party controlling Congress. The Kokonspiracy seemed on track, but there was a rocky road ahead for the comrades-in-pies…
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251- Do what whould be a good AH? Gore wins Bush Vs. Gore
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253- It’s been done.
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Alice and Beavo lay completely still and silent, faces pressed into the soft dust. The pounding, marching footsteps went on for over an hour, and then finally faded away into silence. For another hour, the two musers lay still, not daring to move. Then, at last, Alice sat up. She pulled out binoculars, and peered into the distance.
“Come on Beavo. We’ve heard and seen all that we need to. Kokonilly and POSOC are waiting. And, of course, Gimantor will want our report.”
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254- Drat!
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255-my post was cut off. I said- ‘sweet. I’m an officer. You’ll need a description.
gimanator
Tall. wears shaggy dirty blond hair. might be considered weird due to ‘jack sparrow-like’ tendencies– weird moving around or sometimes apparently strange decisions. Casual and relaxed, but serious about his job.’
so there.
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Ooh yes. Description of me.
Long brown hair, often gets in her way, blue eyes, slightly pointed features. Short, slender.
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When Alice and Beavo finally arrived back at head quarters, it was already dark. Brushing her hair out of her eyes for the umpteenth time, she knocked quietly on the steel door.
“Password,” a metallic voice from the interior said.
“Phthalocyanine blue,” Alice replied. Even though she knew that it was pointless to cry, a tear welled up in her eye anyway. It had been Rebecca’s… No. It was useless to think about it. Rebecca was long gone now. It was only the bloggers left.
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Here’s a description of me for Cinnamoon’s fanfic:
Tall, lean, wearing unbuttoned flannel shirt and small glasses (or possibly a monocle.) Blue-grey eyes. If still a teenager, probably blond hair: if an adult at time of fanfic, probably brown.
Good qualities: Intelligent, compassionate, perceptive.
Bad qualities: Arrogant, impatient, contemptuous. Has tendency to lash out at people when under stress.
Important notes: Casein allergy. Cannot digest milk, cheese or chocolate. In the case of accidental ingestion, will throw up within the hour.
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259-ooh, we get to meet some more people now… reading fanfictions are fun..
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259 – Gripping!
Allergies: Seasonal, cat dander (highly), dog dander (sort of highly), MOSQUITO BITES (I hate those! They swell up like crazy! And itch really, really bad! Not fatal, tho.)
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I’m trying to write a bit every day.
The door swang open silently, and the duo stepped in. The corridor was dark, which was a surprise. There was a light on in a small office at the end of the hall though. Gimantors.
“Odd,” Beavo said, “Gim usually leaves his light off. I can’t remember the last time he had it on.” The pair walked down the corridor to the office.
“Gim?” Alice’s voice came out a little louder than it should have been. She walked into the office. No one was there. A small, ovalish, white object was sitting on the desk. That should have warned her, but it didn’t. It was not until she saw the other side of the egg that she realised what was going on.
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EEK!
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oh great…what’s happening to me… or the egg… egg? hare athon? Oh NOOO! yesh. a little bit a day, that ought to be good. give us something to look forward too. I like that.
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I have about fifty thousand descriptions of myself, I’m sure Cinamoon’s smart enough to find at least one of them.
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I don’t know… my descriptions vary… depending on what kind of character I want… It’s all still part of me… just different.
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265- OH YES! Egg. Like Hareathon. Don’t worry, you and POSOC and KaiYves have escaped. Alice and Beavo however, that’s a different matter.
“Come on! Come on! Pick up, Beev, please! Pick up! Pick up!” POSOC’s pleadings with the micro radio cradled in the palm of his hand were of no use. Only a static crackling emmited from the tiny machine. “No! No! They didn’t… They can’t have!” He hunched further over the speck of metal. KaiYves, watching anxiously, looked up at him. He looked up as well, and, for one brief moment, their eyes met. Both of them knew, although it was unspoken, that they were too late.
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The tension!
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268- Argh! I am slain!
Maybe. Am I slain?
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Rockin’.
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Ooh. somebody needs to save them… Aha! I just can’t wait for me to appear! *twitch* I have to wait for tomorrow. These are so addicting….
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Drat. Must wait for the fanfiction.
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273- I’ll write another installment of mine as soon as I get in the mood. Hopefully sometime today.
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274-Good. I just wrote some on the books in progress page, if you wanna read that while we wait…
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The guards fell upon them with uncanny efficiency, removing their goggles and equipment. Lionel had vanished from view- Alice saw the transmitter that had been strapped to Songbird’s belt, now crushed and trailing wires. They were cut off from Beijing. Nobody knew where they were, except for the one person they wanted to remain hidden from.
As the android took Beavo’s musePod out of his pocket, the voice barked an order. “No! Give that back to him. Get out.”
The guards left through a side door that slid closed with a hiss.
Spice muttered groggily for a moment. “Must be camouflaged behind some dense synthetic… sensors didn’t pick up a thing…”
From behind the desk rose a man whom all of them recognized and dreaded. The man suspected to be responsible for the disappearance of Romana Prokopiw. The CEO and Editor-in-Chief. His Muserliness, the President of the Mostly Harmless Republic, Ronald Tardiff.
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He was tall, sandy-haired and rake-thin, clad in a cream-colored pullover sweater and khaki pants. A faintly apologetic smile hovered on his face. “Greetings, ladies and gentlemen- what a pleasure to have you here! Your musePod, if you please.”
Beavo reached into his pocket, biting his lip.
“Hurry up, man, don’t fiddle around with it!” Tardiff snatched the music player from Beavo’s outstretched hand. He removed a set of speakers from one of the few drawers not upturned and thrown on the floor. “Dear me, what a mess you fellows have made,” he sighed. “It’ll take the bots ages to get the room clean again.”
He placed the speakers on his desk, slid the musePod into a receptacle on the top, then turned it on and scrolled through the songs. “I need something nice and dramatic. Ah. Here’s a good one… ”
A thunderous crescendo of drumrolls erupted from the speaker mesh. “Hmm. Excellent soundtrack. Perfect.”
He turned around to face the dazed circle of Musers in the middle of the room. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to explain the situation to you. I take it you were looking for this?”
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Wow, Cinnamoon, it’s really good! O the suspense!
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277- He does seem like if a muser was evil.
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279- Thank you. That’s precisely what I intended him to be like.
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A screen on the wall lit up, depicting a complex pattern of dark blue lines and murky yellow-brown shapes. Tardiff pulled a small remote out of his back pocket and pressed a few keys. The lines vanished, and a map of the Northern Hemisphere leaped into focus. Alice recognized it as the one that Kiki had stolen.
Tardiff entered another short sequence, and a white bar appeared at the top of the image. It slowly began to fill with red. TRANSLATING...
Then it beeped, and the multiple Middle English labels that dotted it transformed into something far more easily comprehensible.
Beavo swore. “Good Lord. It’s an invasion plan.”
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How long is this going to be? rough estimet of number of posts left.
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282- Well, the rest of it’s plotted out, but I’m not sure how much detail I’m going to go into about the havoc ********* (censored because of spoilers) wreaks, or how long the epilogue’s going to be Why do you ask?
~
“Precisely!” Tardiff beamed. “Give that man some virtual choklit! But it doesn’t stop there. Oh, no. Allow me to explain.”
“You already said that,” TNÖ muttered under her breath.
“The first thing to do was to remove the GAPAs’ most trusted allies. I thought and thought on that particular point for days, but when Alice and her friends came in for their little tour, it came to me in a flash. I encoded the invasion plan in such a way that only the Administrators would be able to decipher it, and gave a junior editor instructions to very carelessly leave it behind where you were sure to find it. The police almost ruined it by capturing you- like a fool, I forgot to deactivate the alarm- but they managed to crash, and you got away. I knew that Robert would be sure to contact dear old Diana Lutz about the problem, and when I heard about her plans from certain spies, I began to make preparations for your arrival. As I suspected, they sent the MuseBloggers they trusted most. These- or, indeed, you- were also the most respected and admired. With you gone, Icelanders would have no-one to rally around, and no way to organize a defense when the GAPAs were captured.”
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Dang it! I’ve played right into his cursed hands!
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Cinamoon- *gulp*
POSOC- Good Lord? Wow, the future me has a really strange choice of language.
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285- I edited out the rather stronger term which preceded it.
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Go to Venus, Tardiff!
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283- becuase I don’t want it to end!
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287- Mwahahaha…
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I posted on Thursday, but the weirdness swallowed it. Here we are. Three days worth, hopefully.
Gimantor walked up the dirt walled corridor. He reached the end, and walked back down towards where POSOC stood.
“Well?”
“We have to go in. We can’t just leave Beavo and Alice.”
“Can we afford to?”
“We can’t afford not too. The numbers of Musebloggers left on earth is shrinking rapidly. There’s the three of us, Alice, Beavo, possibly Kokonilly – I’m unsure there – and maybe a few others. We have to get them.”
“Are our weapons stocked?”
“Not really.”
“Do we have a decent oven here?”
“No.”
“What are our assets?”
“Assets?”
I shall return.
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I’m back.
“Our maps and plans?”
“We have maps and plans?”
“Our strategy?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Well, nothing we haven’t done before. Call KaiYves.”
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Oh… Cinnamoon, you’re amazing…
I wonder if maybe Gim saw my writing in the same light that I see others’.
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289- Somebody got that joke! Yay!
Because Venus is always compared to…
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293- I don’t know. The only place I got was Venus = Aphrodite = probably called a muse at some time = Muse or Urania? and Venus = planet = astronomy = Urania
Yes. I am probably wrong in many ways.
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293- Of course.
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ARGH!!!! *dies* Someone tell me if I’m right or not!
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It’s an inferior planet, sometimes called “morning star” and “evening star.” It has a lot of craters, it’s the only planet named after a female. A long time ago it was known as the “wandering star.”
La la la la – AHA!
I believe I understand.
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“Even now,” Tardiff continued, “military space planes are landing all over Greenland and deploying my troops for the final invasion of Iceland. By dawn tomorrow, Reykjavik will be under siege. The Administrators, deluded pacifists that they are, haven’t really bothered to set up much of an army. Iceland in its entirety, from London to Seydisfjördur to Helsinki, will be in my hands by sunset. And then- ”
He tapped a few more buttons on the remote, and the image changed.
Traggle gasped in outrage. “Cruise missile launching stations? I’d call you an animal, Tardiff, but I’ve known animals with more of a conscience than you.”
“Oh, shut up, lady. I won’t actually launch them unless Diana Lutz refuses to surrender. Which I don’t think is very likely. You see, Urania has so many orbital defense systems that trying to hit it with ballistic missiles is like dropping a tennis ball on steel netting. You can’t get through. But cruise missiles- they fly lower, and if they’re launched from somewhere within range- Reykjavik, for instance- ” He mimed an explosion. “Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam… she’ll listen to my demands, all right. She cares about her people. A good leader.”
“You’re sick, Tardiff!” TMFA yelled. “These are millions of people you’re talking about murdering!”
“Stop it, man! There’s virtually no chance that I’ll actually be forced to do it. It’s just a sort of bargaining counter.”
“Nobody’s forcing you, you scumbag!” Kiki screamed.
Alice cleared her throat. “Tardiff. You want to rule the world, don’t you?”
“Of course! Don’t look so scandalized! You plotted on the MuseBlog for years!”
“The Kokonspiracy was a peaceful coup. Like what they did in Urania and Iceland- that followed the original plan. Muse was the only one that accomplished it through war, under your command.”
“And now I’m finishing what I started! Muse will rule the world! That’s what you all wanted.”
“Yes. We wanted Muse to rule the world.” Alice staggered to her feet, looking Tardiff in the eye. “We didn’t want you to rule the world.”
Tardiff’s eyes narrowed, and a vein pulsed in his neck. “I am Muse!!”
“No, Tardiff. You are not Muse.” Alice was shaking, but she didn’t stop. “Musery is not a corporation. It’s an ideal. It’s creativity. It’s innovation. It’s invention. But more than that- it’s those things used for the greater good.
You think you’ve crushed Musery. It’s true you’ve crushed Muse’s integrity and everything it ever stood for. But you will never be able to destroy Musery. No one has, no one can, and no one ever will.”
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Ooh…
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The most shocking plot twist in the history of Muse Fanfiction is soon to be unveiled.
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300- I have my own secret suspicions, judging from your previous writings and such. I’ll see if it has any truth in it.
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301- You’re about to find out.
“Destroy Musery?” Tardiff said softly. He stayed silent for a few moments, a muscle twitching below his left eye. “In a few weeks I will be Musery!” he suddenly roared. “But I see you’re not convinced, oh no. Well, that’ll change.”
Wearing a manic grin, he leaped behind his desk and pulled a large lever. The soundtrack cut out, and a voice resounded from the speakers in its place. “Verbal command activated.”
“Authorization Tardiff R. Top-level command.”
“Secondary identity confirmation, please.”
Tardiff irritably flicked up a thin panel on the surface of the desk and pressed his thumb into the gel beneath.
“Identity confirmed. Standing by.”
Tardiff smiled. “Open Pandora’s Box.”
((More later…)
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297- Venus has an average surface temperature of 55 degrees F (13 degrees C), and if you stood on the surface, you’d be feeling 1,323 pounds per square inch of pressure on your body. Plus, there’s the sufuric acid atmosphere.
Understandably, it’s often compared to the Judeo-Christain Hell.
So, “Go to Venus!” is a space nerd swear.
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303- I gathered that it meant roughly that, but I was going on a slightly different tack…
Venus used to be called the Morning Star and Evening Star, which in turn became Hesperus and Phosphorous, or Vesper and Lucifer. Lucifer is the devil, as everyone knows, so it takes a bit of stretching, but it works.
Your explanation makes more sense, though. I just need to hang out with space nerds a bit more.
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Hmm…
That’s what I thought, although I didn’t have all the statistics on Venus.
I’m going to go around for the rest of the week telling people to go to Venus. This should be fun!
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Oh Phobos, Pandora’s Box! Nothing called Pandora’s Box can be good! That’s the ancient Greek thing that unleashed chaos upon the world!
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306- I assume “Oh, Phobos!” is another space nerd swear?
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((quickly points out that Pandora’s Box also released hope into the world, and with out pandora’s box, the world would be bleak and empty.) *leaves*)
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307- Whether it is or not, I’m going to use it as one.
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I like “Go to Venus” much better, thank you very much.
*agrees with Vixen but mentions that it had a harder time with the second of the two*
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292-oh only perhaps.
Ah… finally cinamoon’s fanfic showed up. Good. Stupid weirdness. Somehow I feel our muser team is a little dysfunctional, but… It looks like we’re going to make it.
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I’m kinda stuck right now, but I’ll attempt to keep writing.
Alice and Beavo sat in a small room, shaped as the inside of a sphere. The walls were glistening metal, and there appeared to be no door. They had no idea what was going on outside, as the walls blocked all sound. Perhaps it was better that they didn’t know what was happening.
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307- Yes, it’s a moon of Mars.
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After this is done, ΡÖŞÎĈ , are you going to finish muse: omega?
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I might, but I’ve been planning a really fun AH Muse fanfic which I want to get started on.
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315- the one with be Franklin?
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316- Precisely.
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*sigh* ANYWAY, forget my past attempts at fanfiction, including the most recent one. I am starting afresh. Completely. Anyone who wants to be in it, say so. If they’d like to give a description of themselves IN FIFTEEN YEARS, that would be helpful. Thanks.
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318 – Sure. In the future…I would be a 27-year-old small woman with brown curly hair and glasses. I would probably wear skirts and put at least part of my hair up. I would be beginning a profession as a research chemist, physicist, mathematician (probably logician), or maybe computer scientist.
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318- age: 27
Hair: Brown
other facts: Rich from screenwriting and noveling. has mustache.
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P.S. If there’s any part of your body that you really wouldn’t mind losing or if you’d like a robotic arm/eye/leg/hand/toe/etc. go ahead and say so. The MBers haven’t had it easy the past eleven years, which, as a matter of fact, is the entire point of this story.
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Okay, Alice.
Age 26, black hair, big brown eyes, nearly blind, really thick glasses, a little bit arrogant, a limp, very respected chemist, well-known math geek and chess player, designs video games and writes novels in spare time. Oh, and to avoid the awkward assumptions, female.
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318- Thirty years old, short brown hair. Wears glasses or may have gotten corrective surgery. An archeologist who has written a few moderately sucessful mystery stories for children.
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All right. I still want more people to put in, but I’m going to start writing now.
——–
Lena curled up into a tighter ball, pulling the blankets close. In her dreams, a group of people gathered around her, breathing icy air onto her neck. “Stop it,” she mumbled.
“By Kokopelli, it’s cold,” said one of the dream people.
Lena rolled over, and her blanket slid off. The cold air was shocking, and she woke.
At first she thought she was still dreaming. Four people stood outside her window, which was open, letting in the biting December air. One of them held a flashlight, and they all wore thick clothes.
“Ah!” cried one. “She’s awake.”
Lena stared. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” said another. This figure wore a long skirt and a plaid scarf.
“Why are you here?” asked Lena, still in a whisper.
The mustached man rubbed his forehead. “That’s a very long story. And a painful one. We’d rather not tell it right now.”
“What do you want?” Lena’s voice rose with fear.
“We want you, Lena Grady. More than that. We need you.”
“How do you know my name? Are you stalkers or something?”
One of them almost laughed, but it turned into something like a sob instead. “Stalkers! Kokopelli, but it’s been a long time since I heard that word!”
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OK. Myself in fifteen years. I’m going to have fun with this one.
~
Physical description: ΡÖŞÎĈ is 28 going on 29, but he looks like a man of forty. His hair is brown and rumpled, with a bit of silver at the temples. His face is pale. He’s six feet tall and extremely thin, and in dim light one might almost mistake him for a skeleton. He lost his left eye in a skirmish with the antagonists of the story. He had surgery three times, but the first two tissue transplants were rejected, and the area around his socket is seamed with scars. The transplant which finally took is brown and deeply sunken. His natural eye is blue-gray and lively. He dresses mainly in subdued autumn colors and faded jeans (his socks are usually mismatched), but they’re concealed by the trenchcoat which he often wears. It’s tan with a plaid flannel lining, and it has several deep pockets which contain interesting things, including but not limited to the following
One Treo
Innumerable pencils
Two pencil sharpeners
A middling amount of Japanese, European, Canadian and American money
One German-English dictionary
One flashlight
Two live rats named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Rosie and Sternie)
A small package of rat food
An e-book viewer
A pair of glasses
Mental description: He talks eloquently and frequently. He will talk to anyone in his general vicinity, and if nobody’s around, he will talk to his rats, whom he’s very attached to. He is cynical and sarcastic most of the time, but those who know him well know that he really has a soft heart. He is extremely intelligent and a bit self-centered at times.
Other notes: Little is known about his past. He went to college at UC Berkeley, and has traveled up and down the Pacific coast from Anchorage to Acapulco. He wrote several books, but they were all under a nom de plume, and only his closest friends know which ones they were.
~
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Oh ok, I fear that this fanfiction will also die, but what the hey, it sounds to cool to pass up.
~
Gimanator- 29 years old. Brown hair with thin beard, eyes constantly have bags under them, and he always seems solemn and tired. Has had one arm replaced mechanically with thin wire since his original had to be replaced because of an explosion…that likely relates to the antagonists as well. He doesn’t care what he wears, really, as long as he’s warm… so… always wears thick snow jacket no matter the weather. A nickname of his was ‘lizard blood’ because of the jacket tendancy(I’m making stuff up now.) Uhhh… accepts other people, and therefore has no prejudice or grudge against anybody, unless they make a point for him to have one(again, most likely the antagonists). Fascinated and calmed by the ocean… (wow, I really got off track, so I ought to stop now…)
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321- Give me replacement hands. No one knows I have them, But they let me write fast.
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There was a hissing noise, and the entire wall behind Tardiff’s desk split in two along a cunningly concealed seam. Cloudy blue light shone through the crack.
“This is really a triumph for the genetics department,” Tardiff boasted. “A few of them could easily be found and br… reindoctrinated, shall we say. Others were slightly harder, but they could be accomplished through grafting. A couple of them had to be grown from embryos, but the development rate is much faster than normal. The real trick was the volume of the braincases… that was solved once they increased the proportionate size. I’m proud to say that only one of them required robotics, and it was easy to program. Nothing on all the education we had to do for the others… But it was worth it in the end.”
The wall slid aside completely, revealing a compartment right out of a science fiction movie. Arranged in a row along the far wall were several tanks of cloudy fluid, wires and tubes trailing from them. Dim forms drifted within the tanks, masks strapped to their faces. Alice’s eyes jumped from one to the next. Details were hard to make out with the liquid blocking her view, but on occasion a limb or face would brush against the side of the tank. A pale-skinned woman with lank blond hair. A long-nosed, dark-skinned man… or was it a woman? And as she looked farther along the row, the forms grew steadily more improbable and… familiar.
Beavo’s hoarse whisper suddenly cut through the awed silence. “You have got to be #@(%!^& kidding me!“
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328- Pwt is the “A long-nosed, dark-skinned man… or was it a woman”. and Mimi’s “A pale-skinned woman with lank blond hair.”
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No comment- might write more tonight- might write more tomorrow- if not tomorrow, you’ll have to wait until Friday. Sorry.
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326- You have such little faith in me?
325,326,327- Thanks. I’ll be back.
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KaiYves was much more sceptical of the plan than Gimantor. Her hair flew around her faces as she pointed out all the flaws in their roughly sketched plan.
“So, are we just going to go up to the bu… I mean, THEIR fort and knock on the door?”
“No, but…”
“Look, we need a better plan. We don’t even know if they’re at the fort!”
“I see your point. Well, we’ll leave it to you to find out.” KaiYves rolled her eyes.
“Men!” she muttered.
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Oh, dear. I’m not sure if my other comment went through. And if it didn’t, I can’t continue.
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Bye! I’ll be back on Friday.
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334- Wait, where are you going?
See you on Friday, maybe!
———–
“Are you stalkers, then?” asked Lena. She was still frightened, but the initial shock was wearing off.
There was a pause. Then the mustached man spoke. “Not as such. We only…er…follow a select few.”
Lena’s eyes widened. “And…I’m one?”
“Yes.”
“But why?” The idea that, for who-knows-how-long, she had been watched and followed by a band of complete strangers was surprisingly acceptable. The entire night had a surreal quality, the cold wind in her curtains, the four silhouetted figures, herself, sitting on her bed in a little pool of flashlight glow. None of it could possibly be real. It was the stuff of dreams.
“Yes, why. That is the question. Trouble is, it’s tied into the long story I mentioned earlier.”
“We’ll have to tell her. How would you feel if a bunch of people woke you up at this unholy hour and told you they’d been following you for the past ten or eleven years?”
“Confused,” put in the flashlight bearer.
“At any rate, we ought to introduce ourselves,” said one of the women. “Lena, I’m speller73.”
“KaiYves.”
“Kokonilly.”
“TMFA,” said the mustached man.
“What kind of names are those, anyway?” asked Lena. “They don’t sound normal.”
“They’re screen names,” said Kokonilly.
“What’s a screen name?”
“Oh, I forgot. You’re post-holowebs, aren’t you? Before the holowebs they had computers, which actually had screens instead of projected images. A screen name was an alias you used on the computer.”
Lena had never used the holowebs. Only the very rich used them anymore, and the hologram manufacturers were closing down. It was all anybody ever talked about anymore. But Lena had more pressing things to say than this. “So those aren’t actually your real names?”
“They’re our real names now,” said KaiYves.
Lena nodded. “OK. You still haven’t explained why you’re here.”
“We want you to come with us,” speller73 said.
All Lena’s fear came rushing back. “WHAT? Leave! Now!”
“Calm down, Lena.”
“I won’t! And I won’t go with you! I’ll call Mom!” She took a deep breath to yell.
“No! Lena, let us explain!
“You haven’t explained anything!”
“There are others who can explain it better, that’s all.”
“Well, they aren’t here, and I’m not going to them. And if you’re not going to explain, just leave.”
TMFA stepped forward. “If we tell you,” he said solemnly, “you must keep it an absolute secret. If you choose not to come with us, then you can never tell anyone about this night. Do you swear?”
A moment’s hesitation as Lena took in the gravity of it all. The strangers’ faces grew grim and sad. Was she really so important to them?
She let the blankets slide off her shoulders and walked to the window. “All right,” she said. “I swear.”
—–
And with that little cliffhanger, my friends, I will leave you.
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328- In the immortal words of Spider-Man “I really hate clones.”
Gen-Engineered Muses! That is just wrong!
If I meant it before, I really mean it now.
Go to Venus, Tardiff! And don’t bother lasting twenty minutes like the Russian probes did.
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Alice- In fifteen years? *brain explodes* Uh… *gets out calculator*
I’d be twenty seven. Okay. Here goes…
Beavo’s one of the MBers who got off at least a bit easier than the others, and leads a double life. His dream job as an actor was shattered when his identity as a Muser was discovered, and he now lives in hididng, under the assumed identity of Spencer Mason. And now, I can’t see what I’m tyuping, so hold on while I post and refresh.
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{Yeah, GAPAs, please ZAP the previous post.}
All right, I continue.
Spencer moved from LA to Charlottesville, where he works as a writer for the local newspaper. He tries to insert Muserly ideas as much as he can without blowing his cover. He lost both hands when he escaped LA, the [insert antagonist gang or something] aren’t very forgiving. He now has longish hair, died black and straightened. He wears false black glasses. Beavo and Spencer dress alike, though, both wear long sleeve T-Shirts with dark jeans. Both also enjoy the same types of music. Pale, known to blend in with walls. Dark brown eyes tinted black.Writes depressing poetry as well as stories for the paper.
I still can’t see what I’m writing. Apologies for the mistakes.
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Alice, all of your FanFics are awesome! I can’t write that well…
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339- Why thank you. I’m rather pleased with this one too, so far.
I’m very happy about the way my writing style has been going lately and having brought back, for a very short time, my Terraformed style, I have no desire to ever go back. I’m DONE with explaining all the character’s thoughts and opinions. I’m just going to let it show through the dialogue, and if it doesn’t, well, that’ll change eventually.
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I do wish I was a little better at description, what whatever. I’m working on it.
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I think I’ll write on over the summer.
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KaiYves hurried to the oh-so-basic computer in the corner of the room. She typed in a password, and, as she waited, her thoughts drifted back to the one thing she wanted to forget. She fought, but the names floated into her mind, unbidden. Rebecca Lasley… Robert Coontz…. Rosanne Spector….Paul Baker….Kokonilly, most probably….Miss Swann….Cinnamoon….
No. She had to stop thinking about them. They were all dead now. All of them. She couldn’t waste valuably time lamenting them.
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340-hmm. really? I have found that all my stories needed lengthening . I have remedied that, but maybe not completely…
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344- Oh yes, I quite agree. But my first drafts have been lovely nonetheless.
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Because there First drafts.
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343 – I probably died??? *weeps and laments Kokonilly’s death*
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347-but only probably!
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348 – True… always be positive! *sniffle*
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349- Don’t worry… You’re alive in mine!
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OK, I’m back.
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“Now do you see the genius of this plan? I will forever be remembered as the man who brought the Muses to life!” Tardiff gloated. “And they will obey me and my successors forever. They’re not strictly immortal, but if one perishes, another can be cloned, and will be raised in an identical environment. I will be worshipped by Musers the world over for centuries after my deeds today have become half-forgotten legends.”
He glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which, I’ve got to leave you. No, scratch that, it’s more vice versa. You’ve got to leave me.”
With that, he pulled a small pistol from his pocket and deliberately loaded it one chamber at a time.
Beavo clenched his teeth. He’d hoped to save his ace in the hole a little longer, but if he didn’t, they’d all die.
“Hey, Tardiff!” he yelled. “You like the musePods they’re making nowadays?”
Tardiff stopped, glancing at him in puzzlement. “Yes. Why?”
“I think they’re really cool, especially the ones with the internet access and video capabilities…”
Tardiff’s eyes went wide, and the blood drained from his face as the penny dropped.
“NO!!” he howled. He spun around and blasted away at the musePod perched innocently between his speakers. The top half seemed to disintegrate beneath the bombardment. Wires trailed from the shattered casing, and the scroll wheel hung on only by a few threads.
“Too late,” Beavo said, keeping up an air of bravado despite the fact that he’d never been more terrified in his life. “The video of your little speech has already been uploaded to uTube and MuseVids, as well as DL’s central command. Urania’s probably at DefCon One now, don’t you think? Terpsichore’s probably already heading for Lake Michigan… ”
Beavo was cut off by Tardiff’s foot driving into his stomach. He fell to his knees, gasping for air, and felt the pistol butt smash into his nose. Blood trickled down his face and dripped off his chin.
Tardiff loaded a single bullet into the gun. “I’m sick of you,” he said, and took aim.
That was when Kiki the Great kicked him in the groin. Beavo derived savage satisfaction from the sight of Muse’s CEO gasping in agony and sinking to the ground.
Tardiff staggered to his feet and wildly fired the pistol at his antagonist, but his aim was off, possibly because of the amount of pain he was experiencing, and he missed his target.
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Battle!
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352-
Crowd: Ooh! Ah!
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Oooh. OWWWCH. Poor Tardiff dearie, I guess that’s the end of his family jewels. You go, Kiki!
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355- *cracks up* I can’t wait until Kiki reads this part.
About three more posts to go until my story is done.
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“Very well.
“Way back in the ’90s, all the way up till about 2013, there was a magazine called Muse. This magazine was read by many smart and curious young people, and eventually a man named Robert Coontz got around to making a website for these people to gather on and discuss varied topics. These people were extremely ambitious, and in 2012 – the year you were born, Lena – they initiated their plan, which they called Mostly Harmless.
“For a short while, everything was good. The plan was going smoothly. But then – a MuseBlogger -”
“What’s a MuseBlogger?”
“Oh! The website that Robert made was called MuseBlog. At any rate, a MuseBlogger, a relatively new one, March 2010 I think, betrayed us. He didn’t understand Mostly Harmless, and was frightened. So he betrayed us.” TMFA’s face fell, and KaiYves muttered “Phobos!” under her breath.
“In the December of 2012, the last day as a matter of fact, that traitor blogger disappeared. It was as if he had never existed. Except, of course, for the damage he had done. The MuseBloggers were forced into hiding.”
“What was his name? The traitor, I mean.”
“I can’t remember. I don’t even want to remember.”
“But I still don’t see what I have to do with this,” said Lena.
There was a stiff and awkward silence. The curtains swayed in the breeze. The flashlight switched off.
There was no moon, and suddenly Lena was terribly afraid, of the dark, of traitors, of these strange people outside her window. She slammed shut the window and locked it, leaped into her bed, and covered her head with the blankets.
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357 – This is really good. It feels like I’m trying to kidnap the girl.
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352-
Smile for the camera, spam-brained supervillian-wanna-be!
357- I agree with speller73. Very good.
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Wow, this thread is getting long. Time for a new one, wouldn’t you say?
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