It was not too long after a stray train of thought had dumped Skip into a Starbooks that had poofed into existence at the time, which now seemed a faint memory of quite a long time ago.  The setting didn't seem to help whatever he was supposed to be doing, and neither did Mr. Flick (he knew his name somehow, whether he himself just poofed into existence or not), when he barged in the coffee shop with the most depressingly optimistic expression Skip had ever encountered in his brief life since that morning (and especially on Mr. Flick, who very well could have not existed before that moment anyway).  Or, maybe his current train of thought was just a bad contrived segwey to bridge two abysmally unrelated frwoa fragments together.  (Skip mentally noted that a flash forward might be the ultimate excuse for a lack of writing anything in the middle, especially in nonlinear fiction).
              Time would tell.
              "I have something you're going to like, Skip."
              "What is it, a Mr. Plot Generator?  If it's anything but an industrial sized Mr. Plot Generator, you can bring it right back to the department store where you got it and get a refund.  I hope you kept the reciept if it's anything but a professional grade Mr. Plot Generator, because otherwise it's going straight into my new recycling bin I recently thought up for any non-Mr.Industrial Professional Grade Mr. Plot Generator surprise gifts anyone ever happens to bring me in the next few billion years or so.  I figure out of all the gifts anyone will ever get me over the time it takes me to actually generate a plot myself, there'll probably be enough raw material in them to make *several* Mr. Plot Generators, and if I'm lucky, a couple microscopic races of Mr.Plot-Generator generator amoebas who know how to make one.  Maybe it will be a race toward who can generate a plot first--me or the generated Mr. Plot Generator, once the Mr. Plot Generator generators generate it--but at least I'll have double the chances of eventually getting one!  So what have you for me, a Mr. Plot Generator, or a box of syphilis?"
              An avid Starbooks customer who Skip had long named a Starbooksian looked over and frowned at Skip's sudden deterence from quiet focused writer's block to irritating disturbance of the local silence.  For the past hour, Skip's setting had been fluccuating between a Starbooks, a bookstore with a Starbooks in it, and a tree he'd climbed in a local park just outside a large Starbooks corporate office.  He figured the relaxed layed-back setting of an overly expensive chain-store cafe flooded with beatnik lemmings would be the best place to spark originality.  It had worked up to the point of brainstorming the idea of cafes, chain franchises, beatniks, and lemmings, but had hit a brick wall as soon as he had the setting down enough to take a seat and start not writing.
              He finally decided that the whole process of thinking up a fad beatnik-lemming setting was ultimately just a distraction from his lack of writing to begin with.  Hence it was so poor a writer's setting that it had sucked away his originality before he'd even thought the place up.  Given this event, he'd thought about brainstorming a more thorough and formulated machine for this purpose--perhaps a two-in-one Mr. Plot Generator / Mr. Time Machine that would warp itself back in time as soon as the raw materials for it had been harvested from his recycling bin and the thing was finally thought into existence, saving anybody the trouble of building it--but the buckets of expresso he'd need before the blueprints were actualized would probably land him in a grand mal seizure, max out the credit cards he'd have to think up to pay for them, or just plain piss off the otherwise canarily friendly Starbookstaffians when he'd failed to relinquish his cumfy chair well after closing.
              "Better than both!"  Mr. Flick chucked some sort of vifa metal contraption at him with surprising power for sixty year old fat man who sits in a chair all day editing stories by and of people more dexterous.
              "What the hell is this?  A padlock?"
              "A *note*pad lock!  I was going through your sporadic plethora of haphazard pages and I realized you hadn't actually completed a single chapter--"
               "Unfortunately, one of the first niches I thought to write about was abnormal psychology and Attention Deficit Disorder, and I think it was contagious.  For all I know this *is* the second chapter; or at least a completely random one..."
               "--And I thought, what frenzied, fervent progress we might make if by some freak mutation of the evolution of current day idea for man, you were to have developed the ability to actually finish a chapter of your novel!  So instead, I thought up this!"  He victoriously held the thing as high as he could without looking ridiculous, then frowned confused as he realized he couldn't possibly be holding it after he'd tossed it to Skip.  Its previous and current position both phased in and out of reality for a moment, as if the lock--or the physical space around it--was deciding whether an object could be in two places at the same time, and if it couldn't, where exactly the notepad lock was in that case.  Hence Mr. Flick decided it made sense to place the lock on the arm of the cumfy chair, at a point roughly inbetween the two previous positions.  The lock (or the vifa frwoa space around it) seemed to shrug, solidify it there, and take a quick mental note that something odd had just occured for future reference.  The starbooksian seemed frustrated that the only way Skip had managed to shut up for a moment was for his visitor and the space around them both to become animated instead.  He sighed, and comitted to a more intense focus on making the paragraphs of his novel form into more coherent and absorbing prose.
    Now Skip still wasn't quite clear on the concept of sarcasm, and was entirely sure whether Mr. Flick was engaging in it or not in his apparent excitement of Skip's work.  In light of his tiring lack of fictional conflict, he decided sarcasm would be a more productive interaction.
               "What a non-condescending epiphany for a retired bland-brained publisher who's never written a page of *anything* over the course of his life in the most potential-saturated Age for doing so.  I shake with anticipation to discover in what way the scrap of metal this man thought up will aid the creativity of my pulitzer-worthy brain."  Skip placed the padlock on the arm of the chair and resumed staring blankly at the notepad in front of him, who--unlike Mr. Flick--simply shrugged off the fact that he couldn't have done so after the thing was already there.
               Since Mr. Flick clearly had less of a conception of sarcasm than even Skip, and was too tired to notice the second ID space discrepency, he simply gave a slight frown at not being sure if something that had just happened had not made sense, or he'd just been too dense to pick up on something that had.  To remedy his failure to pick up the event, he decided to pick up the lock instead, because clearly his creation *did*  make sense to him and thought it likely that Skip was too dense to pick up on *that*.  He decided the latter confusion stemmed from the former, and mentally minimalized his failure in the situation to not estimating Skip's brain density precisely enough.
               "This writer's pad lock, will prevent you from writing anything else until you finish whatever chapter you're working on at the time you lock it in place!  It has no other key, no other combination.  You can do anything else you like; you can get up from your seat, or eat a sandwich, or take a nap, or plan a vacation to Fiji.  But for the rest of your existence, whenever you sit down to write, you'll be able to work on nothing else until you finish your designated chapter.  Isn't it clever?  I really think it should help you."
               Skip now felt guiltly at insulting his publisher given he'd taken the trouble to attempt to do something nice for him.  Skip was quite curious now if Mr. Flick had succeeded, and took the metal lock that he handed back to him, both of them now completely oblivious to the fact that Mr. Flick hadn't picked it up from the arm of the chair.
               "It really works?"  Mr. Flick handed Skip a few pages of something he'd written.
               "Look, I used it myself!"
               "'Unlocking the Secret of Writer's Pad Locks: What Writer's Bricklayers Don't Want You To Know.'"
               "I couldn't think of anything fictional to write, but I managed to write an entire article on its invention without even getting up once from my seat."
               "How does it work?"
               "I can't tell you yet."  Mr. Flick snatched back the paper before Skip had had a chance to thumb through it.  "But I can tell you it works!  It most definitely works.  I can honestly say with complete conviction that the placebo effect isn't the slightest factor as far as the writer's pad lock goes.  It didn't even enter my mind, so I don't even know how or why I'm even bringing the placebo effect up.  Take my word for it, I hadn't the slightest intention--subconsciously or otherwise--to approach you with a completely bullshit explanation of this writer's pad lock in the hopes your very desperation would delude it into realization!"  Mr. Flick was now nervously tapping the stapled sheets of papers he'd brought and Skip was beginning to get the feeling they were likely completely blank.
               "Alright, I'll give it a shot.  Thank you for the thought, and for your placeboless invention if it happens to work."  Skip picked up the padlock with an aura of anticipation and mock-melodramatically clicked it shut.
               "Excellent!  I'll leave you to your writing, then."
               The annoyed starbooksian's expression showed his concentration in imagining the book he was reading had failed, and he'd been getting his only entertainment for the last minute by listening to Skip and Mr. Flick in the dramatic suspense of when the hell they were both going to shut up, and now sat on the edge of his seat at the exciting conclusion that Mr. Flick's declaration had foreshadowed.  Mr. Flick in turn glanced quickly at the fellow with a second expression of possibly having missed being insulted in some way, and left for the bookstore exit, where the Starbooks cafe happened to be at the moment.  The beatnik gave a contented sigh as if exiting the theatre of his favorite movie, and resumed trying to imagine what his book was about.

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