It was the fourth word of the very first line of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of Skip's short life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between the dawn of the dawn of time and seven o'clock Monday morning.    Nobody anywhere had any memory of anything before it, for many reasons.  Firstly, nobody existed, and neither did anywhere.  There was no what, at a time when there was no when, and no one new why.  Had they known, they also might have wondered how any of this was so, if how itself not been completely off the day's planner to theorize about or even guess at.  Had it been, Skip might have written why, if he'd not been cursed since the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of his short life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between the dawn of the dawn of time and 7:01 Monday morning... with the mind manglingliest case of writer's block anyone would ever have.  Like, ever.     If Skip had had a job (if he'd existed at all), his job (had he known about it) would have had been to write the very first frwoa of the 9 X 10 to the unknownth nanit progression of the known univierse, which at the time Skip would have existed if he and time had, had not yet been named.  Naming the known universe, in fact would have had been the greatest thing that Skip ever would have had done, had he had bothered.  Had he had had, it also would have had been remembered as the most significant historical naming of the known universe, in the history of the known universe, soon to be known as Okuaka.  It also would have had been the most infamous naming of Okuaka in the history of Okuaka, since it would have had been the only one in it.     "Okuaka!"  Skip exclaimed.  "Only Known Universe Anyone Knows About!  That's what I would have just now named Okuaka if I had existed just a moment ago."  Since this was the first thing that Skip--or any writer of any sort for that matter--had ever said, he was immediately  hit with a sledge hammer rush of infinite mixed nostalgia and regret just after he'd said it.  Or thought it, or whatever.  He wasn't really quite sure what had happened.  He just supposed that there were probably a billion better first things to ever say or think.  But, because he wasn't sure, he decided to say it again.  "Yes," he finally concluded, "there were definitely a billion better thoughts I could have had than 'Okuaka'.  Like 'Okuaaweeka.'  Or 'Ok.'  I think."     Thinking "I think"  led Skip to think some more.  Because there was little else to think about, he thought about when in the history of a known universe it was most appropriate to think "I think" and to ponder what it means to ponder.  He suppposed the pinnacle historical moments for this were the beginning and end of time.  Since it was  impractical to appraise the latter's value via the the benefit of hindsight and long established empirical data, he decided the best time to think "I think" was the former.  He considered rejecting this line of thought in light of his infinite need for it to be true (since he'd already thought "I think" and nothing could now be done about it), but the subjectivity itself led Skip to skip the thought completely.     " 'Skip to skip,' " Skip quoted mirthfully, awkwardly plucking the first catch phrase ever spoken in the history of Okuaka (or so Skip thought) out of context and right into a fad that would last less than a fraction of a billenia.  " 'Billennia.'  Skip rolled the word off his something-or-other located near the top of what might be his body, which he decided should be defined as a localized physical manifestation of his nonlocalized spiritual consciousness.  Or at least, he decided he would have decided this had he posessed either.  Had he had either (or both), and was right, he would have also decided to call the latter a "soup."     "Body and soup!  My body and soup are one, since I have neither.  Though I suppose one could argue that two lacks of something are just as likely to be separate non-entities as they are to be equated as one substance.  Or perhaps both are true.  What a radical thought!"     Skip had no time for a second one as the train of thought slowed down and his body and soup got off at the first tot stop Skip thought he'd ever gotten off at."	It seemed like the first mot of the second seven of the dawn of Skip's short life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between the dawn of the dawn of time and 1:12 Monday morning.  If his memory was working at all, Skip was pretty sure he had little or no memory of anything before it.  Yet if he didn't, then why did it seem like the first mot of his second seven rather than the first of the first?  Skip got very dizzy at this thought; so much so that he didn't even consider that the known universe might need some sort of naming before he thought himself into it, and unconsciously bypassed this first task and went straight to his second.     As to what to actually *do* next, Skip had a faint inkling that something or other about his purpose in life had been already established.  If he'd had no such inkling, he might have pondered heading off on a great and wonderous journey of self-discovery and enlightenment covered in Frangles Flutonia Extended Deleted Alternate Timeline # FFEE-131122 | FFM t-R2-D2-C3-P-infringe | F:\ frangles \ skip \ bullshitFFMlocations.rtf \ buy it now \ limited offer while \ supplies last part of \ a complete breakfast \ .com  *But*, since he did, all he could ponder was the nagging feeling that there was something he was supposed to be doing.  Precisely, to write the catylist frwoa of the entire 88 X 10 to the unknownth year progression of Okuaka before 7:77 that evening.  While it seemed a pretty liberating task, it still felt like an violation of originality to be denied the writer's right to think up a more original one.     "Okuaka!"  Skip exclaimed aloud.  "That's would I should write about," he thought silently.  "But what *is* it?  What does it *mean?"     It suddenly dawned on Skip that "Okuaka" was the first thing that he or any writer (or anybody, as far as Skip knew) had ever decided to write about--or even say--and was hit with a battle hammer rush of nostalgia, mild deja vu, and regret that it was someone else's fault he didn't have a more interesting topic.  Out of everything anybody could write about, what was so special about Okuaka?  Since no one had ever explained the innapropriateness of copyright infringement to him--especially in the most important fractal work of art of Okuaka's entire progression--Skip decided to risk remembering something someone once said to the producer of the first episode of a space battle saga with strange aliens and trippy glowing swords of light.  They had said, "Of all the things you could do, why do this?"     Imagining the memory that the saga became as popular as deep fried twinkies (a trademark he decided no one should have a problem with him thinking about given his total isolation from any sort of trademark law whatsoever), Skip took comfort in the chance that this story about Okuaka would be all the rage at some point or another in the progression of... of... "Of Okuaka!"     Saying his second and third words led Skip to a doubly strange deja vu akin to the feeling he'd had after he'd said his first.  He took a moment to thoroughly quantify everything he was sure he'd ever said as a sentient being, and brought up a colorful slide presentation in the empty conference room of his mind.     The pie chart of the ratios of particular words was heavily dominated by the words "Okuaka" and "of."  "Okuaka" took up an entire two thirds of the pie chart, and the latter the remaining slice.  Aggravating his bafflement that the task of writing about "Okuaka" was already a strange pick, the fact that the word apeared at a ratio of two to one out of all its content so far, was even more of a shock to deal with.  Especially since it was only just now Skip had even considered that his monologue should begin the great frwoa he was to write.  (A thought he now discarded).     Yet, thinking his thoughts some sort of story led Skip to story some more.  "Hold it.  Can 'story' be used as a verb?" he asked aloud.  Then, upon recieving no answer, figured why the hell not!  For all Skip he knew he was inventing the very medium of language itself as his story storied on.  And since all language that stories story *through* require some sort of vocabulary other than "Okuaka" and "of," he decided to create a bit more of it.  For some reason a series of terms just rolled off his pinkish something-or-other near the top of his head as if he'd heard them a thousand--or at least one or two--times before.  " 'Bilennia'... 'worflii'...  'frwoa'... 'vifa'... 'bricks'... 'tots'... 'dots'...  'mots'... 'Vifps'... 'Okuaka'...  Wait, I think that one already made the list.  Let me check."  He did, and it had.  But what he found missing was an entire language of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and gramatical rules, that he would certainly need in order to tell a story about Okuaka.  He made a mental note to come up with one, but the lack of a language to put it on paper and make it a memo--not to mention the lack of a paper and pen due to the lack of physics entirely--caused Skip to skip the task and forget about it altogether.     " 'Skip to skip' ", Skip quoted in a dually strange deja vu: one for the skips, and two for the feeling he'd had them both before.  Perhaps it was time for the phrase to mean something new.  He thought it would make a dandilion opening to a short poem frwoa, and decided to think up a good one, but then realized he only had time to contrive a bad one.  His train of thought was approaching its stop and he only had what he might have decided was a mot--had he not--to not define his terms a little better, before he forgot where he had heard them before.     Moments are mots, and tots are like thoughts,     And so are the trains of them stopping at stops.     Bricks are small frwoas that frwoa tot growers     Confuse, loose, and fruse into writer's tot blocks!	It was the third seventh of the first hour of the first day of the greatest writer's brick crisis in the history of the known universe, and the fact that Skip had now thrice forgotten everything that had ever happened to him wasn't helping the situation.  He had a distant, vague memory of a time long ago at least fourteen minutes back, when something to do with him had begun for the first time.  He got the vague idea that it had progressed in some way or another, and then stopped progressing, and then decided that the starting and stopping of progression in general was the only thing there was, and hence started again.  Then he had a very clear memory of forgetting everything that had ever happened to him, and of a second progression of time pretty much just like the first except with the addition of a lingering deja vu that it had all pretty much happened before, a deja vu that was now doubling itself as life began repeating itself for the third time in fifteen minutes of fame.  It was a phenomenon Skip decided to call "treja vu".             The most prominent aftertaste in his mouth after the whole 14-minute ordeal was that of having been thrust into a nightmarish clashing of newness and oldness.  The newness of the very beginning of the progression of a great Age of Ages--in harmony with the freshness of his short life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between the dawn of the dawn of time and the end of it--and the end of it.  All in all, somewhere in this strange polarity of genesis and finality, he had accumulated some small amounts of knowledge and skill.  While he couldn't remember what they might be, he decided now would be an appropriate time to finally put them to practice.  Or at least for the first time in recent history.  Skip looked around at the strange thought-metal of his train pulsing in and out of reality--as if its atoms couldn't decide whether physics should exist or not or what it meant for tangible matter if it did--and began to describe what he saw and felt.             " 'My first memory was waking up on the train.  I had no idea who I was or what was happening or why I was plagiarizing the pilot of ABC Family's Kyle XY almost word for word.  My mouth wasn't sure what it was narrating.  My eyes weren't sure what this weird metallic primordial element was, or how I was sensing it, or how exactly it was holding me up, though it seemed like the weird trippy glowing metal in Contact when what's-her-face is in the spherical metal beach ball that's about to sploosh her down into a trippy galactic journey of poetic discovery and child-like wonder resulting from the hallucinogen pill they gave her by mistake before she boarded the thing.  Yet while whats-her-face lacked the literary skills to convey her detailed experience to others, I had the inverse dilemma: I was a talented writer quickly regaining his skills, but in a world that lacked anything worth writing about.'             " 'With every new breath of prose and alliteration I spoke, I began to remember what it was to be a writer, and at the vague idea for an intangible universe around me--that had billions of years to go before fleshing out into matter and physical form; somehow I knew this--I remembered what it meant to be born before my time.  Every comedic writer is born with satiric instincts that ultimately piss a whole lot of people off by demeaning their lives and otherwise commendable works of art.  Every writer's life is filled with a rich plethora of detailed places and complex people constantly begging to be documented and fictionalized and parodied, or just immortalized in the snapshot of a poem or thoughtful stall scribble.  Every environment except the first Age of the known universe known as Okuaka.' "	" 'It was just minutes before the climax of the first of seven acts of the little known story of the writer of the greatest story ever told.  It was a little like Shakespeare In Love, an exceptionally average film about an exceptionally magnificent play writer.  Unlike a story about Shakespeare, the story of Skip's day had the benefit of being fresh and unpredictable.  However, the ridiculous gunshot premise promising nothing less than a story about the writing of the greatest tale in the known *universe* pretty much shot itself in the foot along with any other realistic and reasonable benefits the story might otherwise have had a shot at achieving.     [Its apocalyptically tedious run-on sentences poorly disguised as brilliantly complex, crafted, structured, and delightful-to-parse prose in a manner so intrinsically innate that they could almost serve--if not serve sans a shadow of literary doubt--as entire self-sustenant and radical works of art in and of themselves akin to the poetic line-to-line structure of Edgar Allan Poe, Eminem, and Shakespeare, also contributed to its failure as a respectable and historic work of art, and quite possibly to its chances of even being published in any capacity, including but not limited to free online reading material, children's crayon drawings, bathroom stall scribbles, doctorate dissertations, and napkin-scribbled frwoa-poems.]                  " 'Fortunately for Skip, literature, and recovering run-on sentence junkies, Skip had the peculiar advantage this morning of having forgotten everything that ever happened to him, along with any manuscripts of any story he might have been working on, on the morning of the day it was to be published.  Or at least submitted as a rough draft.  Or at least outlined a tad.  Or maybe just brainstormed over a cup of nonexistent coffee... Skip really hadn't the faintest !@#$ing clue any more.  Worse, he had little idea whether this confusion--and his problems in general--were the result of him being a total idiot previous to now, or were the incompetences of everyone else around him, or, just the infinite idiocy of chance itself.  *Un*fortunately for Skip, literature, and recovering run-on sentence junkies, Skip's memories were starting to come back to him.'              " 'To Skip, it almost felt as if his *own* life was a story, and his own writer had brainstormed him on the back of a beer bottle with a black sharpie when drunk and stoned at a frat party for dropout English majors.  The idea for a story of the writing of the greatest story ever was in and of itself a clever idea.  The fault lay in the execution.  Or at least, the execution of the person convicted of post-party beer-sharpie talented-writer impersonation, for to date, his writer had violated almost every established professional manner of literary conduct imaginable.  They had thrust their readers into three chapters of non-sequitur, unexplained literary rubbish, and only a drop of hope told Skip that they would develop any significant amount of writing skill any time soon, never mind in time to save the known universe from the greatest failure of the greatest frwoa that would ever fail to be fritten.  He might as well have spent his entire life as a fictional character in a junkyard of little used half-highlighted handbooks and manuscripts deferred.  For all he knew, he had.'              " 'All this Skip knew and felt from intuition; from a vague, lingering sense of what had been happening to him for the last 21 Flutonian minutes, which he now noted seemed quite a bit longer than a standard Earth minute.  Of course, mathematically, *any* set of 21 units is likely to seem longer than just one unit of a comparable kind, but in addition, the *average* unit of the 21 also seemed longer than your *average* Earth minute.  Not that there's just *one* average unit in a group of 21, or a full set of them (as more are likely to be average than be above average or below average), or that your average Earth or Flutonian minute is any more respectively shorter or longer than any other setting's units are shorter or longer relative to each other (or some place else), or that there's any point to averaging 21 units of the exact same length when you could have just taken *one* of them to begin with, but you get the point.'              " ' "Tangents," Skip said non sequiturly, "are as unbecoming in sophisticated literature as awkward narrative grammar and adverbingly altered words.  Except, perhaps, in the writing *of* tangents themselves, since how else would one comment on the nature of tangential rants than to break from the literature in question and torture the reader with a run-on nausea?"  Not that the nausea *itself* would be run-on (he continued thinking to himself)--if 'run-on' can even be used as an adjective--unless it was described as such, but rather "run-on nausea" in the sense of one being nauseous as a *result* of tangential rants.  A nausea that would be at the least doubled if some writer augmented the idea of integrating real-life tangents into their commentary about tangents by awkwardly inserting their entire rant on the matter in some significantly greater work of art in which the commentary upsets the entire flow of its story line just to drive home the point that tangents are *especially* naughty when taken to this extent, especially if they're fused with run-on sentences and a full set of 21 average units skipping the point of the entire flwoa-frwoa!'                  " 'Skip then wondered who on Earth would run on a nausea-paved sidewalk, or would run on nausea fuel, or who would run around on nausea-crack, or who would run their programs on a nausea O/S, and many other puns on "run-on" that would be too tedious to list if it were even possible, or at least--if it were--would require a non-lazy and extremely run-on friter to frite Skip's further thoughts on the matter.  It was only after his run-on train of thought on run-ons running on the ADHD of a distracted writer with amnesia (himself) did Skip realize that the entire ordeal had a very keystone purpose: it was the very first significant creative writing technique he'd ever even thought up; to the best of his memory anyway, which wasn't much better than the rest of it.  Whether a good one or a bad one, Skip was well on his way to becoming the greatest flwoa writer in the history of Okuaka.' "                  (A task he was already beginning to loathe.)                  "What now? 'Skip said,' and was slammed with the overwhelming instinct that a few headers in the fabric of reality needed to be initialized.  So he took a brief moment, and habitually thought up the universe, the known universe, a name for the known universe, the first *Age* of the known universe, and the beginning of the first story of the most important friter in the first age of the known universe now known now as Okuaka.  He also thought up a few characters: Toad, Frank, Darlene, Dr. Vifps, Mwchap, Todd, Ed, Eagle, and a shady person in the back of Frank's bar he'd never noticed, even after disrupting it three times (in order of appearance, sans and save the latter).                  " 'The ideas came fluently to him--almost *fluttery* even, not to mention *fluppupally*, another term that would have needed defining if it wasn't intuitively obvious from the fact that it's spelled "fluppupally".  It was a morning task he was quite used to by now.  Or if not an every *day* task, perhaps the fourth of the day at a new job he was overly qualified for, for which he just needed a few refreshers to get the brain ball rolling again.  *Or,* if not his fourth hour, then at the *LEAST*, his fourth set of seven minutes since he punched in at 1:11 o'clock.  (A period of time he decided to call a "sour", at the risk of establishing a precedent that a whooole lot of other things would soon definitions too, such as "dot tot flwoa-frwoa fritten-frused bricked and blocked thrice-augmented definitive run-on tangent-technique", fractal rocks, mot, dot, tot, frwoa, flwoa, freer, frite, fruse, bricks, blocks, and vifa.'                  " 'Having succeeding in his experimental proof that a lengthy term would fail miserably as a joke when inserted at the beginning of a list rather than the end of it, Skip had now expanded his tangent/run-on techniques to include medium-surpassing fourth-wall-disrupted prose for the purpose of the likewise medium-surpassing fourth-wall-disrupted technique at just the end of this very sentence *alone*!  Not to mention utilizing the former techniques as well, fusing *every* writing technique he'd *ever* come up with just now--or at least over the last *sour*, or *hour*, or *day*, or *LIFETIME* up until the point where he couldn't remember a damn thing be*fore* it, including but not limited to absolutely *everything* after it--into an *ineffable, intrinsic, initially introductory and ominously foreshadowing TITANIUM-enforced, UNoriginal, RE-repetitive repetition of EVERYTHING to date in the ENTIRE REST of the WHOLE story of his mortal life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between BLAH blah BLAH blah BLAH, and BLAH*--whole.' "  (Which, incidentally, wasn't even a grammatically correct sentence.)                  (Unless it was.)                  "That's quite enough of *that!*"                  For the entire rest of the sour, Skip resolved to eschew obfuscatory writing techniques, and work on some better ones.  Not just narrative ones, but creative ones.  The type of writing that makes people think.  That influences society.  That sparks the ideas of those who influence the very fabric of reality.  It was time to frite the Great Flutonian Frwoa that would one day be known as Frangles, currently entitled "Skip Square One".                  (...Again.)	It was the beginning of Skip's future as a prolific siff frwoa writer sometime around the time when no writer anywhere had any clue what the hell they were doing.  It was also the beginning of the future in general.  Not just the beginning of the future in the way that any moment is the first moment of the rest of all eternity, but in the sense that even the idea of the future can bring about its tangible existence in any place where no one's given the issue of the future much thought.               In fact, that imagination and creativity could actually form tangible reality was something Skip had quickly learned.  It had taken him a good half hour to realize he had any potential skills of the sort, but he had definitely made progress, because for the first time he could remember, Skip's imagination was truly forming the very fabric of reality: a major step toward the greatest Flutonian frwoa that would ever be fritten.  Or at least, revealing a reality that was there all the time that Skip had unconsciously repressed in order to trick himself into thinking he thought it all up.  That would have certainly explained some of his amnesia, but not his gentle ethical outlook on being as honest a writer as possible.  Unless he was also suppressing the reality of being a dirty, fraudulent literary liar & thief.  (This seemed more likely for a novelist, but he supposed he would never know.)               As to what to create and/or bring into existence, Skip had definitely been through enough bizarre, non sequitur nonsense to have picked a particular topic for his frwoa.  However, he'd also become so fed up with bizarre, non sequitur nonsense that he now decided to think up a second option: a perfectly mundane, secular, sensical, and non non sequitur place called Earth.  Since this Earth idea would need fleshing out, the first thing his gut told him to do was think up somewhere to put it.  He quickly discarded many momentarily plausable places: among them, in a dwarf, phylo thesis, pigeon, gust of wind, pool of fish, or cozy campfire, for reasons that should be obvious.  He also discarded putting Earth in a fishbowl, Christmas tree ornament, or cracker jack box, as these would make everyone else seem more relatively god-like than Skip was comfortable with allowing.  Therefore, he decided to just think up a whole known universe (Okuaka), so nobody beyond it could seem god-like without a really, really, really good magnifier.               As to when to write about, he quickly discarded the present, since the only present thing that's going on while a writer is writing is the fact that they're writing, which isn't a very adventure-packed topic.  After a brief consideration, he discarded the past as well, since he hadn't much luck with his own past to the best of his memory, especially the time he'd wasted just now considering the present and the past as frwoa topics.  He considered that perhaps a writer should write from experience, but because he didn't care much for his experience (and couldn't remember it very well anyway, not to mention experience being something that generally has to accumulate in the past, which Skip had now already discarded as a topic), it made more sense to write about a whole bunch of crap that he had no experience with but could eventually, but that would probably never happen.  "It's only the future that matters," Skip thought, "especially when you're prone to bouts of chronic am--amm.... amnesty?  What's the word...?"               The other reason Skip didn't bother worrying about the particulars of his past was something someone once told him about nonlinear frwoa writing: the more vague and general things are, the more disorganized a writer is allowed to be since they never have to keep their pages in order.  Keeping a messy office and not writing much of anything is hence the most efficient way of writing fractal nonlinear fiction.  This method seemed very preferable for Skip given his experience, his amnesty and memory regarding what topic he'd just chosen were all entirely questionable by now given he did, incidentally, have chronic, diagnosable tendencies toward short-term and long-term amnesty.               Though perhaps Skip could get two birds with one brick, because the more Skip wrote about the future, the more all his freers would have to induce some vaguely relevent psychosis of what had happened before, leaving everyone with the continuous hallucinatory epiphany, "Ah, now that's what I've been missing!"  So, given that his creative endeavor heavily involved the futures of space-time, Earth, amnesty, Skip himself, and fictional literature, Skip decided with ineffable originality to call his endeavor "Future Fiction".  Particularly, Future Fiction about the non-nonsensical non-non sequitur place called Earth.  It all seemed like a nifty idea for at least two or three moments before Skip considered a whole plethora of future Future Fiction problems.               Firstly, being prone to chronic amnesty, Skip had no idea whether Future Fiction had ever been done before.  If it hadn't, then he would certainly have the joy of being the first radical genius (or at least the lucky drunk yutz) to expose the vastness of possibilities of a bold new fictional genre and all its applications and potential that surely everyone will line up to copy and immitate, earning him George Lucas level ownership rights over not just a franchise but an entire genre of fictional literature.  In fact, if writing about the future had never been attempted, it might even earn him a certain intelectual ownership of the magnitude at which he'd improve an artistic medium, which might also give him certain ownership rights if anyone else ever ripped his idea off by thinking up a big and mega-radical art form.  (Past Fiction, for instance.)  Of course, this would all rely on the chance that nobody, ever, anywhere had ever written a story about the future in the history of all existence.               Hence, tabling the supernaturally optimistic case scenario and progressing straight to the infinitely hell-deep cynical case one to be fair, Skip considered the possibility that Future Fiction (or "Fue-fi" for short, he decided) had not just been done, but that every single possible particular instance of Fue-fi had been already written.  (This wasn't too much of a leap from the idea that none of it had ever been attempted, since all the difference would require is one single, sole ADHD/dyslexic mistake of Skip's or someone involved in the matter:  mistaking the past for the future or visa versa.)  Not caring for the infinitely hell-deep cynical case at all, Skip decided how to prepare for it.  It was a very genius and original plan (assuming it was his at all), and it went like this.               Supposing that nothing in the universe is completely unlike anything else, then every writable story is a rip off of the union of everything else that even vaguely resembles it.  Hence any story is in danger of an infringement lawsuit if the right set of angry people gang up against its writer with a good lawyer.  Of course, another good lawyer could counter with the defense of the Union of Minor Excerpts--that all the work's intrinsic parts adhere entirely to local Fair Use laws which in combination render it fully allowable under Fair Use and Right of Parody--but only to the extent that Fair Use laws are applicable in the jurisdictions in question, and to the extent that the lawyer is a very, very good one.  Finally, Skip decided that a writer can basically only write what's financially feasible.               Since Skip certainly seemed broke, he came up with a game plan.  If he were to write the most generic and general Fue-fi story imaginatble, it would only infringe upon any other Fue-fi story ever written to an infinitesimal extent.  Then it would take the entire collective body of Fue-fi writers that had ever lived (if any had at all) to take him down, which seemed so infinitesimally likely as to be not worth planning for.  Plus, if he was the only one to ever attempt Fue-fi and dropped dead next week, at least Okuaka would be left with a one-fits-all Fue-fi frwoa not limited to a small cult niche, like "Sentient AI nukes the planet fi" or "8 year old farm boy saves the galaxy fi" or "Why Scifi channel changed their name to Syfy fi".               Yet the second major problem with writing Earth Future Fiction was still at large: other than mindlessly parotting the exact events around him for the past half-hour or so, Skip hadn't a spec of experience with ever having written anything at all.  This seemed a pretty good time to start, especially since the fate of humanity (incidentally) depended on Skip not !@#$ing up his first manuscript.  As Skip began and his train of thought ran on, he had no idea where he was going or whether he was doing any good at getting there.  He may have been heading towards a lump of unpublished nonense, or was actually bringing forth whole realities from the very fabric of Nonbeing with magnificent diligence.  (Perhaps the two were equated.)  Wherever the windy whirls of thought carried him--fabricated friter nonsense or real life adventure into the vast mysteries of space-time--one thing was clear: only his imagination would keep him in and out of trouble.               " 'Prose... the friter's front-- front... --front man?  Front wheel drive?  Fruntal nudity?...'               " 'Prose, the ultimate artistic medium.  These are the mots of a writer's noble battle against third person idea-starvation, chronic amnesty, and crippling writer's... writer's blick?  -brick?  -rock?  -crock?...  against writers, uh, whatever, all chaining him to the cruel cloudless ground of an uncloudly, cloudless earth.  The'--no, I can't say cloudless three times in a row.  How about,               " 'It was the year 88 billion, when science and matter-manipulation had advanced so infinitely as to be indistinguishble with the blank mindless thought of Flutonia, and only a small courageous group of quantum physicists stood in resistence against the Intergalactic Empire of Unified Philosophy...'  Nah, err... Alright;               " 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good manuscript must be in want of... of... of frontal nudity?'...no, no, no...               " 'To read, to fread, or not to read!  For in those dreams of friter publication...' "               As Skip narrated, the standard, mundane vifa Earth train he had--incidentally--been riding on for quite some time now shifted and metaphorphosized as he spoke.  It left the fading memory of how it had become a dull present day city subway train to dust in favor of the exitement of advancing future developments in transportation technology.  Its worn, painted maps became slick digital navigational displays.  Its LED lights displaying the stop names became hovering holographic images of relevent route information.  The bumpy ground-ride became an even, subtle hum as if gliding on air instead of rusty lumpy bumpy tracks.  Each nails-on-chalkboard screech when turning corners became a gentle whiissshh of re-direction.               How was it all happening?  Was Skip manipulating the fabric of reality via thought?  It didn't seemed the physics ruling the matter around him allowed such a thing.  The only creativity it seemed to involve was the ideas of the mildly-creative nerd engineers who came up with it all.  Perhaps he was simply waking up to a world that he'd repressed away in order to think it back up as his own fraudulent, self-centered idea...  Whatever was happening, it was real.  Skip wasn't delusional or dizzy or dreaming; he wasn't stoned or high; he hadn't died and been pushed into a near-death experience; he wasn't being abducted by the eerie white glow of an alien abduction in the middle of the night half-drunk on Nyquil.  It was all real, physical tangible matter, just so advanced as to seem almost magical.               As Skip concentrated on where his advancing train of thought--and hence the Future of Earth--was going to be going rather than where it was at the moment or where it had been or had been going before, its once-clunky train engine slid to a gentle vibrating hum, then into a gentle quantum riff.  Its metal phased with patches of wondrous reflective translucence.  It was definitely going somewhere, and it was definitely getting there fast.  Skip could only name it one thing: light-accelerative quantum technowarp hyper-go.               By the time Skip approached a stop, it was finally the future.  The future  of the present, the future of Earth, the future of Future Fiction, and the future of Skip's short life as an obscure siff writer somewhere between now and the killer cliffhanger at the end of the episode.	"In a future beyond the future...     "Humankind had spread like sperm from their testicle planet called Earth into the vast and mighty expanse of a cold and lonely galaxy.  It had explored every corner of its plethora of stale solidified matter between the black abysses of nonbeing freckled only with scant specs of stars and atoms.  It had faught rebelious AI, im pending supernovae, ugly green aliens, and galactic civil war, with nothing but a bored clique of a billion populated planets to show for it.  Then, just to be thorough, it had done it roughly fifty billion more times--populating galaxies throughout the Only Known Universe Ever Known, named Okuaka after it became clear there was never going to be another one--just to see if there might be some place out there that didn't involve the cliche threat of rebelious AI, impending supernovae, ugly green aliens, and galactic civil war.     "(There wasn't.)     "Somewhere around the dead middle of the evolution of man and the duration of Okuaka was an unpublished freelance novelist named Skip Friter.  He of course wasn't living at the *precise* dead middle an isomorphic progression of the two (what are the chances?)--nor really anywhere near it at all--but he was in such an apocalyptic crunch for time that his sheer desperation for a good topic had flipped his imagination from being indescriably underactive straight into a total hallucinatory psychosis.  The peek of galactic civilization seemed such a magnificent topic that it was sure to fly even if executed miserably.  It was a plan that might have worked had the sheer magnitude of the idea allowed anything other than complete implosion into the biggest writer's hole Skip had ever faced in the history of his life as a prolific siff writer somewhere between this scroll box and the noindex meta tag in the html to compensate for redundant redundant material.	It was a time so ridiculously far in the future that you might as well have just called it the past, or a whole nother parallel time line altogether.  In the beginning, Skip Friter had nothing to write about; then, there was Okuaka: the known universe, with *plenty* to write about.  Then, in chosing a topic, the idea of Earth had been somehow selected.  Then, since it seemed useless to write about present Earth (since time-wise the present is always on the edge of not being relevant any more), Skip decided he would write about Earth's future.  That had failed, so Skip figured Earth's *far* future would be much more worth writing about.  But that had almost imploded Okuaka, so now Skip decided he would think *so* far into the future that any problems of it being any type of future at all were long since solved or forgotten about.     It seemed like progress, yet also seemed like it was the dawn of Okuaka all over again.  It also seemed like the infinith !@#$ing scroll box joke, but would not last for long as  it was about to also be the very end of this entire unfinished 7x7 Nova 1311 prose map.
Having almost no sensation of how much time his train of thought had passed since he named the known universe, Skip was suddenly unsure if it was appropriate to get off it and start thinking about something else.  If his train of thought had already run forever, then there really wasn't much point in bothering to get off it now.  If it had only been an infinith of a nanit and he switched already, he would probably be diagnosed with the worst case of attention deficit disorder in the history of Okuaka the moment someone thought up Western Psychiatry.  He quickly decided that his train of thought had run from 7:01 on the morning of January 3rd, 1011 B.B., to 7:02 July 5, 1377.  When he finally got off, there was someone quite unexpected waiting for him: The first person Skip believed he had ever encountered.     "I see you lost your tot again.  You're forty-nine minutes late, Skip.  Gof, what the hell's gotten into you lately?  As if being promoted from tabloid columnist to friter of the greatest Okuakan frwoa that will ever be written isn't enough to fuel your ego, you seem to think your tots are now worth quite a bit more than the rest of ours.  I tell you Skip, listen close, mind you.  You're a tot!  Just a tot, I say!  A fluton!  An insignificant spec of dust on a stray book in an ancient abandoned library.  You're the stray thought of a drunken beatnik.  The frangle of a bored secretary who decided to insert the word 'Skip' in the header of every email ever sent anywhere, so god will know not to bother inventing electronic communication and computer secretaries and run on metaphors.     "Skip, you're a passed out pop star crack addict who read the dismal sales figures of his new album, got drunk and passed out, and decided to hallucinate he's the greatest tot that ever thought, because clearly he had too much potential for a tiny dirt rock of carbonites to appreciate.  You're a fluke!  A cell phone error!  An infinitely distractable nanite who decided to build a time machine and go on an unauthorized vacation to the dawn of time instead of the electronic pro-life paper he was supposed to be aborting.  You're a tot, Skip!  And your own tots aren't worth an extra forty-nine minutes of thought any more than anyone else's are.  Perhaps less.  You're a tot just like the rest of us!"     "But who the hell are you?"     "Writer's block and amnesia to boot!  Ha!  Perhaps that's what you could call 'irony' since you haven't decided what the word should mean yet."     "Nor do I even remember coining it to begin with.  You see I was just on... what did you call what I just got off again?"     "Your tot.  Your Train of Thought.  Your Dawn Of Time Train Of Thought.  Your 'dot tot.'  I swear Skip, late and lost dot tot or not, you still can't seem to absorb the simplest shorts.  You Dot Flutonians have the absurd notion that eternity will always be around, so you speak like you need three words when three letters will do.  Nerld is a step closer to the end of the known universe than Flutonia, so I'm sorry if our rushing around to get ready for the middle of it disturbs you."     "No, I meant... I meant I'd never heard the word before, but it seemed to make some sense in my mind the way you said it, but I'd forgotten the exact word.  'Tot.'  'Dot.'  'Billennia.'  Skip continued to roll the alien words off the something-or-other near the top of his body, both of which had seemed to solidify into a much better idea of what they were since he'd stepped off the train.  He decided the something-or-other should start with a 't'.  Tot?  No, tot's taken, Skip thought.     "Jokes and hoax and wolf cried folks!  Are you really saying that you lost your mind again?  If the most brain fried friter in the history of everything can't even keep his mind for a few kilonanits, that sounds like a good enough final plot for your dot tot frwoa to me!"     " 'Frwoa...'  Strange word.  What does it mean again?"     "Gods of Florbb, you've really lost it this time.  Do you remember where you put it?"     "What?"     "Do you remember!  Do you remember where you lost your mind!  Did you have it on the train?  Did you put it in your brain?  Or did you loose it before then?  I don't suppose you remember how to narrate?  We've been talking quite awhile and a hovering freader will need some loose description of the train station we're walking out of before they loose their minds themselves and drown in solid dialogue!"     " 'Skip hadn't felt much in the brief duration since he could remember having felt anything, but he was quite sure he now felt something new.  He tried to coin a word for the feeling, but fell flat on his face.  Literally.  He'd tripped over a little round object.  It was a bland color.  Gray-ish, he decided, with a bland blend of darker dullish gray splotches placed... sporatically.  He was very confused as to weather the spots were randomly placed, placed in a strict mathematical pattern he couldn't decipher, or dotted by a god who himself couldn't decide between either of the former.  Then, having said "confused," Skip decided that's exactly what (and where) he was.  'Confused.'  This caused Skip to frown, and--realizing he was still confused--skipped over over ten billenia of linguistic evolution to coin the phrase 'confrused' like way way way way too early for anybody's taste.  Skip definitely felt confrused.  The short man in the polka-dotted dress he'd been walking beside since he got off the tot smiled for the first time since he'd known the stranger,' "  Skip narrated.     "Ha!  So you haven't completely lost your mind, good.  And you confrused two words into one, I must say I'm flattered that my endless bickering on the matter has finally worn you down to your very first Pert Prose Picture moment.  Perhaps you're more malleable when off your rock!  Maybe we should sit down and go over your proposed plot proposal to the council before you come back to your senses and reject all my thoughts on the matter for the fifth time before your final request for a sixth extension!  The worflii stepped over a puddle of bored mud as he narrated this useless event on the whim that someone somewhere might give a damn.  Come on, let's go the r... the Royal Roundabout, and order a few drinks.  I'll explain everything.  I'm sure this is quite confrusing indeed if you really have lost your mind again.  You'll have to thoroughly convince, me, though; I'm still not sure you didn't just hit a breakthrough in your improvisation skills and are faking the whole damn thing."     Skip decided he didn't have to do something called 'fausing,' and followed the still-unnamed short man who'd called himself a worflii through the vast and timeless streets of The City At The Dawn of Time, which he'd just now noticed was there."	"Nope.  Rubbish.  Too interdependent and self-begging.  How is anyone supposed to know what a 'brick' is if they don't know what a 'frwoa' is?  Perhaps the whole art of poetry is just plain useless for writing anything but a self-recursive lump of slop."               For lack of anything better to think about, Skip thought about poetry some more.  He thought of wordplay and puns and incorrect grammar pawned off as radical innovation.  He thought of rhythm and rhyme and meter and metaphor.  He thought of the unseen intrinsic web of tapestry connections binding well-crafted poems together.  "Like a literary Jedi force," Skip might have said if the copyrighted term for "space cowboy" was worth the risk of thinking.  A force, a duct-taped spider web, an unseen puddle of literary gravities and symbolic strings and yarn and beams and boards without which any poem would fall to pointless pieces.  Pieces having as little intrinsic worth as a plain old boring old brick, valuable only in the hopes that someone else might come along and make something magnificent of them some day.               "A poem is like a magnetic poetry set," Skip declared.  "Or rather, a poem composed with a magnetic poetry set, because it would be a pretty lazy poet to toss a bunch of random shit up on the fridge and call it art!"               "Unless you're a skilled bullshitter and can fool everyone into thinking it was intentionally crafted!  Something you've certainly accomplished quite well today, I must say Skip!"               Skip suddenly realized his train of thought had strayed so far from whatever it was he was originally thinking, that he'd stepped off both entirely into the strangest tot station he'd ever seen (or at least since the last time he thought he'd stepped into one).  On a station bench with his legs crossed on a high rail and hands folded behind his head was a very content and satisfied looking person.  A vague idea for a metaphor about a cat and a canary came to mind, but since Skip wasn't sure if it was his or not--and was already as confused as a newborn infant in a mid-life crisis support group--he got straight to the point this time.               "Who the hell are you?"               "Ha!  337 mots spent with the weight of the known universe on your back, fighting off the greatest artistic apocalypse to ever threaten Flutonia, and you haven't lost a gram of wit!  I must say, Skip, I can't remember a hearing of anyone in the history of Okuaka who could handle stress like that and still come out with flying colors!  As a phylor and a fan of your work to boot, I must say I'm impressed.  Why, I doubt even the great, mysterious phylor lost to the eternal winds of kuic myth who supposedly accomplished exactly what you did, except with near-total memory loss to boot, could have--  could have--  could--"               " 'A deathly shadow swallowed the phylor's mirthful countenance as he realized Skip wasn't laughing, but just blankly frusing at him, whatever the hell "frusing" was.  The man himself even frused, even with the look of death-black anti-mirth already there which was actually impressive to begin with given that his utter psychic terror already seemed beyond the saturation point that a living being was capable of portraying in a single expression.  Then he just rudely stared at Skip some more.'  Was that any good?  I don't think I've tried that before.  It seemed to come natural, though, what do you what I just did, Mr. Phylor?"               "Gods of hell and heaven and every lame deus ex machina plot twist dependent on some freak PTSD amnesia anomaly including Teri's in the first season of 24 and every episode of Doll House and every other scene of Memento backwards from the first!!  Are you--  are you--  please tell me you're not--  dear god, you're actually--"               " 'Serious'?  I'm not even sure quite what the word means but I get the gut feeling it's the one you're looking for.  From your fumbling for it, might I suggest you try an audio program or vitamin supplement to help your memory?  I think Focus Factor is relatively inexpensive if you find the right street dealer.  I get the feeling it helped me once, but I can't seem to remember when that was.  Do you remember?"               "Gods of Florbb.  Quick, what day is it!  No, what time is it!  What mot is it!?"               "I--"               "Right.  How the hell would you know?"               " 'The man who'd called himself a phylor had the instinct to glance at his wrist watch, but, realizing there were two there, decided not to risk alluding to the 1985 Stephen Spielberg film Back to the--' "               "Stop it!  Gods, that comes like breathing to you.  Come on, follow me, Skip.  I think you're going to need a very stiff drink."               "--Future Hitchhiker's / Frangles Infringement Lawsuit MCVIX."               "Hurry, we've got no time to loose!"               "--of Oz."               "Would you please?"	Skip stepped off the thought-metal under his feet that had only whimsically held him up during his trip, and strode into the relaxed atmosphere of Imagination Station.  He knew it was Imagination Station partly because he remembered the name, but also because there was a large sign just to his right that said "WELCOME TO IMAGINATION STATION".  It was mostly vacant but for a few benches and overhead lights, and a new soda machine engrossed in an intense introspective debate of what its contents should be, how much it should initially charge for them, and what the highest rate of increase was that it could get away with and not be too expensive to bother with by the time interest rates were sky-high.             Skip looked around with the gut feeling that there might be someone waiting for him, and when he saw no one, sat down for awhile just in case; there didn't seem to be much of anything else to do.  After quite awhile, a second train of thought stopped, and the only person who got off was an old blind lady being led by a bright neon German Shepherd who looked like it had better things to do then help drag and old hag to the drugstore for some denture adhesives.  Skip decided to wait for a third train just to be sure, and when none came for quite awhile, shrugged and walked up the only exit: a staircase leading upward into a pool of daylight above.             Outside was a brightly lit open space that stretched out with no walls but for a distant vague idea for a horizon, that wasn't sure if there were enough buildings around to block it from view.  Above was a bright, distant wall of poufy white slightly-tangible things and a vast stretch of unspecified color, which if it was anything might have been something in the realm of green or blue or purple.  Directly around him was a relatively bored city square.  There were a few shops and tall buildings, but the buildings didn't seem to be used for much, and the few magazine stands didn't have much more to sell than a child's lemonade stand.  There were a few bored city goers wandering here or there at leisure, and one slickly dressed business man hurrying to get wherever he was going whom the people he passed by gave a small frown at.             He had the thought that he was supposed to be involved in some sort of terrible crisis and should probably be hurrying around himself, but for the life of him couldn't think what it could possibly be or what he could do about it.  Instead, he strode over to a short park tree where three pigeons were circling some stray breadcrumbs by a bench next to it.  They didn't make any motion to peck at them, but simply paced back and forth as if they'd starve to death before they figured it out.             "Dammit.  Dammit.  Alright, maybe if we encouraged them to jump up into our mouths..."             "How are we going to do that, Todd?"             "I don't know, you think of something.  I thought up the Park, didn't I?"             "Yah, and a helluva lot of good that did us.  At least when there was no Park we didn't have to worry about eating anything, now we'll probably starve to death because it didn't occur you to think up a method for actually eating the pigeon feed you thought was such a great idea."             "As always, you let your stomach get in the way of your common sense."             "What do you mean 'as always'?  We never even had stomachs before."             "Hey there, fellas."             "Ahhhh!  The crumbs are talking!  Quick, what's the pigeon first contact protocol?"             "Don't be ridiculous.  Why would pigeons have developed a first crumb contact protocol?  These are the first talking bread crumbs any pigeon has ever encountered, since we're the first three to have thought up a park.  This isn't some damned Blorkk rerun."             "They aren't talking to us anyway, you're probably imagining things."             "Oh, I suppose you've been around the Park long enough to know whether bread crumbs can talk or not.  Anyway didn't you hear it say 'Hey there, fellas' ?"             "Nope."             "Yes you did, you're lying.  You're putting yourself in denial!"             "I'd rather eat the pigeon feed without guilt that I'm committing murder than have a firm grip on reality."             "Todd."             "What?"             "Look up."             "Ah, another human!  Hello sir, what are you doing all the way up there?  Which one of you thought this guy up?  Do you happen to have any pigeon feed?"             "Pigeons can talk?"             "Humans can talk??"             "Bread crumbs can talk!?"             "Ducks can--!?  Wait, a duck!  Run for your brief dumb existential lives!"             "(Good one, Todd, I didn't know you could throw your voice that well)."             "(I've been working on my duck impression since we thought one up)."             "Why should we run from the duck?  Can't we fly?"             "Yah, but the duck can fly too.  And he's bigger, so he's probably better at it."             "I guess I've never thought about it.  Where the hell's this duck anyway?  Wait, are you sure pigeons can fly?"             "Well, I just always assumed... You know, I'm not quite sure.  I don't remember ever trying it."  Skip, having no idea whether humans, pigeons, bread crumbs, or invisible ducks should be speaking at all--let alone who they should be speaking to--felt a tad unsure whether he should be pursuing a conversation.  Perhaps pigeons were the dominant form of life in the universe and he had violated a strict code of conduct by even getting off at their train stop.  Having little sense of class boundaries or social etiquette to guide him, he decided he shouldn't quite give up just yet.  Perhaps a night in a jail cell would be an interesting life experience.             "So, uh, you guys wouldn't happen to know--"                        " 'Guys'?  Sexist, isn't he, I suppose he knows what a pigeon penis looks like."             "Are we guys?  I haven't thought about that either."             "Maybe gender doesn't apply to pigeons."             "No bread crumbs and no sex.  Now I'm really pissed at Todd."             "I mean, I'm looking for--you know, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing here.  I don't even know exactly where here is."             "Join the club.  You probably have  a better idea than we do.  You're bigger, after all.  Your brain's probably like... well, I'd think of a pigeon-to-primate brain mass ratio but I don't suppose I'm smart enough to be able to count."  The pigeons were getting increasingly frustrated at their task, and one of them even fluttered upward and back down a bit to demonstrate its frustration.  It was an awkward landing, but it did manage to get air bound for a few moments.             "Hey!  That's great!  How did you do that?"             "I'm not quite sure.  But it didn't help me get any closer to the pigeon feed."             "Can you guys really not... Can you really not... haven't you ever eaten a bread crumb before?"             "Nope.  This is our first day.  I don't suppose you could..."  Six beady pigeon eyes were instantly re-focused on their suddenly honored guest.             "Uh, sure...  'Skip picked up the few bread crumbs and held them up a foot for the pigeons to grab at.  For some reason they didn't seem any more satisfied at their first meal than your usual hungry pigeon, and immediately glanced around the park to see if there was anything else lying around.' "             "What the hell was that?"             "What?"             "What you just did.  You said exactly what you were doing as you did it.  What the hell was the point in that?  Are you a loony?"             "He was narrating, dumbass.  He must be some type of schizophrenic freelance novelist."             "But why would anybody do that?"             "Why not?  Maybe it gets the creative juices going in a place like this and helps bring the Park to life.  We should try it.  Hey what's your name, big guy?"  The pigeon fluppled upward a foot in attempt to match Skip's height and beamed with pride.  "Hey, I did it too!"             "My name?  Well... I'm not sure actually."             "Alright, skip that question then."              "Skip the question!  We'll call him 'Skip', then!"             "That was so contrived."             "Huh, Todd?"             "Huh, Todd?"             "Oh come on, I'm sure his name already was Skip and someone somewhere bent the dialogue in order to re-name him.  'Skip the question'?  No one would ever say 'skip the question'."             "How do you know?"             "I just know."             "And knowing is half the battle."             "Gggeee, Iiii, J--"             "Well, I guess I'd better off.  It was nice meeting you, Todd, and, uh, whatever your names are."  Skip moved to leave, but having two pigeons hurry in front of him without any sign of flying off if he were to walk right into him made it quite difficult.  The other kept trying to leap up into the air to save time but kept falling over.             "Wait!  You have to help us!  We'll die of starvation as soon as these bread crumbs wear off!  Can't you just stick around long enough for us to figure out how to teleport the pigeon feed into our mouths or something?  I'm already hungry again!"             "I second that."             "I th--I--godammit!  How do these things work?"             "Well, I suppose.  Don't have much else to do.  I have this odd feeling like there's some important crisis I'm supposed to be hurrying to fix, but I can't remember what it is or what I'm supposed to be doing about it."             "I think we should all sit down over a round of beers and introduce ourselves."             "Yah, that sounds great!  I bet there's a bar or restaurant or something right around the corner."             "What makes you say that?"             "Just a weird feeling.  I think it's, uh.. that way!  Come on, Skip.  Why don't you narrate as we go in case it helps think up some more bread crumbs."             " 'Skip and the first three friends he could remember meeting with any degree of certainty progressed toward the area where they all figured there might be some sort of place to sit and eat and drink.  Skip by foot, and the pigeons half in the air who kept stupidly fluttering upward with commendable initial progress on learning how to fly.' "             "Mr. Writer, I think this the beginning of a beautiful friendship."             "Isn't that line copyrighted?"             "Let Skip think for a bit on which words to change and I'm sure he can fit it under Right of Parody."	Skip stepped off a stray train of thought whose misplaced tangental nature was so abysmal that it had even strayed away from the well established patterns of misplaced tangential natures Skip was just starting to get used to.  Perhaps in searching for patterns in the chaos--for anything that made the slightest bit of sense to him in the events he could barely remember even having--to write about, he'd underestimated the full complexity of Flutonia's uselessness to those seeking structure and theme.  Apparently the beginning thoughts on how to make sense of the world and its chaos didn't cover the issue of both of them self-updating as often as often as Java, Quicktime, iTunes, or AOL Instant Messenger.     Because of the tangential stray thought he'd walked off of, he figured he was already late in doing something he probably should have done back on the train.  The stray tangent ride unraveled the already tinsy-winsy inlking of a hope that anything around here had an underlying structure and theme under it worth writing about.  As far back as he could remember (which wouldn't have been far even if he could remember anything), things had adhered to a certain pattern: some random stuff, then a bunch of philosophically messed up stuff about the first stuff, and then a bunch of stuff that didn't really give a damn but the two former.  Something seemed to come fourth, or at least would have, had he remembered what it was, why he'd forgotten it, why it didn't work, or why it now seemed to not fit in even if it had.     He seemed to have lost time, and the structure unraveled in his mind said he could never make up for it.  Nothing he could do would re-structure the fabric of space-time and allow himself to get back on the train and think whatever he was supposed to think to maintain the continuity of the vaguely-structured bunch of random !@#$ of the past before it.  On the bright side, the fact that the randomness of Flutonia had topped its own bafflingness did seem to adhere to some established plot continuity.  In any case, Skip had no choice but to do what he'd been doing as far as he could remember: narrate around with his head cut off in hopes that Nat Geo might buy his evolving documentary on the Tragic Hell of Creating Writing In Flutonia.     " 'Skip looked around.  The train station seemed more real and present than Skip could remember remembering.  Perhaps Skip's concept of his setting and perception of his environment were returning as his writing skills and memory came back and his amnesia decreased, or perhaps he just wasn't remembering clearly.  As if to answer him, the train faded from thought to something that had already left into a fully fleeting shaft of air.  The overwhelming feeling that Skip now felt--just about his only one--was that the world needed some sort of character to keep him company.  Maybe a friend, or a troublemaker; a gorilla with a moderate SAT score would do at this point.  He seemed to remember having a guide or a friend in the past, and if the tangential train had truly upset things, then he would be even further distraught if he didn't even have the repeated pattern of someone else to--' "     "What are you, a nut job?"     " 'In dwelling on his crisis, Skip had barely noticed a faint swirl of air sitting bored on a bench.  It was the first living thing--or whatever--Skip had met in a long time, and he'd already seemed to piss it off.  Since he had no idea what he could have done and certainly did not want to provoke an argument (since he had no idea what a shaft of air was capable of in a fistfight), he simply shrugged, sat on another bench, and waited for someone more friendly to come along and find him.  The annoyed person, in turn--' "     "Would you shut up?  Why the hell are you doing that?  I know I'm annoyed, I don't need you to tell me I am."     " 'Skip hadn't a clue what the youth was talking about, since Skip hadn't said anything at all as far as he could remember, but he decided agreeability would be the smartest course of action considering he didn't know this shaft of air very well and could easily be part of a subway street gang and ready to kill him if he annoyed him any more, however he was doing it.  If it kept up, perhaps intentionally annoying it would have the opposite effect.  Skip wasn't ready to--' "     "What the !@#$, dude?  Are you like insane or something?  Why are you doing that?"     "Alright, now, what do you mean?"     "You're narrating what you're thinking as you think it.  What the hell is the point in that?  Are you a loony?  Just shut up, okay?  Thanks."     " 'Skip hadn't even noticed he'd been narating since he decided he should start.  He'd figured he should live a little before finding something worth narrating about for his fantastic frwoa he was to write.  But apparently he'd almost unconsciously been revealing all his thoughts.  He must have had uncanny literary skills indeed if narration indeed simply came like breathing, without even a--' "     "What the hell's a frwoa?"     " 'The shaft of air seemed to either give up arguing with him, or sink deeper into a less obvious ploy to get him to shut the hell up.  Either way, Skip simply played polite.'  I think it means some type of fractal work of art.     " 'The air frused sans the hostility, shrugged, and elevated a a rubber ball out of its vifa air bag that Skip had just noticed it'd had with him.  He had no idea what a shaft of air intended to do with a rubber ball, or how the air could be strong enough to violate gravity, but he supposed he didn't know much about such things, so he simply shrugged again.  The air shaft just held the ball blandly in hesitation, perhaps preocupied with Skip's last statement, or the strange encounter in general.  He thought about whatever he was thinking about for quite a lot longer than Skip would have imagined a floating shaft of air could.  If it had had any sort of face or posture, they would be permuating through dozens of subtle states that demonstrated it was running through a plethora of passing trains of thought, however vague and continuously fleeting.     " 'The air finally sighed, either having shrugged the whole thing off, or thought everything there was to think of it for the moment.  (Or, of course, it could still be working on its plan to mute Skip.)  It sort of yawned by spinning a bit of its upper body clockwise, did something akin to leaning back on the wall, and began bouncing the ball on the ground in boredom.  Gravity seemed to kick in each time it went down, and forget about itself every time it went up.  It almost seemed normal a thing to be bouncing a ball, but what didn't seem normal was that a shaft of air was doing it.  Finally, it missed an upward catch, and the ball simply floated up indefinitely and in an act of self-survival, vanished in a poof of smoke just before it collided with the ceiling.' "     "What the hell was that?  What the !@#--  What just happened?"  He looked genuinely freaked, as if it was infinitely normal for a bored gust of wind to be bouncing a ball on the floor, but entirely bizarre for it to poof out of existence entirely.  All Skip could do was improvise.     "Don't worry.  You're probably dreaming.  I'm sure your standard laws of tangible air gravity and solid matter will re-form as soon as you wake up in your bed or home park, or what not." <###     "So I'm dreaming?  Just my luck!  Though that would definitely explain quite a bit since the train dropped me off a short while ago.  Actually, I think I saw you come off earlier when I was only a couple specs of dust.  And come to think of it, another time or two while I got substaniazed just enough to blow that candy bar wrapper over there a half inch.  Now I'm this, almost your size, and I really don't think I'll like the boring life of watching myself grow into a full deadly hurricane, then on to whatever lies in old age for bodies of air.  Nonexistence I suppose.  Maybe I poof into a lack of anything worth being, just where I came from.  Yes, I definitely wish I were something other than a whiff of useless air.  Maybe something more tangible.  More real.  Less whimsical.  Less useless."     "I think I'm sort of on the same quest.  While I can't remember all that much, my memory goes back to just about when you seemed to whiffed into existence.  Since then, if memory serves at *all*, the only thing that's happened is a bunch of random !@#$.  I think I'm supposed to be finding some sort of pattern or theme in it all worthy of manifestation into a frwoa topic, but all I've come up with in the last minute is the situational irony of things having gotten much worse since they started making some sense."     "I suppose we could team up or something, not much else to do."     By now, the station did not like where this conversation was heading.  It most definitely concretely objected to the presence of those on a search for a tangible corporeality.  Maybe it was Skip's imagination, but the *station* air seemed to sway the hanging "IMAGINATION STATION" sign as a restauraunt owner might to a "NO SMOKING" sign.  This seemed to tick off Skip's new acquantance, which, just to be rebelious, grabbed a half-empty bottle of water someone had tossed and splashed it within itself in the farfetched hope it would magically materialize it into something more liquidy.     Somehow, it worked.     Its body gathered moisture; moist drops of a fluid, liquidy material began to appear, then finally the moisture aoushed into a rebelious teenager composed entirely of a blue-clear mass of liquid.  The vifa bag had become a soaked nike backpack, and the empty water bottle a skateboard made of powerade.  The kid frowned, as if it wasn't the desired effect at all.  He almost seemed to frown confused... one might even say "frused", Skip thought.     "Great, I'm a licenseless, acne-prone teenager of water too young to drink.  Just great."     "Liquid, liquid everywhere but not a drop of beer."     In response, a stronger gust of wind blonked the sign again like a satisfied teacher who had finally been able to send the roudy student to the principle's office now that he'd entered the school's jurisdiction.  The kid would learn his lesson, because now he was stuck with the abundant imagination of youth.  (And Skip was stuck in the nostalgia of days when he was more creative and less competent.)     As if to contrast the young duo's loss, an old blind lady approached, stabbing her cane in front of her like Skip figured he and his new friend would be doing spiritually for quite awhile.  It dawned on Skip that his new companion would need a name, and said as much as he was swirlshing toward a vending machine to grab a can of soda.     "Oh, I don't know, I feel exponentially heavier than air, like I drank a hundred bottles of kool-aid.  So, maybe something about my sudden weight gain."     "Kilo?"     "I guess it'll do.  Though I think that's a random prefix or something, not just a word for weight.  That's one of the few things I remembered from science last year in summer school."  Kilo was now standing at the vending machine which was proudly blinking its increased price per can, and Skip simply watched the old lady for lack of anything more inspiring.  She approached an upward staircase to a light above, then paused and turned backward.  She only got as far as the soda machine before heading back for the stairs.  Then Kilo mumbled something at the machine while she started walking 360s in a small circle, and Kilo gave her a quick look.     "Oh, come on.  That is so ripped from Donnie--Dammit!"  Kilo turned back to the machine in frustration.  He tried to kick it for some reason Skip couldn't see, but only managed to splash his foot harmlessly on its "Surfbored Do" front logo over a can of bursting soda and a rebelious "DO THE DO" tagline.  The machine seemed to smile deceptively as if the free real life advertisement was its plan all along, and now it had a great marketing trick under its belt.  It must have worked, because the old lady broke out of her 360s and got in line for a can of soda.     "Come on, Water Boy, let's see what light breaks beyond this mortal Plato's Cave."     "I want my !@#$ing money back."  He kicked the machine again but it just smiled again as the old lady got more excited for her drink.     "You can get your fix later.  I kind of have a crisis of some sort on my hands, and I get the feeling you'll be in just as must trouble if you don't get up there right now."     "No.  I'm not going out there like this."     "Maybe you'll get used to it."     "Nah; I'll just sit right here until I think myself into something more useful than a splash of a rebelious youth without a drop of caffeine or booze."     "You're going outside, Kilo, no argument."     "You're not my father."     "Well, someone has to deal with you.  If you don't get out of here I'll just think up some adoption papers and make it official and you'll have to do the same damn thing anyway, except then *I'll* be mad.  And I doubt you want to see a brainwiped novelist with no topic for a book due at the end of the day when he's mad."     "This isn't fair!  The other kids' get to be cool elements.  Why can't I be a cool element?"     "You *are* a cool element."     "Not cool like in temperatre, I mean, like you know, an *awesome* element."     "Like God?  That's a little off the chart."     "An element I *want* to be!  One worth being!  One that people will look and say, 'God dude, cool, that's an awesome element!' "     "Like what?"     "I dunno, a dangerous shifting airy amount of heat and light so powerful that it has to be intensely controlled or it'll break free and cause havoc for quite a number of imaginable ways?  Anything but this."     "Guess that's a step up from a splurshy rebelious youth in coolness, but it also seems like a backwards step back into something airy and formless.  You'll have to do it yourself, though, I'm not any better at thinking this stuff into reality than you are."     "Dammit, I don't want to be a teenager.  This just isn't fair."     "*Life* isn't fair, Kilo.  But you're old enough to work your way towards a more dangerous and satisfying element if you want.  It's your life.  You're just going to have to work for it.  Now come on, I have this intense feeling that there's something that needed doing awhile ago but that's just getting started or something.  We have to hurry... I think.  We need to find a bar or something.  I'm thirsty and I really need a drink."     Kilo stared dead still at Skip like a pillar of implosively angry lava.     "Oh, well, you know what I mean."	Skip approached a park, and the first thing he saw was a busy man in a funny uniform with a funny device, pointing it at the root of a tree for potentially a funny reason if it was strange enough to bother making jokes about.  I was worth a shot.             "Hello, uh, officer is it?  What are you doing?"             "Hshh!"             Skip had no idea what "hshh" could mean, but could not pursue a formal inquiry because for some rare reason he felt the need to shut up for a bit.  An awkward pause ensued, and the only sound anywhere nearby was that of the man's alien device making bizarre noises, that might be described in prose as a  pulsing, erratic "bshmeeping".  The uniformed man's eyebrows lowered in  fierce concentration as if he'd finally discovered the secret location of the  Great Galactic Warlord Dreditron who initiated a long eon of death and chaos and madness throughout the galactic empire and most of the galaxy for longer than any records go back.             "Are you--"             "Huuhushh!"             Twip...  Twleep...  Twitltlteep...             "Is that--"             "HaSHUsh!"             Tweep...   Shmeep...  Tatitleeeeep...             "I don't suppose you--"             "HahSHUUSH!"             Tweep...  Tweeep... tahhhwipiwipiwipilitilitilitiliti--             "Alright, I guess I'll see you later, then.  It was--"             "Pigeons!"             "What?"             "Pigeons!"             "What?"             "There were pigeons here.  Cyberpigeons.  Three of them.  And not more than two smits ago, if you consider skipping sevens to be a second temporal dimension, that is.  Fluttery, fluppupally things, cyberpigeons.  Elusive, manic, devious little devils.  They're probably in your sector looking for your local militia's storehouse of photophasic weaponry.   Likely scoping for some weapons of mass planetary destruction, too.  You  don't have any, do you?"             "What?"             "Weapons of mass planetary destruction.  You don't have any in your sector, do you?"             "Well, I haven't really been around too long.  I inherited this case of  serious long-term amnesia this morning, and things are only starting to come  back to me.  I don't even--"             "Brain wiped!  The pigeons probably used their technilepathy on you to  find your WMPDs, and when they were done they disrupted the memory storage  cells in your brain and wiped your memory so you'd never remember you were  scanned.  Here, let me run a full diagnostic."  The man spun the shmeep device right at Skip and began manically pressing buttons.  As Skip had never had  any kind of object that he could remember directed at him point blank, he didn't  know whether to worry about the man's intentions.             "What are you... what... is that thing?"             "Oh, this?  It's just a generic multi-siff scanning device.  Nothing  special."  Blmeep.  Shmleep. Shmititititileep.  There was an awkward pause  while the man pressed a baffling permutation of keys, while Skip hadn't much to  do but stand around and figure whether his current situation had any kind of  purpose, or was just thrust upon him by nut in a stupid uniform.  He almost  turned to leave.             "Mnff!  No!  Stay still.  Now I have to start over."             Pause.  Shmleep.  Beep.  Bleep.  Shmeep.  Pause.  Smpleleleeep.                "How much does your multi... How much does that go for?"             "This thing?  Oh, well, in some systems they're pricey, in some places they give them away for free, in others everyone just sort of has one, but more often than not it's a cashless society in which any scientist or field operative is distributed one if they have any need for anything it does, with no explanation of how they're made or how many there are to be distributed on any given ship  or outpost."             "And what does it do?"             Smleep.  Blips.  Press.  Mleep.             "Well, basically this.  It does this."             It was left at this.             "Ah, yes!  I see you've recently been in contact with them."             "Who, again?"             "The terrorists!  The cyberpigeons!  The ones who will probably curse your whole sector with apocalyptic chaos if they aren't found and vaporized or thrown out an air lock.   Or at least held in a multi-siff maximum security environment indefinitely until they can figure out how exactly to escape.  I seem to have my mission for the episode, so I'd better stick with you for awhile until you've told me everything you know or realize you're not very significant and get yourself vaporized."             "But what's your name?"             "Lt. Skiff Freckler, M.S.S. Flamemoth!  And how about you, Civilian?             "Ah... Skip.  Skip Friter... I think."             "Ah, I'll call you Bob, then, since our names' similarities might cause some confusion.  I'd never forgive myself if an incompetent Urgg vaporized a civilian when he was aiming for me!  I wonder how that would play out exactly.  'Glump,'  Glomp would say, 'frire our glumpulator agt Lt. Fregrer.'   'Oh, but which one's  Lt. Fregrer?  Is it the cat, the grog, the freelance nogelist, or the armed guard with the "Lt. Fregrer" insignia stitched on his uniformg?'   'I don't knowg, Glump; shgoot them allg to be sure!' "             Skip was finally starting to get used to not having a bloody clue what anyone was ever saying in regards to context, vocabulary, terminology, or theme.  In fact in the past few minutes since he'd walked up to Lt. Freckler, his confusion on the matter had begun stretching way out into a big black lack of tangible substance that he couldn't think how to explain.  Not even ideas penetrated it, never mind the less-than-ideas than comprised most of Flutonia.  He seemed to remember someone once telling him that life is a just a haphazard mush of shit until it begins making sense, but right now it didn't seem to be doing it.  Or even give a hint that it would ever start.  And since the only thing this Great Vacuum threatened to do was expand its uselessness indefinitely, Skip decided to forever forsake his short-lived quest for enlightenment in favor the only thing he could think to do: nitpick the general inconsistencies of Skiff's comments sans any need to understand the particular context.             "If an Urgg was simply to vaporize everyone it thought might be you, our names' similarities wouldn't be of any consequence since mine wouldn't even be known.  Unless we were in a place where everyone's first name starts with 'Sk' and their last starts with 'Fr', in which case anybody named 'Bob' would probably feel socially excluded to an extent that even his physical stance and walk would probably give away something and grant him a general immunity from such vaporizations.  So I think I'll be safe if we meet anything called an 'Urgg' until such time as you stop calling me 'Bob.' "             "You're definitely the distractable one, aren't you?"             It was an odd comment, considering Skip hadn't felt distracted in the least.  In fact, he thought nitpicking the man's logic with attentive precision demonstrated the opposite.  He still wasn't quite getting the hang of flow of dialogue.  Perhaps conversations were supposed to stray from topic to topic, and he'd deferred by staying on one.             "...Especially when  there are urggs and cyberpigeons around that could nuke your sector by brunch, never mind what they'd accomplish by 8 o'clock if they really had a grudge with it and teamed up!   You definitely have that odd brain type I've heard about; the one most of the  needlessly creative scientists have that come up with the things that cause massive trouble for most sentient life at some point in their evolution.  Though I suppose they're responsible for the good stuff too, so I guess it evens out.  What was it, now... Defaculty hyper-attention?  Synaptic  manic-elative nanotendencies?             "Abnormally Attentioned Dutz?  I think I heard that one somewhere."             "A little primitive, but that's the general idea.  Now, if I have any innate hyperdistractable DNA in me at all, might I suggest we head to one of your local mess halls and discuss all this over a quick bite to eat?  I'm kind of hungry, and I find sitting down to chat about some meaningful aspect of the moral themes inbedded in our lives always serves as a decent sanctuary from sudden unexpected death."             "Sounds like a memorable endeavor to me."	"Help, I'm stuck in an empty frage scroll box and I can't get out!  Anyone?  Hello?  I wonder if I should like talk for awhile for some filler to feign the illusion that its a whole frage.... I--Gof!  Get off the couch!!  Come here you sunuva !@#$!..."
"Do you ever get the feeling that it just never begins?"     "What?     "You know, *it*."     "I don't understand."     "Neither do I.  I just thought it sounded like a dandelion opening line for a short frwoa.  Or even a long one.  You seem to have lost your mind and memory right at the one of the most important moments in your expected life-long writing career, and I figured what a great story *that* would make!"     "But why here in the cafe?  Isn't it a bit late to be starting up a frwoa now?  The time to do so would have been when I arrived on the train station, or perhaps when you woke up this morning or something."     "Quite right.  Perhaps that's why I'm not in charge of friting the catylist frwoa of all of Okuaka.  Why don't we pretend the past few lines of dialogue never happened, and I'll let you narrate our introductory scene.  Go ahead, give it a shot.  You seem to have retained your skills if not your memory why you should have any reason to bother using them, so give it a shot.     " 'The short dwarf-esque worflii whom Skip had just met from one point of view, stirred his vague idea for some sort of mixed drink involving alcohol and Pepsi and a solid form of water.  Skip seemed to have hit a brain fart with his initial description, because the bright polka-dotted dress he thought the Worflii was wearing was now full steel-plated battle armour.  The two sat in a vifa cafe, which consisted of a few cafe tables, a bar, a couple sipping milkshakes at a diner booth, and a confused owner who wasn't quite sure if he owned a cafe, bar, restauraunt, or cafarestraunt.  The worflii frowned, yet seemed hopeful; perhaps one might even say *frope*ful, and the confusing mixed thoughts stirring in his head wobbled and bobbled up and down with the invisible buoy he imagined he was poking with his stirring straw.  His mind was not a mixed drink, but rather a... a mixed *think* about whether his current dilemma was a good or a bad thing.  He opened his mouth as if about to speak, then seemed to fruse awkwardly about something, and then--' "     "Alright, alright, that's good.  You seem to have lost only your memory and not your gift with irritatingly overdescriptive narration.  We're going to need that kind of intuition from you if we're both going to survive being bricked to death for not getting this current draft finished of whatever the hell it is we're eventually going to have been writing.  'Going to have been writing...'  Is that right?  I'm a tad drunk and I'm afraid my grammar's a little off beat."     "Bricked to death?  I'm afraid that doesn't sound very good at all.  What does it--"     "Bricks!  Writer's bricks!  They're going to throw writer's bricks at us until our friters eventually lose their minds themselves and completely forget they ever brainstormed us.  We'll be dead.  Gone.  Nothing.  Not a remembered death with a lack of a note on a blank tombstone, but simply never to have existed at all.  I feel some metaphor coming on about a hole in a lake but the bartender's giving me that warning look he gives when he's forgotten to pay his quotation licensing fees, and I'm not quite sober enough to figure out the precise probability of the allusion falling under Fair Use rights."     "Could you be thinking of the Rock Biter's dried up lake in the 1984 Warner Brothers--"  The couple in the bar went rigid as the bartender chopped the wine bottle he was holding downward and smashed it on the edge of the bar.  The surprise on his face said he'd never attempted such a thing and the outcome had entirely surprised him.  He'd clearly meant to do something that would demonstrate his irritability in fusion with his low anger management skills in a threatening manner, but not cause a mess.  Instead, the bottle of what everyone decided was now chicken broth smashed into a plethora of uncountable fragments of glass and liquid.  The faces in the room further tightened as they saw that he looked like he was about to break into tears at the catastrophe, which would certainly further damage his brawny reputation beyond belief.  No one wanted to face the wrath of a doubly disgruntled bartender furious at his own lack of testosterone, but no one could think of anything to say.  When awkwardness grew near it's limit and his eyes were starting to gather moisture, Skip felt a kick from the worflii who seemed to have completely forgotten that Skip had completely forgotten what he could possibly do to remedy the situation.     "*Intuition,*" he whispered.     "Ah, yes!  That reminds me of that old classic riddle, why did the cross pessimist cry over a half-empty glass of spilt chicken broth before it got to the other side of the end of the road of life!  To spill, to weep!  Perchance to seep!  For in those fears for tears what seers may steer us wrong must give us ponds!  What light through Yanni's window drapes; we reel kool, we left stool; a hundred bottles of beer in a pool!  Broth--and--beer!  We're not gonna pay; we're not gonna pay last year's frwoa fees!  Don't worry, be happy now!  Yah!  Yah!  Come on, everybody!"     As Skip wasn't quite sure what he'd done to begin with, he had less of an idea what it had accomplished, and certainly had no idea how to turn his rant into a five-person sing-along, since he wasn't singing at all, and nobody else could possibly know what came next if he did.  Either way, Skip seemed determined to keep going, so he put a cheery jingle to his poem-riddle and began the entire thing again.  The four others in the bar had already forgotten the broken bottle incident and were now just plain staring blankly at him.     "Ohhh... *why* did the pessimist *cry*... about a *half* emp-ty *glass* of spilt *broth*.  Be*fore* it *crossed* the *tot* it *thought* to *strife* the tot of *life*!  To-spill to-weep per*chance* to-*seep*, what *seers* may *steer* us wrong?  What *light* that night through, uh--"     "That's quite enough."  The worflii rushed to toss a twenty on the counter for his drink and Skip's idiocty, and hurried Skip out of the bar.  "Let's get out of here before the bartender recovers his wits and calls the police for noise disturbance or bad poetry drafting."	"Do you ever get the feeling that it just never begins?"     "At least once, I'm sure. 'The phylor stirred his fading memory of a precisely portioned mix of intoxicating liquids tweaked over billions of years.  At first he had asked the bartender for the drink by name, who had never heard of it and suggested a vifa Rum and Coke.  Then he tried to describe the precise ratio of particular types of booze that involved mixing it, but the bartender had never heard of any of those, either.'     " 'Troubled, the phylor had then listed, in order, 47 types of booze that would serve as tolerable substitutes for the drink, as each was successively denied in turn at increasing frowns by the barkeep (partly because the phylor seemed to be infringing some sort of comedy skit involving a shop and a lack of a dairy product).  Most of the types of booze he'd never heard of.  The rest he gave a shrug at as if the man had inquired about a rough draft of an Egyptian translation of the Bible long after the collapse of the star system Sol.     " 'Exhausted--yet without hesitation about the necessary next course of action--the phylor had asked for a few sheets of paper, and had scribbled out a bizarre mess of molecular formulas and philosophical proofs of some of the substances he'd asked for.  The barkeep simply blinked a few times as if being handed a child's crayon drawing of an imaginary barnyard animal.  Both glanced at the wall clock and decided they didn't have time to pursue the matter.' "     "Skip, do you ever get the feeling it just never begins?"     "I'm quite sure you've already asked me that at least once in this very bar.  Maybe twice."     "When was that?"     "Just after you ordered your drink."     "Ah, your recounting of the traumatizing ordeal must have gotten me nostalgic for it."     "My amnesia must be contagious."     "Since when did you have amnesia?"     "You're not seri--"     "Joking, of course."  The phylor's infinitesimal embarrassment said it wasn't a hundred percent true.  He suddenly turned serious.  "This is grave.  Quite grave.  Graveyard shift grave.  Date-expired Gravy Train grave..."  The bartender froze and his eyes flicked upward for a moment as he calculated whether "Gravy Train" touched upon infringing anything copyrighted or was just a regular trademark violation.  He shrugged, resumed for a moment, then froze again as he realized "Graveyard Shift" was a Stephen King novel.  He decided that whether the latter was infringed depended on whether the phylor had mentally capitalized the 'S'.  Refusing to succumb to cynicism and the risk of getting furious and breaking something again, he nodded committed to the more optimistic scenario and resumed his cleaning.     "This just doesn't make any sense.  I could understand your amnesia at the end of the day; it would make a brilliant cliffhanger plot twist to create suspense for any further frwoas about you, but *now*?  What is there to forget anyway?  You just popped into existence this morning at 1:11 o'clock!"     "I did?  Oh, right; I still keep thinking I came in as far back as I can remember, seven minutes later."     "And two minutes *ago*, yes."  The phylor glanced at the bar clock again anyway for effect.  "1:23.  1:23... Why 1:23?  It's supposed to be 7:73 right *now*.  I was supposed to meet you for the last time at the end of the day when you publish your book.  This must be your second time off the train, right?  The second set of seven seconds you've existed since you thought Okuaka into existence?"     "I--"     "Right!  How would you know.  Amnesia.  I suppose there's some sort of plot continuity where you vaguely remember your first sour to keep things going as the minutes progress, but I can't think how to use that to our advantage."     " 'Sour'? "     "Sour!  Sevth of an hour.  Seven minutes of the 49 minutes in every hour.  You coined the term for gods' sakes.  Have you lost your tot?  You--wait!  You only made up the term later in the day!  That's right!  Why would you remember?  See, I was supposed to pick up a copy of your final book at the end of the day.  You were going to sign it for me and I was going to bring it back to the Old Cateot Museum of Future Past Relics.  Now I have nothing, and infinitely worse, my mistot here may have unraveled the entire process leading up to your book's final publication!  At the best, you'll write a slightly different version now, but even that could be catastrophic to the entire known universe.  Even one altered word could send a ripple through the entire progression of Okuaka and affect all the books ever written--or that ever *will* be written, from your frangle.  Even a single typo could throw off all the temporal perception of the tots at the big crunch I'm now afraid to find a tot back to.  In addition to screwing the known universe over, our tot schedules could start un-synching, leaving us to being dropped off totally off our tots!  Like... well, like this, for example!"  The phylor put his hands up motioning to the room, then noticed the clock again and gave it another rhetorical stare.  "So why are we here now... Why 1:23.. *Why 1:23*!?"     The phylor thrust the glass off the bar table where it simply hovered in mid air for a few moments--as the bar air was a little slow and still getting used to the new rules of gravity--and then dropped to the ground and shattered as it remembered what it was supposed to do.     "Right!  Gravity was recently installed.  It all got fixed by the end of the day, I'd forgotten.  I thought the glass would just vanish completely as it used to do, or forget about itself or whatever."  The barkeeper refrained from getting angry, but simply looked over the bar table and frowned as if he'd had the same thought and fully understood.  He grabbed a broom from the corner that had never been used, and glanced up at the now oblivious trouble maker with a confused look as to whether this was supposed to be his job.     "Conflict."     "What?"     "Conflict.  You say I'm writing a great book.  Any book requires conflict.  I don't know what sort of story I was supposed to have come up with, but it seems to me as a fresh budding writer that an initial crisis of the upcoming events of the day--already threatening the very fabric of existence--is as good a plot as any, however miserable a headache it's giving me.  It 'breaks the fourth wall' so to speak, thrusting the freer into an instant crisis that could surpass the frwoa medium in question and threaten the freer's sanity in a very real way, especially if they're philosophy majors.     "Why, our writers themselves may just be inserting this absurd plot twist theory of mine because they themselves haven't a damn clue where to go at this point and are praying to their own friters that I take over and help all of them out.  Perhaps they'd written a brilliant seven-page frwoa and people liked it so much they were contracted for another 117,642 when they'd already wrapped up their story and hadn't a damn clue to go from there.  You want a story that breaks new boundaries?  Well there you go, and here we are!"     "Genius!!"  The phylor slammed his fist down on the bar table in excitement causing another glass the barkeep had placed just on its edge to tip over and shatter.  The air had remembered what to do this time, and the barkeep's expression said that the phylor should have done the same.  Yet it still held a gram of guilt.  Perhaps it was idiotic to have placed the glass down on the edge of the table to begin with, especially given the one just broken and his pre-knowledge of the violent tendencies of the rowdy customer.  In any case, for some strange reason he looked like he was about to burst into tears, then sniffled, shrugged, and reached for the dustpan again.     "That's it!  Let's go, we'd better figure out how to fix this as fast as possible.  Come on, Skip, I suppose I'm your guide for the next four minutes or so, improperly inserted into your time line or not.  If we can't find a way to water down your plot to one less prone to catastrophic tragedy, all Okuakan fictional writing until its final collapse could be in gravy train-grave jeopardy."     "And I thought forgetting about it was a crisis."     "If you're lucky, you'll get a few more crises by the end of the hour, and then you'll you no problem thinking up material whatsoever.  Maybe you'll discover something less radical to write about.  Like a plush octopus or a gay chinchilla."  The phylor moved to leave but the bartender cleared his throat.  "Oh, I wasn't expecting to be in this scene.  I don't suppose you panhandled any money in the station your first seven minutes and hid it away somewhere with a reminder note on where you put it?"     "I doubt it."     "Of course."  The phylor reached for the pen before leaving and scribbled out something confusing enough to distract the bartender until they left.  "Molecular formula for adamantium."	The first bartender of the first caferestaurant of any kind to ever exist seemed bothered about something as he watched a man and three pigeons wander into it.  Rather than greet them, he started obsessively surveying his inventory for some reason.  At one of the diner booths was a young couple who were too involved in each other to be sure whether they had eaten or whether they had already paid and left if they had.             "Ooo!  Pigeon feed!"             "Where, Todd?  Oh!  Hey Skip, dive in!"             The pigeons clumsily flittered upward toward the bar table at a small bread crumb that had been left behind, but only Todd made it.  After he quickly downed it, the others resolved to settle on top of the caferesaurant's dining booth rather than risk humiliating themselves at a second failed attempt to fly up four and a half feet.  The bartender stared at Todd for a moment, then glanced back at his bottles and glasses.  Then he stared at the other pigeons for a moment.  Then back at his bottles and glasses.  Then he stared at Skip, then the spot where Todd had pecked the bread crumb, then Todd, then back at his bottles and glasses.             Pigeons.             Glasses.             Todd.             Table.             Skip.             Bottles.             Todd.             The male youth gave a crafted, rhetorical glance over at the bottles of beer on the wall, then turned back to the girl as he began repetitively whistling a thirty-something-note four-measured melody.  While Skip didn't recognize it, he was pretty sure by the expressions in the room that it was done tauntingly at the barkeep.  The scene seemed as awkward as his deja vu that it had seemed so before, so he trusted his gut and did something he figured was as normal and harmless to do in a bar, and ordered a Rum and Coke.  The bartender simply stared at him awhile longer, then slowly reached under the bar table and lifted out a wonderfully shiny, new-looking, and exceptionally sturdy-looking metal cup.  He stared at Skip while he thwucked it hard on the edge of the table a few times to display it's sturdiness, and placed it down and poured the drink.  Skip nodded a confused thank you, then frowned and turned to Todd.             "Do you ever get the feeling you just popped into existence a moment ago?"             "Oo!  Oo!  Ask me!  Ask me!"  One of the pigeons at the diner booth had spoken up.  He had managed to flutter up on the seat and was still trying to reach the table where his friend was pecking at something.             "Okay."  Skip waited.  So did the bird.  It kept trying to fling itself up on the table as if it was waiting for the conversation to progress as Skip had agreed it would.             "Okay, do you ever get the feeling you just--"             "Yes!  All the time."             "Yeah, I think we all know that feeling," the other one agreed.  "Actually, come to think of it... I can't remember ever feeing much of anything else."             "Me neither."             "Then that makes two of us."             "I can count to two, dufus.  I wasn't born--err, in the last minute, anyway.  Or at least not since Skip asked if I just popped into existence a moment ago."             "No, I was being rhetorical.  Like poetic, y'know?"             "I certainly do not."             "Then ask the lobotomized beatnik.  He'll know."  The diner booth pigeons blinked at Skip while Todd carefully surveyed the breakable items in the bar.             "Skip?"             "Sorry, know what?"             "Rhetorical poetic irony."             "(He doesn't know, stupid, he lost his mind, remember?)."             "(Yah, but not everything.  Shh, I bet he knows)."             "Oh, that's easy.  Though I don't quite think the comment was quite verbal irony; it's not the reversal of anything you'd otherwise be expected to say, but rather something that doesn't need saying at all, which of course does make it quite rhetorical, you're right.  As to poetic, I'd argue rhetorical comments in general have a certain poetic quality to one extent or another--that is, what better medium than poetry to excuse anything colloquially odd than to claim the deviation was an intentional artistic expression that's just not being appreciated at the moment--but I'd say your line doesn't contain any particularly poetic tones above and beyond what's already intrinsic to all rhetorical claims, so there's no need to actually be redundant and label it as poetic."             The pigeon who'd asked took a careful melodramatic pause before delivering, "Unless I'm being rhetorical in calling it poetic!"  Skip offered a slight chuckle.             "Not much poetry in that, is there, J-- er, T-- er, Vvwuuuuhh--....  Peacocks of Purgatory, I must be losing it!  I can't even remember my best friend's name.  Do pigeons cry?  I think it's time to shed a depressed tear or two at some tragic aspect of my situation right now."             "I don't have a name, idiot."             " 'Idiot'?  Is that my name?  Wait, what's yours again?"             "Idiot; it's--never mind."             "Wait, we're both named 'Idiot'?  That, well... that makes two of us!  Uh?  Ehh?  Hunh?  Come on, that was the best rhetorical poetic irony joke I can ever remember making in my entire life.  You should be cracking up, Idiot!"             "Idiots!"  Todd had broken his gaze from the beer bottles and glasses back to his two friends.  He tried to shake his head back and forth in shame, but could only manage to bob it up and down a bit.  At this, the bartender drifted over to see if there were any crumbs on the table, or why some had suddenly materialized if Todd had found any."  Upon finding none, he raised an eyebrow at Todd before he walked back, as if at a magician who had played a dirty, deceptive trick and was going to get caught one of these days.             "How am I an idiot?  Idiot here is the one who doesn't know what the word means.  I just called him one to his face is all I did."             "The pointless bickering about it makes you both idiots, especially since we just got here and a lot of our ideas clash about what life is all about.  So I doubt we're going to master the finer points of grammar, vocabulary, usage, name calling, irony, and sarcasm, any time soon..."             "Well I think Idiot here is doing pretty good on the sarcasm end."             "Pretty well, idiot,not 'good'.  You need an adverb to modify an action."             "Shut up, Idiot."             "...And, for all you two know, there's no such word as 'idiot' whatsoever and Idiot over here just made it up.  You can't possibly know for sure, and so it's narcissistic to call someone else an idiot when you just be being an idiot yourself.  That's why you're both idiots!"              "But if he made up a false term, then he's the idiot, not me.  How can we both be idiots at the same time?"             "I think our idiot friend Turd over here is too stupid to know about exclusive disjunction alternation."             "Oh!  'P' or 'q' but not both or neither!  Right?  See, I bet Todd didn' t know!"             "Where in duck crumb dumb struck hell did you pull that from?"             "Intuition."             "I bet you just turd that out of nowhere.  I bet it's not even the correct definition."             "I think we need a philosopher.  Is that a word Skip?"  This caused Skip to lower his eyebrows in a dizzying attempt to concentrate.  The word had reminded him of something and sparked a second strange bout of deja vu.  He shook his head a bit in frustration--an action Todd seemed jealous of--then spoke up.  " 'Phylor.'  I think you're talking about a phylor."             "A what?"             "A what?"             "A what?"             The bartender gave a quick look at the pigeons, frused for a quick moment, made a decision, then looked back.             "(Did we just infringe Spaceballs?)"             "(Not even close)."             "I have this vague memory of meeting someone called a 'phylor' once, long ago.  Maybe it was an old dream, but something about the way he talked makes me think he was a very logical person that could explain a few things about your current dilemma."             "There's our purpose in life, then!  The philosopher will know how to help us corporealize our vague lack of sense of our tangible existence.  Do you remember where you thought him up?"             "I thought he said 'phylor', not 'philosopher' ?"             "I dunno, Idiot, I just have this weird feeling like one of the words is some big frwoa's absurd condensed term for the other, though I'm not sure which is which."             "What the hell's a--wait, Skip, do you really remember something from before?  I thought you said you couldn't remember anything before getting off the train."             "He never said anything of the sort."             "I don't know, Todd, the word just triggered it.  Maybe something's coming back to me."             "I know!  I know!  If we take this opportunity to figure out the method that Skip's memories come back rather than just hoping for the specific information, we can use them on ourselves, since whatever he did before meeting us probably won't matter to us a damned bit."             "How phylical.  Alright, we should find somewhere else that might trigger Skip's memories.  Why don't we walk around a bit and see if you recognize something, Skip."             "Yah, Skip, I don't think this whole bar place has done us any good.  You haven't described anything yet.  I still don't know what I look like!"             "You're a pigeon."             "But what is a pigeon exactly?  Am I tall?  Short?  Blonde?  Am I cute pigeon?"             Todd tried to shake his head again but just got plain dizzy at the further head bobbing.  "Come on, Skip, let's go, we gotta hurry!  You have to write your book before the end of the day or somethin' horrible's gonna happen!"             "What in Nonbeing are you babbling about, idiot?"             "Uh, I dunno, it's just this feeling I got...  Like I just knew."             "Looks like you guys might be able to remember something, too.  I think we're starting to make some progress.  Good work, Id."              " 'Id?' "             "He means 'idiot', idiot.  It's short."             "Skip's calling me stupid too?  That's so mean."             "No, it's reverse condescending poetic irony!  Haven't you learned anything in the last minute?  He's suggesting you turn around the insulting nature of my name-calling and nullify its harm by adopting it rather than acting offended and fueling me on.  Then I can't bother calling you an idiot, because it would be rhetorical, and I wouldn't bother being poetically rhetorical to insult you every other sentence, because that would get just plain redundant.  Boy, Id, you're even too idiot to tell when someone's telling you you're not one!"             "Isn't it i-ronic?"             "Docha think?" the other added, as if immediately forgetting his annoyance and jumping right into a sudden friendly sing-along.             "It's like raaaiiin... on your wedding day!"             "It's a free ride, when--"  All three pigeons scattered upward at the loud thump and the sound of breaking glass as the bartender punched the metal cup he'd been cleaning behind him at the wall of beers.  The young man in the corner climatically whistled the last ten notes of his melody, as if the entire period since he'd trailed off had been a crafted, suspenseful pause.             "What was all that about?"             "I think you guys quoted something he didn't like.  And I get the feeling it's not the first time it's happened around here."             "But we were just making that up!  What about coincidence?  Don't I have the defense of happenstance?  I've never even heard of Alanis Moristte."             "Agreed, Id.  I think it's time for us all to bounce."             "We can bounce, too?  Why bother bouncing if we can fly?  How does it work anyway?"             "No, I meant--metaphorically, Id.  It was a poetic metaphor for the obvious observation that now would be a good time to leave.  Especially since the bartender's distracted and we haven't payed for the bread crumbs we ate."             "Then why bother stating it?"             "It was rhetorical!"	"Fire on!"             Frank the bartender glanced over at Skip and his vaguely humanoid water-composed friend.  Skip still wasn't quite clear on what constituted proper social etiquette in Flutonia, but from the look on Frank's face, randomly yelling out in the hopes your body will explode into a mass of fire at a wooden bar table near a storehouse of flamable liquids wasn't included.  A plush chinchilla and octopus broke their attention from their menus with a curious worry.     Kilo frowned at his failure, then began snapping his liquidy fingers to create a spark.  While this seemed much less likely to work, it seemed to provoke a stronger objection from Frank.  He shot a closing fist toward Kilo's hand, and lowered his eyebrows in surprise as it just splished the water harmlessly, although the motion still succeeded in some respect in that Kilo's fingers were now temporarily missing.  The teenager looked up in a rebelious annoyance, but the barkeep simply shook his head implying some aspect of what he'd done was taboo.  Then he slid some free matches on the table over to him and resumed mixing the plush toys' drinks.     "What was all that about?"     Skip lowered his voice to a whisper.  "If I remember clearly, I think the bartender is very particular about copyright infringement and has strict rules about mimicking or alluding to copyrighted frwoa material, even if that isn't the intention.  My guess is you came too close to mimicking some scene in Marvel's big screen rendition of the Fantastic--"  Four people in Frank's Bar halted as Frank slammed his fist on the bar table, causing absolutely nothing to happen except exactly what he'd intended to do: demonstrate his low anger management skills regarding copyrighted references in a threatening manner but not cause a mess.     Frank simultaneously beamed like Peter in Narnia when knighted after his first wolf kill, Lonestar in spaceballs when he lifts a Yogurt statue with a schwartz ring for the first time, Luke Skywalker shooing down his first X-wing, Wesley Crusher after saving the Enterprise in any given episode of Star Trek, Ms. Palmroy in Donnie Darko in that romantic shot as she stares down symbolically at Cherita for no clear reason after cursing loudly in anger up to the sky, Grandma Death in the same film now twice alluded to as she gazes off her porch into the vast and wonderous world of her front yard, and SquishToGo in his prideful Fair Use YouTube videos founded on his impressive education of looking up 'fair use' on Wikipedia.org.     "But why'd he slip me the matches?"     "Maybe he thinks they won't work for you any more than snapping your fingers will.  You'll just get them all wet before they can light."     "But--"  Kilo frused and glanced back at Frank who'd resumed his bar cleaning with a subtlly lifted mood as if having reached some personal goal in time to be ready for the second half of the Hour Frank Accomplished Something Or Other Unbeknowest to Skip and Kilo.  Kilo looked about to ask him something but Frank just slid them a couple complimentary beers.  Kilo reached for his ID but realized he wasn't asked for one, didn't have one anyway, and was probably too young to drink even if he had much of a lower body to hold up jeans and a wallet.             "Isn't he going to ask to see--"             "Shush and drink up, I think he's in a good mood, and we'd better not ruin it.  I'll take responsibility if we discover you're under age and he comes to his senses."  Frank, apparently oblivious, pulled out a heavy stack of paper and began flipping through it with a careful, devious focus.  Kilo's attention jerked back to Skip as he asked the most unoriginal question a creative writer could ask a teenager not particularly preocuppied with future ambitions.     "So, any idea what you want to be when you grow up?"  The indecipherable expression on Kilo's watery face said his expression itself couldn't decide what it wanted to be when it turned into something.  Perhaps it was deciding to what extent Skip was being ironic while being confused as to what curves of facial water should expose such a debate.     "I dunno... a tsunami?"     "I  thought you didn't want to be a murderous instegator of mass death and destruction."     "Right.  So maybe something important like a tsunami, without the death and destruction."     "How about a kiddie pool?"     "Howz'at important?"     "Well, children's imaginations are at their peak just out of the womb, aren't they?  They should still be pretty fresh when they're about kiddie-pool age.  A four foot diameter puddle of tap water could be a vast ocean of life's possibilities to a 2-year old kid."     "What if he pees in me?"     "His youthful epiphanies bound to one day change the world should make up for it."     "What if his epiphanies land the world in a fiery apocalypse?"     "*Then* they're going to need the tsunami."  Kilo was now fumbling with the matches trying to ignite one without getting it wet.  He'd failed with half of them and was now carefully experimenting with the rest before he ran out.  He seemed intensely involved but still had the organization to converse as if thinking deep was second nature.     "Ever get the feeling you're supposed to start something big?  Like *really* big?  Like Flutonia's just some vifa training facility, and some day you're gonna find out there's a whole universe of tangible matter out there and you alone are going to have the brains to think up the ideas that'll save existence from a bunch of green slimy aliens from another universe?  Or that you're some kid Einstein growing up in some sort of dream-like sandbox in a remote corner of hyperspace, and as soon as you figure out what the hell energy is and what it equals, you'll be ready to use your equations to build the wormholes that will let everyone travel around everywhere they need to go?  And that they built this whole place just so you could get a gradeschool history lesson on what life was like before it got all real and stuff?  Or that life already evolved so much that everyone just got bored again and re-created the dawn of the universe just to watch it grow from the comfort of some vifa matter-energy living room?  And that they've made you really important with genes to change the world and stuff because just watching normal people go to work every day is just dead-ass boring?  Or it's all a super computer program and you're supposed to get to the last boss so someone can get back to their boring cubicle job?  Ever feel that?"     Kilo's thoughts--which seemed secondary to his more attentive task of snapping a spark with his fingers--seemed to flow like the water that he was, or at least be fueled by it.  One thought seemed to flow into another like self-similar mental rivers in the same fractal forest.  (Perhaps his body fueled his mind, or his consciousness sustened his body of water; Skip was in no position to ponder the finer points of metaflutaepistemelogical phylo).     It first appeared a tangent, but Skip quickly discarded this as an innacurate interpretation.  While it *was* ramblyish, Kilo's rant also seemed *relevent*--perhaps *very* relevant--to whatever the hell was going on about now or where it was all heading, and seemed intrinsic to who he was as a character.  Whatever it was, it was wet and watery, and in fact seemed to *run* on water, Skip added.  He hence decided to call this a "run-on", however uncreative the term seemed.     Skip found Kilo's particular run-on rant to be as baffling as any other set of ideas he'd had the obligation of pondering.  Skip had just barely started to come to terms with his setting; just barely begun to grasp the careful patterns in which the nonsense of Flutonia re-baffled itself into continuously *worse* nonsense.  That a bored teen who seemed less grounded that even Skip could start thinking about possibilities beyond Flutonia *entirely* was dizzily disconcerting.  Of course, there was the scant relief that Flutonia's pattern of topping it's own bafflingless continued to become exponentially worse at a steady rate, but this wasn't much.     What did it mean; was Kilo even more prolific a prodigy than everyone said Skip was?  Perhaps Kilo was important to all the universe in the way that Skip was supposedly important to the universe's obscure fractal pool of Flutonia.  Only an infinitesimal spec of jealousy prevented Skip's relief at being less important than he previously thought from dominating the moment in utter totality.     "Nope.  I can honestly say that considering my role in all the universe has definitely been off my todo list for the day.  Save any previous friter inconsistancies to that claim proving me wrong, of course."     "Yah.  Same here."     "What do you mean?"     "I mean I just had a thought that maybe someone somewhere was that important, and I was hoping it might be you so I could tag along and do something more exciting than sit in a nameless bar and drink this skanky horse piss."  Kilo took a long, ironic swig of his beer.  Frank was still absorbed in the book he'd pulled out and didn't seem to notice the comment.  The plush chinchilla and octupus at the diner booth were getting ansi for their drinks, which were ready, but sitting bored on the bar table.  Both the plush animals were guaging the distance to the drinks while collaborating on how they might reach them.  Kilo failed with his last match and another set was instantly slid over to him.  He frused, as this all seemed fishy behavior, but shrugged and resumed his attempt to light one.  Perhaps his body's alcohol percentage would allow him to catch on fire a bit if he could get one lit this time.     "Well, we could always think *up* something important.  I mean we thought up the bar, didn't we?"     "Or just walked around Square One and entered the first bar we could find."  Kilo managed to get a match half-lit, but his finger just extinguished it when he tried to touch it.     "Self-fulfilling prophecy, you think?"     "Self-full-what?  No, I'm nowhere near full at all.  I think I have to be like half alcohol or something for this to work.  D--Dammit!"  Kilo chugged the rest of his beer and stuck out his hand behind him for another one.  Frank simply slid him one of the dozen he had lined up without looking.     "What the hell--?  Something's up with Frank.  I think he's too absorbed in that book to realize he's dishing out alcohol to a minor.  That's enough beer, Kilo."     "I have a high tolerance."  Skip shrugged Kilo's rebeliousness only out of a morbid curiosity of finding out what book Frank was reading, and  because of a really fuzzy sense how much at all he was supposed to be looking out for Kilo.  The forgotten chinchilla and octopus were trying to help each other up on a barstool.     "Either way it should work.  If we set out to think *up* adventure and we really can't, then maybe we'll just bump into it anyway."  Kilo got another match lit in vain.  "What we need is a katalyst."     "A whuh?"     "Something to start with.  A nucleus, a focus, a nexus, a.. *spark*... around which everything we do will rotate and grow from.  For the only half hour of life I've known, life has been a whole bunch of random sh!@.  Someone told me it might all start to make sense at some point, but I can't wait that long.  I need to write the greatest Flutonian story ever told by the end of the day, and you want to become the first Flutonian puddle of water in the known universe, something quite worthy of storytelling.  I have some vague sense of worldly writing skills, and you seem to have some odd potential to ripple out into the vastness of existence for lack of anything better to do but drink beer and whine about friter narration.  Somehow we work well together, since we've already thought up a place to get drunk, and who knows what we could think up tomorrow.  I'd say this one's a no-brainer."     "Oh, boy, batman, this sounds fun...  *Not*."  Skip paused to decide whether Kilo's negation of his sarcasm canceled it out or augmented it.  Or perhaps it just weakened it by rhetorically watering down a comment that was already mock true by implication.  Skip took a guess that Kilo's frusing meant he was debating whether sarcasm negation was "in" or not, and whether he should add another "not" if it wasn't.  "Anyway we still need a catalogs, and I'm fresh out of deers."     "You mean 'katalyst', and 'ideas' ?"     "Yah, that's what I drunk."     "Kilo, you're drunk."     "Best state for inspiration...  Matches still aren't working.  Need more booze."  Frank slid him another beer and Kilo tried chugging two at once.  "Alright.  Alright."  Kilo concentrated...  "Katalog... Katalog... alright ok ok ok.  Somethiiing.. *simple*.  Wind?... so been there.  Already sick of waaater...  Fire?  Ice?  A bolt of lightning?  Nah, sound like !@#$ing nerd RPG spells.  Okayyy...  *Earth*.  We'll start with earth.  Big ball of earth.  Yup.  Earth."     "Hunmm... that's not bad, kid.  That's great, actually.  Great!  Okay, since we don't know anything else about it, we'll stick the ball of earth in a completely black void of nothingness.  Then we'll fill the whole void up later, or just procrastinate it indefinitely or until it eventually implodes.     "Freckle it."     "Hunh?"  Kilo was still occupied with the matches and was getting a spark every other match now.     "Freckle the void.  Some acne, or a little dandruff or something, just so people know it's there and don't fall into it or whatever."     "A physical vacuum of corporeality which in its entirety is itself a graspable and pseudo-metaphysical entity!  Thats perfect!"     "Uh, sure."     "Is that all?"     "Hunh?"     "Well how about a bunch of them."     "Isn't that a little much to start off with?"     "Well, you know, we'll just throw in a number so we know how many more balls of earth we have to explore before my frwoa--and your adventure--is finished.  Then we can think up some details for our Earth before we go try to find it... or think to it, or whatever."     "Three."  Kilo lit a flickering match in unison with his suggestion.     "Too boring."     "Four."     "Too fantastic."     Frank half-subconsciously lowered his eyebrows a tad.     "Five."  Light.  Flicker.     "Right out."     Frank's eyebrows lowered another tad.     "Six?"  Light.     "Too Battlestar."  Lower.     "Eight."  Light.     " 'Eight?  What happened to seven?' "     Frank's grip started to tighten in conjunction with his expression.     "Nine?"     "Ninth Gate."     "10?"     "Ten monkeys."     "11?  12?  13?"     "Oceans 11, Oceans 12, Oceans 13."     "Geez.  Alright, something totally random.  37."     "37!?"  Light.  Flicker.  Tight.  Angrier.     "40?"     "The forty year-old Virgin."     "You do *have* some numbers, don't you?"     Frank missed this allusion entirely, as did every Monty Python fan freer within a forty universe mila radius who didn't have every line of every Monty Python skit memorized.     "What kind of number could be the most important in the  universe but not already taken?  Alright, ok, how about forty ttttt--"     Frank shot his arm for the bar towel with baffling speed.     "--*ten*?"     Frank halted, but held still.     "Forty-ten?  Is that a number?"     "(I was going to say 4*2* but I got this odd--)"     The towel whi*pipped* toward Kilo with infathomable speed.  He managed to dodge it, but it had the indirect effect of slapping Kilo's current match and lighting it as it flew from Kilo's hand and fell in a napkin disposer which ignited.  Kilo reached to put it out, but the flame only igniting his hand.  The flame whooshed through Kilo's whole body and for about a half a second he was the exact fire-person he'd been trying to become.  It only lasted a moment as the alcohol he'd absorbed burned off, and Kilo managed to splash out the napkin fire.     Frank's towel, however, was not so lucky.  As Frank whipped it backward from the flame, it burst into a full torch of light as it had recently been used to wipe up a spilled drink.  But instead of stomping on it, dosing it with water, or handing it to Kilo, he instinctively tossed it to avoid getting burnt.  Unfortunately he tossed it on top of an open bottle of tequila, which ignited, as did six others in turn.     The two plush toys were now sprinting for the exit, and Skip tried to pick up Kilo and hurl him at the fire.  The attempt landed him on the floor in a sploosh as if he'd tried to climb a waterfall.  Finally, as Kilo leaped over the bar himself and punched the fires.  Upon extinguishing them he seemed a bit depressed, having hoped to light up himself again.     Strangely, the fire out, everyone awkwardly progressed back to their previous positions in silence as if nothing at all had happened.  The toys at their booth, Frank to his book, and Skip and Kilo back to the beers.  Frank especially seemed nonchalant on the matter, and slid Kilo another beer.     "So.. Earth!"     As Skip and Kilo brainstormed their idea of Earth, Skip noticed the bar seemed to shift and morph around them as they spoke.  He couldn't tell if their very ideas were molding the fabric of the vifa space around them or his subconscious had hidden what was there all along in order to pawn the place off as his own idea.  Or maybe it was a loose-knit dream, shifting one setting to another as the feel of the dream changed.     As Skip and Kilo talked on, the vifa diner booths formalized into totally solid, visible entities.  They became apholstered in bark-brown leather next to lightly draped windows as if a ghostly interior decorater was working on them on some askew plane of existence.  They finally became complete with a salt and papper shaker, napkins, and a bottle of A1 at each table, and the floor became a thin, dark carpet in a vaguely celtic pattern.  The walls were painted in subtle earth tones; the ceiling in a butch gray.     By the time Skip and Kilo's Earth idea was as fleshed out as it was going to be for the moment, the place had achieved a net feel of a uniform cafe/bar.  Nothing clashed.  They'd barely remembered precisely what they'd discussed, but the bar around them stood an ambassador to the very idea of Earth.  It was nothing special, but it was a starting point.  Neither had expected the whole setting around them to change, but nonetheless, right of the bat their plan seemed to be working brilliantly.  They could begin exploring their idea of Earth without even thinking up rockets and transdimensional transporters.  The final result was akin to the final progression of someone sitting at a table eating a bowl of salad while the scene around them changes from a barnyard picnic to a backyard city park bench in a Ranch dressing commercial stressing its manufacturing "Since 1884".     It felt as if an indefinite period of time had passed.  Earth seemed a vast and complex idea, and to have a good enough an idea of what it was to have materialized a random earthly bar must have taken a long time indeed.  Skip looked up at the clock as Kilo took the last swig of the chocolate milk Skip had switched him quite awhile ago, but the clock was different, too.  Before it had seven divisions labeled 1 through 7.  Now it had 12, and five little marks breaking up each twelvth-slice.  Something was wrong.  Even with all the change, it seemed out of place for time itself to have changed systems.  Skip got the mangingly complex feeling that his increasingly clear memory of being in the bar three times that day was somehow entirely reliable to the extent that it went, and that the *lack* of deja vu regarding the clock was also dead-on in being a distortion in his memory apart from all others.     "Why the hell is that like that?"     "Bases."  It was Frank who'd spoken.  Skip didn't have even the faintest memory of any bartender ever doing so.  His voice was as deep and introspective as any character who rarely speaks and then moves mountains the rare moments they break silence.  Of course, the epiphany-deep tone had little or nothing to do with the fact that Frank's words seemed as mundane and useless as possible.     "What?"     "New clock."  It was a conclusive statement, as if the meaning of "Bases; new clock" was very clear, and any clarification or elaboration for anyone clueless enough to not know what they meant--or dense enough not to accept them as an exciting mystery if they had genuine reason to be unfamiliar with them--was completely out of the question.     "It's supposed to be 1:43."     "It is."  Somehow Kilo found it easier to read the new clock.     "Then we have a lot to do.  Come on, kid, I think our plot's about to pique."     "Shouldn't we stick around and help Frank out with his whole scheme to burn the bar down and collect the fire insurance?"  Skip looked carefully at Frank and could finally read the title of the bright neon book Frank had pulled out just after they'd walked in:     "How to Burn Down Your Bar And Collect the Fire Insurance For Dummies."	"Ever get the feeling that it's always TO BE CONTINUED...?"              The man who'd introduced himself as Lt. Skiff Freckler sipped at a blue-green drink he'd called Athlorian Ale.  He hadn't asked for it directly (as he had been familiar with the pub's inventory), but had simply ordered a vifa Rum and Coke.  Then he'd aimed his multi-siff device at the glass offered him, and with a single "shmeep" the color had swirled from black to a sparkly pre-drunk turquoise.              Skip--on a stool beside him--had commented that Skiff said it was just a scanning device, who replied, "Some substances react strangely to multi-siff devices.  Something about the noise emitions annoying its composition on the molecular level, if you could imagine that alcohol and cola molecules can be annoyed!  Anyway, this button has the effect of turning Rum and Coke into Athlorian Ale."  He pushed it to demonstrate, and a bottle of Tequila below the bar burst into flames as Frank the barkeep rushed to put it out.              Skip waited until the fire had been put out to order, but before he did was handed a tall metal cup of filtered water.  Distracted, he glanced around the bar.  Like most everything in Flutonia, it was more like a vague idea for a bar: a vifa bar, in a vifa time.  Or *mix* of times.  Or time *lines*.  (Or something like that.)  It was largely made of metal, and minute specs and flecks of light zipped and freckled the floors and walls.  Two seemingly intelligent metal balls that looked absolutely nothing like a kino, toclofane, or Babylon 5 ISN camera hovered back and forth between a handful of access panels a dozen feet up.  A plush chinchilla and a toy rocket at a diner booth were sharing an August issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.               If Skip had never lived a day before he'd entered it, the place would still feel futuristic.  Thoughts of his past--and his present--seem to fade away into irreleventness, as if it was only the future that mattered.  Yet since the future never arrives until it does (Skip had noted in the past) this is probably why things seemed vague and incoherent.  It was a perfect place to brainstorm a topic for the the most important Future Fiction frwoa Skip would ever write.              "Yes and no."              "...Like your life is just a single spec of sentience on a vast multi-net of zillions of pages?  With no end, ever, because nobody on it thought to put up a linkless 'dead end' page to serve as an ending?"              "No.  Not really."              Lt. Freckler visually scanned the bar with a mathematical precision that indicated he'd been spending way too much time with his multi-siff scanning device.  Or perhaps the two were directly linked; maybe a tiny brainchip that allowed the two to communicate.  Skip had little idea as he had almost no experience with the future.  He mentally noted his mental observation for possible topic material.  "This sector gives me the bizarre feeling that everything's just getting started.  Not our conversation, or the day, or our mission to capture the cyberpigeons, but just, *everything*.  Like this whole sector is a little sector-sized microcosm of the Big Bang."              Skip's head jerked upward like a novelist rabbit who'd heard the predatory howl of writer's block and was now frantically factoring the Write or Flight equation.  This was in part due to the fact that a big *bang!* usually means someone has fired a gun--which isn't a good thing to hear when you're a rabbit--but more because the event of initializing something enormous and significant was something he was quite used to by now.  Maybe because he was to write the greatest Future Fiction frwoa ever written, or maybe because he was present when the most important glowing blue button in the known universe was pressed.  Of course, he wasn't sure if he was the one who'd pressed it--or even if it was really pressed at all for that matter--because his amnesia of recent and long-term history was definitely getting worse; or maybe better, he really couldn't remember, which is another reason the future  bar seemed vague.              "What do you think of the observable universe, Mr. Novelist?  As a writer, is science viable?  Or do you think philosophy has it right?  I've been thinking of switching and like a writer's opinion, because an artist is a very objective third party to the two."  Skiff spoke less genuinely and more nervously, as if he was only grasping to initiate a meaningful dialogue to ward off a deadly crisis that would most certainly pause for a slow moment in the frwoa.  He kept scanning the room methodically with his gaze.  He seemed in an overly mundane place that was simply taking its bloody time to reveal the tragic crisis he was worried about.  Every moment it didn't happen seem to upset him and make him all the more antsy to get a meaningful conversation going.              "I'm afraid no type of celestial galactic is event is the foremost thing on my mind, Lt. Freckler."              "Oh, and what would that be?"              "The massive sluggish alien just outside the window behind you that I'm taking a wild guess is an urgg."              "What?  Where?"              The alien entered the bar with the look of exhaustion from a long day of executing uncooperative humans.  While Skip was sure he'd never seen a space alien before, he somehow knew how generic it was.  It was greenish, slimy, ugly, had two small fidgety antennas atop its head, and a crude ray gun and uniform that suggested its race had gone to space before it had evolved sufficient weaponry and tailors.              "Ah, my worthy nemesis!  We meet at last!  I hope you brought your wits and most accurate vaporization gun, for you are about to meet your doom."              "Not today, you ugly waste of an unevolved puddle of swamp lard!  It's you who I hope has brought your wits and most accurate slime gun, for now is the moment you will pay for the destruction of the Excalibur and the death of my father!"              "Father?  Ha!  You demean my prolific skills as a cold-blooded murderer.  Need I remind you I've also eliminated your sister, brother, mother, crew, first born, extended family on your late father's side, the other side, and everyone you've ever known or loved?  If I die today I will die knowing your defeat is total and complete."              "Except for your own death, old foe!"              "Ha!  We shall see!  En guard!"              Skip's Write or Flight mechanism suddenly accelerated into high warp.  While he might have a decent chance of reaching the door without getting shot or vaporized, his writing career was in the same danger if he didn't start taking some serious mental notes.  A climax dual between a mighty protagonist and his nemesis (which was which, he wondered?) would certainly award him material to jump start his vast and timeless frwoa about the vacuum of space beyond Earth, especially since the frwoa's non-manifestation by the end of the day would almost certainly result in his death anyway, and perhaps that of the known universe.  It was pretty much a no-brainer for Skip to stay, which of course was totally inconsequential to Skip's lunge for the door.  Only when he realized no one in the bar had done the same did he realize the plush chinchilla and toy rocket had been reciting lines from a science fiction screenplay they'd pulled out.              Skip walked nonchalantly back to his stool, and the sitting bar alien simply yawned and ordered a Rum and Coke.  One of two youths at a diner booth in tight, futuristic military uniforms couldn't stop staring.  Only when Skip saw a handful of action figures and a book labeled "Wars Trek" did he realize the two were probably visiting the time line for a Fue-fi convention.  The very real-life alien gave a subtle "urrrgmmf.." as if expecting something inexorable and annoying from them any time soon.  The excited one tapped his buddy on the shoulder and pointed, who gaped as if laying eyes on the greatest being in the known universe.              "Oh my god!  It's a V--"              "I'm an *urgg*, youg primitive twerp.  Gret your frwoas straight.  Flgurth is the most important frwoa in the entirety of your mgeasly ku, ngot some vrague idea for a flagranded friretale story."  At the word "urgg", Skiff had aimed his device toward the alien and begun tapping it.  The second Wars Trek nerd whispered to his friend.              "('Flatlanded fire tale story'?)"              "(It's alien sarcasm.  He's mocking NASA's early progress in space travel, like we might as well think the Earth is flat if we haven't fully explored Sol yet, never mind the Milky Way.)"              "Try nerber mind the rgest of your *ku*, worm."  The urgg answered without turning as if the insult came like breathing and required no actual focus.              "('Ku'?)"              "(Likely urgg slang for 'known universe'.  He probably says he's from another one and his race's sciences have advanced so far that they've managed inter-universe travel, when he probably just licked the wrong swamp frog and passed out into a fantasy where he has more than 10 brain cells.)"  Their comments faded into techno-babble, and the urgg gave a bored sigh.  He looked to Frank for a standard barkeep shoulder to rant on, but as he was busy doing barkeep things, turned to Skiff.  Skiff seemed too busy scanning him, so finally he turned to Skip, who looked boring enough to have time to shrug and nod at his life's story.              "Why is always 'V'?  I don't look like any alien of  your frwoa space that starts with 'V', and yet it's always 'V'.  I've gotten Vulcan, Vorlon, Vorta, Vorc, Vorcoran, Vorcacorian, Vinean, Venek, Versus..."              " 'Versus'?"              "I thgink someone saw 'Alien Vs. Predator' and thought 'Vs' was an alien, and somehow frigured I lgooked like one."              "An alien?"              "No, a 'Versus'."              "I don't think you look like a 'Versus'.  I mean a 'versus' seems like he would have more of a--"              "Oh!  And 'Vogon'.  That's the wgorst!  And the only 'V' alien I even resemble.  I'm big, sluggish, and ugly, so of course I'm a mgember of stgupidest race portrayed in 20th century 188th billennia Earth fiction.  Wgorst frwoa ever written.  Makes all big ugly aliens look like brgainless retards.  I've had fgour people actually recite award-winning poetry atg me just for the igrony.  In fact that entire frwoa is just braignless lard mush as far as I'm goncerned."              The second Fue-fi fan spooned his ice cream and mumbled to his friend.  "I dunno what he means.  I rather *liked* Hitch--"              There was an utterly nonvogonic sound as the urgg vaporized the defenseless Wars Trek nerd.  The gun intentionally paused for effect at the other, who took the hint and bolted for the door.  Optimistically, the scene foreshadowed only a half-tragic ending... until the urgg vaporized him anyway.  Skiff--oblivious to both executions--was still blmeeping his siff device at the urgg, tapping it with almost android relentlessness.  The urgg treated the scan like a harmless swamp fly doing its thing and turned to Skip again, whose Write or Flight mechanism had now fully kicked in, booted, crashed, and frozen.              "Why is it always 'V'?"              As if to demonstrate his question was dull and unanswerable, two exceptionally regular and non-futuristic pigeons interupted it by striding into the bar.              "Skip!  What are you doing here!  You aren't supposed to be around here at all!"  The one who'd spoke flew up to the bar table beside him in a pseudo-clumsy manner that Skip could only call "flupluling".              While Skiff had only been interested in the alien enough to point his scanning device at it, the pigeons were clearly infinitely more dangerous, as he yanked the urgg's ray gun out of its holster and aimed at the defenseless bird, both tremoring with an otherworldly terror.  He flicked his thumb and the device gave a charging sound as if it was preparing to go self destruct and nuke an entire star base into stray electrons.              "Wretched bird beast!  Back to hell from whenst you--"              In a single motion, the urgg took a last swig of his drink while plucking the gun from Skiff's hand, flicking the thumb switch as he lifted it.  The gun charged down as if it had decided that nuking a mere star base wasn't worth the self-sacrifice and it would wait for another day when it could be of more use.              Frank looked up from his oblivious bar cleaning, gave a brief frown of concentration as he mentally replayed the scene he'd missed, decided there wasn't anything currently worth worrying about, and resumed his cleaning.  At the same time, one of the non-kino, non-toclofane, non-ISN-camera ball-things got distracted and hovered down to the scene as if turning on a fairly new soap opera he'd only just now discovered, then gave a disgruntled beep as the other yanked it back to its terminal with a slinky-shaped tractor beam. TO BE CONTINUED...
"Well that was unproductive."     "Touche.  So where to now?"     "While I usually have things under strict control, I have to admit I'm at a loss at what to do with a writer who's lost his mind, got off his rock, and completely forgotten what he's supposed to be doing there."     "Perhaps we should find someone more competent."     "Darlene!  We should find Darlene.  Come on, why don't you keep up your narrating practice as we walk."     " 'Skip and the still-nameless Worflii--' "     " 'Toad.' "     " 'Skip and the dwarf with the absurd name in full-plated armor--which either harbored a few plotches of blood or a couple remaining polka dots from Skip's earlier misinterpretation (Skip couldn't decide which)--strode the vifor streets over a period of time that it was completely pointless to bother relaying.  The whole transition was an imposition on any freader hovering about, as it was being relayed simply for Skip's benefit of practicing his narration skills.  It also had the second purpose of a cheap ploy to ensure continuity, because for some strange reason, the hovering friter was wrapping local events around a skeleton plot structure that involved having no break in the scene from the last to the next, no matter how awkward the segway.     " 'Finally, after a long and seemingly endless walk, Skip and Toad arrived at the office building just fifty feet next door, and entered a small, plain office.  Some sort of chubby secretary was typing at some sort of vifa desk top computer.  She glanced at a clock, whose hands read just under quarter past one.' "     "Not bad, Skip, but shut up for the moment, would you?  Darlene!  Thank god you're on your shift."     "A strange comment, dwarf, since I've never left my desk even to pee in the history of the known universe."  She spoke without removing her eyes from her computer monitor, as if the flies who'd just entered might be shooed away with a few words as she was too busy to swat them.     "Worflii!  I'm a worflii!"  Darlene melodramatically thwaked a small red button on her keyboard while continuing her rushed typing, which sounded like the clickety-click of a racing sleigh of a dozen horses on a titanium road.     "What do you want, Toad, I'm very busy self-integrating a hundred poorly defined tasks into explanation tables of why they need to be self-integrated."     "What else do you ever do?"     "Once this is done I'll let you know.  So what is it?  Oh, good day to you, Skip."     "I suppose it might be if I had any other to compare it too."     "What's he talking about?"  Clickety clackety click clackclick.     "Our acquaintance Skip has kindly decided to loose his mind on the day on the day he's supposed to submit his first frwoa novel to the Developing Arts Council, causing me to clear my schedule for the day and help him out, as if I don't have anything better to do."     "Faking."  Clacketyclick click-clack clack-clack-clack.     "I don't think so.  He didn't have the art of deception down very well before, never mind improvisation, and he was trying so diligently to improve both.  It's unlikely he could hit such a sudden breakthrough in both skills to be able to carry on a farce of this magnitude.  Also, being unkind enough to thrust the task of fixing this up on me is entirely unlike him."     "He must have decided the skill of deception would be most useful if no one had any idea he was capable of it, and began lying about his progress.  Then he developed harmonizing his improv skills along with them, continuously concealing both.  As to his morals, they don't surpass his ego, and he probably considers the artistic progress of an all-important friter secondary to abusing the generosity of a close friend.  He *is* in fact clever, so if he's planned the whole thing well enough, you'll never even find out that he's screwing you over." Clackclacklacklickclack.     "And yet, I don't think the precedence ratio of his ego to his morality surpasses that of your ego to your pessimism."     "Touche.  So is this why you've come?  To see if I'd care enough about either of your dilemmas to raise a finger off my keyboard to help you out?"  Clickcliklack.     " 'Darlene's rudeness and frantic typing were both a little much so even for her, which indicated to Skip that something else important had recently come to her attention and irritated her.' "     "How rhetorically intuitive."     "Of *course* that's why we're here.  Now can you do anything to help us or not?"     "Absolutely not.  Our local frwoa budget is still plummeting.  We initially thought we'd have to begin cutting blockbuster movies down to tv miniseries, and book chapters down to half their size, but now we're down to reducing the former to mere ten-minute independent film student projects, and the latter down to loose pages and unrevised paragraphs.  They might as well be down to letters or pixils for anyone in financing cares.  And since you've been in the office quite long enough to comprise a short scene--and are probably well over a page in any prose frwoa hovering about--it's about time you left before it becomes a longer one and taxes the budget."     " 'This seemed to begin explaining the feeling Skip had had just outside, who now frowned in confusion as to what a frwoa or movie or miniseries even was exactly.  The worflii continued oblivious to Skip's momentary dilemma, and to the surreal fact that Skip had predicted that he would speak before he even did so.' "     "What if we simply paused and resumed our dialogue in a few moments?"     "Out of the question.  Now get going.  When I have a spare moment I'll run a couple searches see if there's anything I can do to help, if only to be rid of the potential monotony of these scenes keeping up all day long.  Now shoo."	"You two look quite confrused."     "Confrusion necessitates clarity, Darlene.  I'm hoping you have a way to invert ours to the latter."     "I haven't hit my break yet so I haven't gotten a chance to look for anything, given Skip just asked seven minutes ago.  I assume he's bullshitting a second bout of amnesia from the fact that you're back already, because he usually wouldn't be quite that pesty.  On an average day, he'd wait at least another couple sours before--"     "How does she know that word?  I thought you said I made it up later?"     "Gossip's a bitch.  In the time it took you to walk here, the shady fellow in Frank's bar in the corner you probably hadn't noticed called me up and relayed the whole incident.  Quite a dramatic scene, I must say, Mr. Nameless Phylor.  For someone who knows how a tiny chip in a glass could unravel the fabric of existence at *any* self-important event in the history of Okuaka, just plain smashing two of them entirely--then handing over a fictional formula for a copyrighted substance to someone who never remembers to pay his licensing fees--is just plain nuts.  The Council is sure to de-rez you to bits.  I'd ask when your grand temporal tampering trial is but you wouldn't tell me if you knew.  Noninterference directives indeed.  You probably invaded Skip's Adventures In Writing Block just to purchase a couple shares of stock of some idea *that* will be all the rage by the end of time, if anything becomes of my whole stock market idea.  Would you like to invest in that?  If you don't have any money on you I also have an idea for a digital monetary transfer service.  I could even--"     "This is serious, Darlene; my tot here dumped me completely off target, and now Skip--"     "Dumped?  Ha, got off at the wrong stop is more like it.  Your sense of physical direction is as miserable as Skip's sense of *plot* direction.  Probably gawking at some short-skirted unified phylo theory and got off two stops too late."     "Darlene, that's it!"     "Pervert.  See, Skip?  I'll bet you twenty it was underage, too."     "No, the tot had some sort of temporal surge as it had some brilliant idea, and ran away with itself for a moment.  When it caught itself, it assured us it had slowed down enough to compensate.  It must have been wrong, and got exactly two chapters ahead of itself!  Or maybe just crossed over and just skipped two pages, frangle-depending...  That's right, it was a cyclic tot. It must have gone straight through page frot 343 and I got off at page frot 9 instead of frot 338 where I was going, and then--"     "Bases!"     "Oh, sorry, Skip."     "Accepted, for I have no idea why I should be bothered anyway, as I stopped paying attention to all this undefined terminology quite awhile ago.  Maybe I'm supposed to define it later... or earlier, or something."     "I'm sure the confusion will help inspire you to fictionalize an idea for a Base-7 / Base-10 Harmonization Unification Template Theory totally useless to practical mathematics, but that by my time will eventually result in my studying of the infinitely developed field inspired by your work--later in the day."     "What in Okuaka makes you say that?"     "Too much!  I'm saying too much.  But frack it.  At least we're a step closer to figuring out this crisis, given our confusion is finally back on track!"     " 'Darlene thwacked a red button to her side, as Skip uselessly narrated the event as it was the only one in the scene with any kind of narration.  It must have meant it was an important one.  Or maybe someone involved had just been incompetent.' "     "Come on, Skip, let's find Dr. Vifps.  The first thing you're going to need to buy more time is a note of your condition for the DAC Temporal Mental Instability Form.  Darlene, I don't suppose you could just punch up the website and print out--"     "Out!"	So now you're a vet."  Skip and two pigeons stepped into a small, busily-lit office.  It only had one occupant--a heavyset and exceptionally middle-aged woman who was the single cause of the room looking busy--busier than it would have if there were ten occupants--who sat at a very haughty and important looking desk, as if if the stability of the known universe depended on its the management skills of its occupant and it was hence the second most important inanimate object in the universe.             The first was clearly the bright glowing neon-blue seven foot radius button taking up the entire left office wall.             The button stood tall as if with folded arms with the unspoken words "Push me, and you'll learn a thing or two about quantum-repellent security force field space."  The secretary was busily typing at a pear-shaped desktop computer as if the thing was about to explode and nuke a billion-mile radius if she didn't do her job with maximum efficiency.  Every press of a key on her keyboard was like a click of a team of emergency architects staple-gunning a hammock around a live nuclear bomb in hopes it will keep the explosion back.  Click.  Staple.  Staple.  Click.             Todd walked carefully up to the button with a caution that seemed uncanny for a fluttery pigeon.  He somehow seemed serious, as if he'd suddenly remembered he'd been a legendary adventurer in a past life and was quite frused to discover his archnemesis temporarily encased in carbonite here and now.             Staple.  Click.  Clickityclicklickclick.  "You best get those pigeons out of here before I hit my pigeon vaporization key."  Id and the other took this infinitely seriously and fluttered out the door to the safety of the park sidewalk.  Todd simply continued staring at the glowing blue button as if her words didn't apply to a thrice-knighted legendary warrior.              Skip felt an odd sort of peer pressure to act similarly.  As far as they'd seen so far, he and the pigeons had had a very similar lapse of memory, and the idea they would recover faster than him made him feel a delinquent in an anonymous support group for recovering survivors of existential lobotomy operations.  Since his treja vu told him he'd definitely been in the office at least one or two times before--and yet had no memory of ever seeing a giant glowing blue button in his lifetime or any past reincarnation--it wasn't hard to fake the half-lie to fit in with Todd's sudden partial recovery and improving long-term prognosis.  He quickly decided the best course of action to save face would be to assume his vague memories were on target and inquire about the thing he couldn't remember ever seeing.             "Ah, what have we here?  Something new?"             Darlene raised an eyebrow.  "I'd forgotten a few extra things I have to do today and decided I don't have time to deal with your amnesia problem, so to compensate I flicked the decloak lever next to the button you're gawking at hoping it will jump start your your plot and get you out of my hair for the day."             "But what is it?"             "The most important button in the known universe.  Nothing you need worry about."  Clickety click clacky clickity...             "What does it do?"             "Dammed if I know."  Click clik click...             "What do you think it does?"             "No idea."             "You must have theory."             "Nnnope."             "But, supposing you did know, and were holding back on telling me for your own twisted, manipulative purposes, what--hypothetically speaking--would that purpose be?"             "I'm a secretary.  I don't deal with hypotheticals."  Clickyclack cleckity.  "And if I did, I would be much too busy to make an exception at the moment."             Todd hadn't moved from his regal, introspective stance.  It was quite disconcerting behavior from a pigeon.  The other two--in contrast--were poking in and out of the room watching Darlene's fingers like your standard pigeon might keep walking back to a lumberjack in a park who had threatened them with a chainsaw, while deciding on the minimal time period it would take before he got tired of being mean to them and threw out some bread crumbs to shoo them off.  They watched Darlene closely, and every time she moved to hit a key they hadn't seen her hit before, they fled back out in case it was the one she'd threatened to murder them with.             "Alright, suppose a heavenly messenger of light descended from heaven and told you god has granted you one wish that you could have anything under the stars you could think up, but the fine print of the order form he handed you said the wish had to be something to do with the purpose of this button, what would you wish its purpose to be?"             "Are there any hidden fees?"             "No."             "Shipping and handling to send the form back up?"             "Just a stamp."             "Mandatory life insurance for the angel in the unlikely situation he gets struck by a bolt of lightning, jet, air balloon, blimp, projectile missile, or any other object at all not listed in the above objects?"  Click click click.             "Nope."             "Overdraft fees for every extra wish I make over my limit if I forget after the first that my balance already hit zero?"             "No.  Your entire temporary membership expires the moment your wish is granted."             "In that case, I'd wish the button re-initializes the big bang prematurely and gives you something more important to worry about than bothering me with your amnesia problem."  Click, clack, click.  "Now shoo, all of you.  You have your important crisis, now go figure it out yourselves."             Todd finally broke his introspective silence with an eerily poetic monotone.  "And its glow had all the beaming of a shadow's eyes deceiving."  Darlene loudly thwacked a red button on her keyboard sending Id and his friend fluppering out the door for their lives.  "Shoo!"            Skip was as confused as he could ever remember being.  Todd looked solemnly confused himself, and wandered out the door after his friends, soaking in some sort of personal dilemma.  Skip was too dumbstruck to worry about issues of peer pressure, and simply followed the pigeons' lead.             "Riddles in the blue glow."            Thwack.	>             Skip expected something different, but everything was the same.  In Office B was the middle of the beginning of the beginning of his short life as an obscure frwoa friter somewhere between a nonsensical novella and the end of the known universe known as Okuaka.  Next to it was the feeling that things were about to get even more confusing than usual for anyone not in the room.  But that's not what was exactly the same.  What was exactly the same was everything *else*.  The office, Darlene, her Pear-brand computer, the bright neon self-important blue button on the far wall that practically said "PUSH ME", Darlene's incessant clicketycleck keyboard typing, the presence of someone new... all the same.  Yet different.  Sort of. >             "Hello Skip, Kilo, come to badger me again about  your vague confusion regarding Flutonian life since the last time you did so?" >             "Yes, that's it exactly!  Darlene... What on Earth is happening to Square One?" >             "A strange question, Skip, since the answer has recently relocated to this very room." >             Kilo frused. >             Skip frused. >             Darlene frused, missed a blink, and typed something up that she seemed frustrated she had to bother with.  Skip took a guess that she was concerned that his and Kilo's frusing necesitated a description of the action in a prose rendition of the frwoa in question, hence necesitated a definition of "fruse" for the scene to make any sense.  Skip supposed she would probably also have to define "frwoa", "frite", "siff", blink", "blue", and just about any other word used to portray the scene in a text medium.  Why she seemed to be compelled to do so now was unknown; yet what Skip wouldn't give to have a look at the index baffled him. >             "What answer?  Kilo?  Me?" >             "The button?  The clock?  The water molecules of Kilo's body of water?  The microscopic killer giraffafly in the corner you never notice?  Who the hell knows." >             "But I thought you just said--" >             "If I had all the answers, Skip, I wouldn't be working an obscure secretary desk job at the dawn of the known universe as far away from anything interesting imaginable, now would I?  And I certainly wouldn't have to limit my daily entertainment to seeing your disappointed facial expressions every time you fail to call my bluffs." >             "I suppose you wouldn't at that." >             Clickety clickliky. >             "But..." >             Darlene traded a couple keystrokes for a speedy sigh. >             "...supposing you did have all the answers; supposing you were a great and mighty oracle with access to all the answers to life and the universe and--" >             There was a loud *thwack* as Darlene hit the red button on the edge of her keyboard.  Kilo noted was marked "Fair Use." >             "--everything *else*, right there on your Dull desktop, and that in that infinite matrix of data and archives and information was the one file that could tell us what on Earth is happening or has happened or will happen or why anyone should *care*, what would... well, I mean, can you open that file from here or is it on a back up disc in the back room I should go fetch for you? >             " 'Darlene suddenly halted her typing, and Skip could almost imagine the sound of an angry town as all power went out in a 40 mile radius, or the panic of passengers on a starship that had suddenly lost its heading and defaulted to a head-on collision with the nearest starbase.  Or a class of philosophy students about to fail their mid-term given the server of the TOA they'd hacked into was suddenly spouting quantum engineering equations.  She spoke as if a whimsical, tiny microcosm of a great and mighty oracle with access to all the answers to life and the universe and -- *THWACK!!* --- everything *else*, right there on her desktop computer.' " >             "No I don't."  clicketickytickCLICklkCLIK... >             "Yes, you do." >             "Nnnnnope."  Cliklickclick...  "And you probably shouldn't be narrating like that, the visitors might get confused." >             "The whu-?  Please, Darlene.  What's happening?"  Perhaps just to mock him, Darlene suddenly did exactly what Skip had suggested he do via his narration.  Surreally, Skip had the sense that Darlene's break was of no major consequence to whatever she was doing.  Perhaps a sped up parallel universe had called in his narrative prophecy and adequate precautions had been taken to prevent the blackout and save the starship and starbase of people from untimely violent death (at least those not sitting down in a mess hall discussing the moral siff themes embedded into their lives, which almost certainly would save anyone in space from *any* type of untimely death).  Darlene frused, relaxed, then inhaled for a thoughtful speech entirely unlike her. >             "Have you ever had a dream, Skip, that you were so sure was real?  What if--"  She shook her head as if a writer crossing out a line of prose realizing it was someone else's, reached up and thwacked the red key again, then began fresh. >             "I do quite a bit this desk, Skip, and have been doing it for a long time.  I align vifa templates, correlate spreadsheets, and moderate traffic between high numbers of databases and pages and people.  In all that time, do you know what I've learned?" >             Kilo shrugged. >             Skip stared rhetorically. >             " 'Then Darlene told Skip and Kilo most important thing anyone had or would ever tell anyone in the entirety of Flutonia and perhaps in the history of the entire known universe known as Okuaka, who were so floored that they did their best to push themselves into immediate denial regarding any relevance the information might have to their immediate dilemmas.' " >             "Good try, Skip, but no.  And for your annoying intrusion, I'm not even going to tell you.  But I will answer your question." >             Kilo frused. >             Skip stared rhetorically. >             "Your answer, my clueless novelist and delinquent watery teenager, is the visiting freer."  Darlene resumed her typing as this clearly answered all the questions of the increasingly frusing Skip and Kilo. >             " 'Freer'..." Skip rolled the word of his thoroughly defined tongue.  "Strange word, I know I've heard it before..." >             Kilo concentrated as if missing a vocabulary term in English from falling asleep then hoping he might have absorbed it subconsciously.  "When was that, Skip?" >             "A few moment ago when Darlene used it, and then I heard myself say it just after it when I repeated it.  Aside from that, I only have a feeling it might be in the title of our frwoa or something, but it's just a vague feeling.  And of course some time before that, and perhaps even before I lost my memory this morning; and of course the term just by its phonetics seems perfectly self-explanatory, but just to be sure, Darlene, what in the hell are you talking about?  What on Earth is a 'freer'?" >             "Freer!  Fractal reader!  Frwoa seer!  Frangles freader!... The person hovering about who just leaped into our story when you walked in the door and is probably confused as hell right now.  Have you even lost your basic sense of vocabulary, Skip?  This just gets better and better."  Darlene smiled a mischievous grin while she brainstormed cruel mind games for them that they couldn't begin to guess at."  Clicketyclickcklik... >             "So..."  Skip risked a further interrogation.  Darlene sighed.  "How is a 'freer'--whatever that is--the answer to what's happening to Square One?  I mean, first thing I know I get off a train and meet this lost kid here--" >             "You're as lost as I am, Skip." >             "(No, I meant lost in the abundant imagination of youth thrust upon you when you became a clueless teen.)" >             "(Right.  Sorry.)"  He bit his nails and shut up as he decided it was best not to question adults who knew what they were talking about.  His glance kept returning to the clock in the room as if antsy for lunch or free block. >             "--and converse out of boredom hoping to think up something more interesting to do around here, then suddenly we find ourselves--" >             "Stop right there, Skip."  Backspace backspace backspace.  "You probably shouldn't reveal too many details about what's been going on.  It would hinder the modularity of the freer's experience.  It's part of what I do, you know, organizing a ton of freer traffic of people who aren't quite sure where they came from or where they're going.  That's why the office looks just as you remembered it.  If it looked anything like the whole Earth-like environment you've been noticing outside--"  Darlene stopped and stared morbidly as if hitting her first wrong key since she learned to type as a toddler.  " 'Earth'... I shouldn't have said that."  She sped up her typing as if letting Hitler loose in a school playground and trying to forget about it by sinking deeper into her work. >             "Ah!  So you're not flawless after all.  Now would you mind explaining how our idea of Earth is shifting Flutonia all around us, why it's not doing it here, why knowing what's happening in the story they're reading ruins the story for the freer, and what on Fluton Prime we're going to do about all of the above." >             Kilo slightly perked back to attention.  He'd probably heard the term 'Fluton Prime' and decided the idea was worth thinking about, if not whatever relevance it had in the conversation he was still ignoring. >             "Alright, Skip, look.  We've been having some significant issues with the modular nonlinear servers installed last week.  They seem to be upsetting the structure of our usual frwoa space.  Usually about now you come in and say something generic, and I say something back, and no one who'd overhear our interaction would have any clue exactly what any of it meant, leaving them clueless enough to keep reading whatever any friter decides to write next.  But as I've just been fmailed, non-generic scenarios have been popping up all over the place >             Particularly in regards to you, you seem to be thinking up this whole 'Earth' place and it's been re-forming the frwoa space around you via your desperate struggle for any sort of setting to start your story.  Actually thinking up a topic for once has screwed over the ambivalence we're usually used to here; a principle that seems to happening in many other ways with others, too.  And now we seem to have to mention 'Earth' to figure out what the hell to do about it.  In short, for the moment, and for *once*, I actually have a personal motive to bother dealing with you or helping you out. >             Skip beamed as if this were a compliment from a messenger of god, then frowned as he realized it was likely the inverse.  Kilo glanced around the room and was probably wondering why the hell he was still in the scene as he didn't seem to be acting much of a sidekick protagonist at the moment.  Though maybe being silent deepened his character attribute of being a clueless, dense teenager, and contributed to the dismal foreshadowing that he would never progress as a dynamic character as long as he was under eighteen.  As if reading Skip's thoughts, he confirmed them all with an A-for-the-delinquent-day class question. >             "What's a freer again?" >             Darlene blinked. >             Skip--who *had* been paying attention--embarrassingly rolled his eyes as he wasn't quite clear on the issue either. >             "Look, idiots.  Life is like a story, and a story has to begin *somewhere*.  You were both frustrated with the lack of corporeality of Flutonia, so your imaginations led you here.  Skip is supposed to write a great and mighty self-important story by the end of the day, and he was so frustrated with his writer's block lost in the infinity of vast nothingness, that he finally," Darlene clicked the Fair Use button ahead of time, 'decided once and for all where the hell he wanted to be.'  And Kilo seems to be *from* Earth, so from *his* frangle, there's really no other place he's ever *been*--" >             "Except for the total nonexistence of Earth just before we thought it back up..." >             "Yes, of course.  Anyway, out of all the places and topics in the entirety of Okuaka, for the moment this Earth frwoa seems to be happening, and apparently you two idiots are its main protagonists, so you better go figure the whole place out, because if you keep talking about the damn thing around here when I've told you why it's disrupting my work and all of Flutonia, I'll simply type you out of existence." >             "Can she do that?" >             "Uhh." >             "Skip, can she do that?" >             "..." >             Awkward pause. >             Clickketiy. >             Thoughtful pause.    >             Clickckck. >             Click click clikety clickkdk-- >             "So what's a freer again?" >             "Get out!  Out, out, out!  Come back when your fully confrused again and aren't asking me sensible questions to which I don't currently know the answers.  Even if I did, I doubt I'd tell you, as it's much more fun to watch you suffer than take time off work to help you out.  And I certainly feel justified in causing you some trouble, because as Skip would say, story necessitate conflict!" >             Pause. >             Click. >             Click. >             Pause. >             "Either get out and stay out for the day, or screw me over and push the damned button for once in your miserable lives.  It'll leave me with a week's worth of infringement papers if it turns out to be an infinite probability drive, but at least I'd be rid of *you* too.  Assuming it doesn't turn me into a lump of cow dung or a bowl of falling petunias!"  *THWACK!!* >             Skip headed for the door with a monotonous, unsatisfied deja vu.  Kilo, however--who'd taken a sudden sense of life-long uselessness away from the conversation--decided to push the bright ominous glowing button in the corner.  Clearly he deemed teen life pointless enough to skip seeking assurance that the button didn't nuke Square One or implode Okuaka. >             Kilo pushed it. >             It beeped. >             Skip blinked. >             Kilo frused. >             The office lights flickered a tad. >             Darlene sighed with the depressed wisdom of the plagiarized bowl of petunias now twice alluded to. >             Skip worried.  Less for the safety of anyone in the room, and more for Darlene's wrath in the case her nonlinear frwoa issue was about to be exponentially tripled. >             Darlene looked at the clock as if something was not on time. >             Kilo frused at the clock as if the final bell for the day hadn't rung. >             Skip got confused as to the bases on the clock. >                      Then, something happened. >             (In general). >             Then, something happened in *particular*: Skip felt an indescribable feeling of nausea-esque something-or-other as he fainted into an completely unexpected and ambivalent vertigo nexus of space-time.  His last thought of the scene was that he hadn't a clue what was to come next, especially since he did, incidentally, have chronic bouts of short and long term amnesty. >             (The freer was no less lost.) >             Skip did however have one single nonlocalized vifa instinct of what to expect to next: >             He expected something different.	The ugly urgg, fidgety starship officer and topicless novelist materialized into a vague idea for oblivion in a crash of lightning.  They stood slightly singed and gilded with an unexpected smoke; a lingering boom of thunder fled the scene as if it was supposed to have dropped them off in a whirl of warm transporter light but had made an embarassing mistake.     Lt. Freckler instantly whipped out his general multi-purpose siff device and tapped fascinated as a coconut fish dropped off the shore of an island on a Magic the Gathering blue land card.  He tapped it half-scientifically and half-ready to blast anything that moved straight to hell.  The urgg just yawned and slugthed forward ambivolently, and the vifa novelist looked habitually for some topic idea or muse.  Only the latter payed any attention to the drunk flutter of light that dumped two tardy cyberpigeons into the air behind him.  They only remained airbound for as long as the dissapearing light-beam held them there for continuity purposes.     "Well?      "Doesn't look like much here.  Looks like we're stuck in this little temporary scroll box that no one will probably read because it's like waaay too tiny to bother.      "Guess we should come back later, then."      There was a crash of flutonic scrollbox energy as Flutonia imploded, ended, and, like, whatever (at least for the moment)
"Well *that* was unproductive."     "Not really.  Darlene's nothing if not resourceful and competent, however short on human compassion.  So if she says she'll take a moment to help out, she'll likely accomplish something of use."     "Like finding the phone number of a local hypnotherapist who could regress me and suck out my memories?"     "Dr. Vifps!  We'll try Dr. Vifps.  Come on, it's just next door."     "Should I narrate this one?"     "Keep it to a minimum."     " 'Skip and the plated worflii--' "     "Alright, we're there."     " 'Indeed they were.' "     "Not necessary.  Dr. Vifps!  Thank god you're free."     "My rates are quite economical given the vastly expensive biogenetic development of the vague idea for the field of psychiatry, Mr. Dwarf, but they are certainly not devoid of price any means."     " *'Worflii'*.  Not *'dwarf'!*"  Dr. Vifps pulled out a notepad and quickly jotted something down, then noticed Skip had been in the room.     "Ah, hello, Mr. Friter.  How are you doing today?  No lapses in sanity this afternoon, I hope."     "Nothing in particular, no.  But I do seem to have lost it *completely*."     "You certainly have not.  If you had *entirely* lost your sanity, you'd be hovering in a void of nonbeing, given the fact that around here it takes a certain amount of sanity just to retain a concept of sentience.  Unless I'm hallucinating--which is very unlikely since I just wrote myself a prescription yesterday for a mild antipsychotic--you're certainly not *non*existent since you're right here in front of me.  Therefore, I conclude quite thoroughly that you have certainly not *entirely* lost your own mind by any stretch of either of our imaginations.  You have, perhaps, lost your imagination itself, which is why your fear of the situation is causing you to magnify its relevency."     "I don't think 'relevency' is exactly relevent to your rant, Dr. Vifps.  'Signifiance' might be significantly more relevent to it, and is closer to what you mean.  We're not speaking about what my situation might be relevant *to*, we're simply discussing its intrinsic consequences for the moment.     " 'The experienced doctor gave a faint whip of a glance at the vifa framed doctorate of philosophy degree in the waiting room where they--incidentally--all were, and gave a single infinitesimal twitch at being corrected by an unpublished writer who hadn't even *thought* about majoring in English in college.  He further frowned at Skip's audible and intrusive interpretation of his subtle behaviors, as if a psychic had momentarily raped his mind of privacy and displayed his minor error of language for the whole universe to see and smirk at.  He quickly managed to surpress both irritations, and got on with clearing his schedule for the afternoon to aid Skip and Toad in their ongoing crisis of--' "     "Enough!  Correct my grammar--"     " 'Usage', not 'grammar'."     "--my usage all you want, but don't even try to plant subliminal suggestions in my mind with your Jedi-esque ego-laced pursasion-narration.  It won't work on *me*.  I'm a psychiatrist, and yours to boot.  Save your narration for your owned malleable weak-minded characters.  I certainly can not clear my schedule for you.  The most I can to today is write you a quick note about your condition, and you can hand it in when you fill out the Temporary Writer's Mental Instability paperwork.  It's in the d.a.c. office next to the three dozen boxes of Indefinite Writer's Block Appeal forms, so you've probably never noticed it before."     "Artichoke!  I never heard of such a thing.  Looks like we have a possible out for you, Skip.  Maybe I can even get on with my day before your leeching crisis further sucks away its usefulness."     "Tell me briefly, Skip, what has gone wrong?  Speak quickly, mind you, I heard frwoa funding has sunk even further this week, so its best to get you out of the office as soon as possible.  Not to mention I'm quite busy self-integrating a hundred poorly defined dsm-vii disorders into explanation tables of why they need to be self-integrated, or even classified at all."     "He's lost his long-term memory.  That's about it."     "Then in my expert diagnosis, you have long-term amnesia.  Here."     " 'Dr. Vifps scribbled something illegible on a small leaf of paper and attempted in haste to flick it at Skip.  But, forgetting exactly how the air in the room worked (given the announcement only that month that Flutonians would now be breathing air rather than walking around in a vacuum), frowned and flicked a second glance at his framed degree as the prescription simply floated toward the ground instead.  Then, too busy to bother whining about Skip's second embarassing narration exposing his mental incompetencies, he--' "     "*Out!*"	"Mr. Nameless Phylor, how awkward a visit considering Skip was just here a sour ago and you're not even supposed to be when you are.  What's that old recursive phylor take on that Zen proverb again?"             " 'Wherever you go, there you are unable to construct any sort of proverb parody because they've all been overdone so much in 88 billennia of comedic parody that you might as well save the universe the trouble and not bother with yet another.' "             "How did you know that, Skip?  And how did you I was out of place here to begin with, Dr. Vifps?"             "Gossip's a bitch.  Darlene relayed the whole incident at Office B to me before you got here."            "But it was a brief walk, and Darlene's a busy person.  She called you up the moment we left?"            "No, she hit a button which published the frwoa scene ahead of time and played it on my heptago live as it happened."            " 'Skip spoke up in his annoying way of breaking the flow of the conversation from the topic into a needlessly non-sequitur literary nitpicking.'  I wonder if that would really be 'gossip' at all, then, or just meddlesome violation of privacy.  Perhaps if--?"            "Privacy?  Have you lost your tot some more, Skip?  You're a dawn of time frwoa writer.  You--more than anyone--should have a decent sense of all the freers that could be hovering about eavesdropping on current events, especially given your current crisis and excellent source of plot conflict.  In fact, your paranoia that people are always watching you is one of the factors that contributed to my positive report of whether you'd make a good dot flwoa friter."            "What's 'freer'?  And 'friter'?  And 'dot'?  And I still don't know what 'frwoa' means.  And 'flwoa' is a new one entirely if my lack of deja vu regarding the terms I've heard is on target."            "Freer; fractal reader, frwoa viewer, free reader.  The readers, the audience, you're potential fan base.  It's quite odd; you seem to have the most selective amnesia.  In the case of long-term amnesia of your type, one usually forgets events, but not their vocabulary or basic language skills.  What criteria your mind used when deciding what particular words it would forget is beyond me.  Perhaps it's some sort of natural frwoa event meant to inform a local freer of some vocabulary they may not be used to, but I don't know what kind of freer could possibly not know they are one!  Especially after my thorough nut-shelling of the term just now."            " 'Skip shrugged off the fact that only one of the confusing terms had been defined for him in favor of another tangential nitpick.'  But who says they're still ignorant of the word now that you've described it?"            "I assume their long term memories are fried too, or they would have remembered the last time you asked somebody what a 'freer' was, and it wouldn't have been neccessary for your conveniently selective memory to have failed to contrive an explanation for the them."            " 'The man who'd called himself a phylor seemed hurried and yet thoroughly thoughtful at the same moment, as if not sure whether being thoroughly thoughtful would shed enough light on the dilemma to be worth the time not being hurried.  He opened his mouth to speak but then was surprised to realize Skip had narrated this event before he had done so, even though Skip couldn't possibly have spoken along with whatever he was going to say since Skip wasn't telepathic.  Yet, a gram of hope slithered into the muddly puddle of his complex emotional expression, as if Skip's skills were either evolving back to speed at an extra-speedy rate, or he had not lost them as much as the phylor thought he had to begin with.  Dr. Vifps also seemed impressed with Skip at the momentary intuitive insight into human behavior, but then lowered his eyebrows in a menacing anger inappropriate for a psychiatrist at Skip's intrusion into his own personal few feet of psychological frwoa space.  This indicated that Skip had probably accomplished something very similar in recent history, but Skip couldn't decipher whether his vague memory of such an event was innate, or influenced by his self-fulfilling induction.'            " 'As to the morality of his behavior, Skip might have now given the defense that he couldn't have possibly known he'd already antagonized Dr. Vifps, but he held back in defending himself as he was quite sure Dr. Vifps would say that he had subconsciously remembered and used the amnesia as a brilliant excuse to aggravate his irritation further when normally he wouldn't have any excuse to do so.  This tweaked Dr. Vifps' analysis of Skip's personality to include an extra layer of sociopathic lack of empathy.  Suddenly both Dr. Vifps and the phylor forgot their praise completely as they became unfairly frustrated at Skip's narration which they probably thought was a run-on one due to their lack of experience in the subtleties of prose (such as the difference between an unintentional run-on and one particularly crafted to create a sense of parody about the nature of exaggerated run-on tangents).  Dr. Vifps almost moved to slap him, when--' "            "Out!"            "What do you mean, 'out'?!  We just got here."            "Perhaps he's decided one of us is gay and he's ordering us out of the closet?  I'm not gay, am I?"            "Shut up, Skip.  Dr. Vifps, this is a serious situation.  If the long term amnesia of one of the greatest--"            "Most overinflated..."            "--of one of the greatest friters in the current and past history of the known universe, and on the day of his publishing of the greatest--"            "Overinflatedist--"            "That can't possibly be a word."            "--The greatest frwoa in all the univi of all of Being to boot--isn't enough to spark a gram of concern about the stability of all of Flutonia--"            "Where's that again, guys?"            "--especially given he can't even seem to remember the name of his home Age--then the presence of an end of time phylor thrown haphazardly into the middle of the crisis who wasn't technically even supposed to be in the City at the Dawn of Time at all today--"            "Where's that again?"            "Should be enough to rest my case and cause your gravest concern.  Or should I finish the sentence?"            "It sounded complete to me."            "(Hush, Skip.  I figured you parsed it correctly, but being neither writer nor philosopher, I figured I'd confuse Dr. Vifps with the paradox of allowing an impossible option, and maybe he'd forget his idiot lack of concern for the safety of all life everywhere in every corner of Being long enough to help us)".            "(I thought it was just Flutonia?)".            "(I'm using your idea of literary exaggeration to make my point.  And I can't think of any other way to exaggerate a danger to the stability of the known universe than to simply extend it to a danger to all of them)".            " 'Dr. Vifps's beady eyes were now darting back and forth between the clock, his suspiciously whispering visitors, and his internal conflict of whether what the phylor was saying was important enough to justify a five minute break.' "            "I really don't know what I can do, P--err, Mr. Nameless Phylor.  I've already given Skip a medical note noting his condition.  If the DAC didn't accept his Mental Instability form the last time you went to fill it out, then there's not much more I can do except append it with 'EXTRA IMPORTANT TO THE STABILITY OF OKUAKA'."            "That might help.  Besides, I don't think Skip saved it, I think we need another."            "That I don't doubt, since he's likely to do so even when his memory is fully intact.  Or at least as intact as an Abnormally Attentioned Dutz's brain is capable of being."            "AAD?  I have AAD?"            "Don't worry, I'm sure you'll forget about it soon enough."            " 'Dr. Vifps scribbled out something on a small page and handed it directly to Skip.  He didn't toss it to him, or anything like that, nor would he have had reason to, unless he'd recently had some sort of embarassing experience with doing so, which was unlikely, but vaguely in the realm of possibility as far as Skip's deja vu went.' "            "There.  Amnesia and AAD, with a hint of remote possibility of extreme importance to the stability of the all the known univi in all of Being.  Now off you go."            "But what happens if we..."            "Just follow the writer's brick road, Mr. Friter."            "That''s a good line.  Is that mine?  Or--"             "OUT!!"	"So now you're Dr. Doolittle."             Skip and the three pigeons entered a cozy, warmly-lit waiting room.  Todd examined a gold-framed degree on the wall, and another carefully searched the floor for bread crumbs.  Id fluppled up on a coffee table and tried to nip at a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.             "Doolittle?  Who's--"             "Surely your amnesia at least allows for some general gut feeling that my anger management skills will diminish every time you walk into this office until I turn violent and become a danger to someone, particularly you.  To boot, I highly doubt your insurance will cover hundreds of one-minute sessions scheduled every seven minutes.  At the worst, they'll bring an investigation on my organizational incompetency.  For someone with seven bachelors degrees, someone's bound to suspect that I've turned autistic and schizophrenic and am trying to send coded messages to a terrorist mole in your local Blue Cross and Blue Shield.             As Skip was still wrestling with the blue button issue which itself was too much for him, he allowed himself to be distracted from the matter by wondering if a blue cross and shield would offer him some sort of holy crusader's protection against blue buttons.  Or would they just make things worse?  He noticed the pigeons were conversing about something that he hadn't payed attention to.  He caught the words "superpigeon" and "narcissist".             Skip began to devote a little RAM to calculate whether his brain was already scrambled beyond repair and whether he should just give up and ask Dr. Vifps to permanently admit him to the nearest writer's sanitarium.  It could have been his imagination, but one of the pigeons seemed to be attempting to coo a melody from a 1986 Metallica album.  Dr. Vifps scribbled something down in irritation as Skip realized he'd been narrating his thoughts for a short while now.             "Dr. Vifps, would it be a question that would lead to an inpatient situation if I asked you whether believing that the fate of the known universe depended solely on your actions over the course of a single day, was a healthy world view?             Dr. Vifps turned his glance from the pigeons, who were now discussing what the third's name would be--or was already--and whether he and Id had to apply for a legal name change to make their names official.  "What was that, Skip?  Oh, excuse me, I was trying to block out your question, seeing how if you were even thinking such a thing--which your question seems to imply--I'd have to knock you out cold and strap you into a straight jacket before you regained consciousness.  That's something I'd rather not do since the possibility of a sexual molestation lawsuit is even more worrisome than the malpractice charges I might face for letting you get this bad to begin with.  So just keep those types of thoughts to yourself from now on."             "But I thought...  I mean I was thinking such a horrid psychosis would actually land me some leeway in requesting a temporary mental instability absence from whatever job I currently hold, which if memory serves, had something to do with me forgetting something extremely important."             "Right you are!  That's even better than my last diagnosis for you.  The Developing Arts Council is sure to grant you a deferment with that.  It is, after all, supposedly the greatest frwoa to ever be written or will ever be written.             "But I thought that sort of line of thought would get me locked up?"             "Not if I keep you balanced by playing along with your absurd self-importance until we can figure out how to suppress your ego so you can more gradually come to terms with the reality of your situation."             "So it's true!"             "No, I'm simply playing along again.  Are you beginning to feel suppressed and clear minded yet?"             "Not a bit."             "Alas, I suspected this would be worse than I feared.  Alright, I'm giving you an official certificate of Complete and Total Indefinite Psychotic Break Syndrome Post Traumatically Crucial to the Very Existence of Existence Itself.  I can't think of any more inflated way to put it, so if you can't obtain a TMI approval this time, you're simply going to have to start contemplating suicide or some sort of desperate DAC hostage situation to force your official deferment.  Now off you go, Skip, and take these dirty rodents with you.             Dr. Vifps turned to Id.  "Id."  The pigeon nodded and flupped down from the book which he'd somehow managed to get open, and walked through the door that Dr.Vifps held open for him.  ...into his office.  Dr. Vifps entered it himself as if entirely expecting Id's behavior, then closed the door behind them as if Id had booked a session previously.             "What in the--"             "We decided Id could use a little medication to deal with the anxiety of changing his name so many times while you were talking with the shrink.  We finally agreed, but he's going to need a bit of Post Traumatic Stress Therapy before he fully accepts it."             "What's so bad about it?  What is it?"             "Ed."             "And I'm Eagle!" the third announced.  Eagle tried to bow in a formal greeting but just flupuppled upward a bit instead.  "Dyslexic.  I'm dyslexic!  I'm going to need therapy.  Ed, wait for me!"  As if hearing him, Dr Vifps's office door opened as if he had already expected Eagle would come in at this moment, who shot himself straight in, causing Skip to smirk at the thump of a pigeon flying straight into a closed window.             Todd gave a shameful, apologetic sigh up toward Skip for any abandonment issues surfacing in Skip's mind on top of everything else he had to deal with at this point.  He glanced at the open door, then back at Skip, then back at the door, then back at Skip, in heavy debate of who in the whole situation was the most screwed up and whether he should stick with them or not.  "I guess I'd better..."  Todd glanced back toward the open door.             "Go ahead," Skip laughed.  He left the office to search for somewhere the note might be of use.  He left with a comforting feeling of having finally met a few peers with whom he had something in common.  " 'He wished with an ominously fragile vehemence that he would never forget them.' "	Only a bored plant studying a copy of the DSM-VII in the corner of the room gave Skip a hint of genuine attentiveness as Skip barged his recent breakthrough across the office at Dr. Vifps, jolting him into a full shrink-and-nothing-but-shrink alert mode.     "Dr. Vifps!  I remember!  I remember everything!"     "Ah, yes?  What?  I mean, hrm?"     "My short-term amnesty--"     " 'Amnesia?' '"     "Yes, I forgot the word.  My short-term amnesty is back!  I remember everything since I can remember losing my long-term memory.  It's still not a gram there, but at the least, I remember everything that happened to me *since* then, because not being able to do so seemed a horrible burden on being able to retrieve it!"     "But who in the hell *are* you?"     Skip opened his mouth to respond, then locked it shut for a good long while as he tried to sift out the exact meaning in Dr. Vifps's tone.  For a brief mot he thought Dr. Vifps was giving him a cliche psychiatrist's interrogation response to his rant without having heard it very well.  Then he figured he might be mocking the cliche and poking fun at the lame formulation of psychiatric interaction in general, which would be a little less like him but even more likely to demonstrate Dr. Vifps wasn't about to be of any help.  Only after a moment thoroughly worrying about the situation did Skip realize with a relieved sigh that Dr. Vifps was talking to the humanoid splash of water who'd entered the room with him.     "Oh!  Oh, this is Kilo.  I met him at the train station.  Or thought him up, or something like that.  I'm still not sure exactly why he's composed of water, but maybe you can help us figure that out.  He certainly needs some therapy too, for he has issues about wanting to be fire instead.  I suppose primal elements are more in the realm of philosophy than psychiatry, but his angst over the matter surely lands the issue somewhat in your ballpark of expertise."     "No, not him.  He hasn't said anything crazy yet.  I was addressing you, Mr... Mr..."     "Friter!  Skip Friter!"  Skip leaped back on his train of thought of what exactly could be happening.  A deja vu plethora of possibilities popped to mind, but to save time parsing them, Skip simply skipped to the least likely one to implode the universe or give him a seizure.  Dr. Vifps was *pretending* to have never met Skip for the sake of a quick laugh.     "Ha!  An amnesia-diagnosing psychiatrist with amnesia himself!  I think that's what I'll call irony given I haven't decided what the word should mean since someone told me I'd coined it.  I hope you wrote up some thorough notes about me in my file, because you certainly can't give me much therapy if you're going to keep forgetting who I am!  Well done, Vifps; quite unexpected.  You really... you... yuhhh..."     Skip's words drifted into the forgettable void of history into the alzheimers-infected nothingness of air outside his mouth, that knew quite well what to do with drifting psychotic rants even if it didn't have a firm grip on physical gravity.  Dr. Vifps' mirthless expression had seemed an exceptional deception for his joke, but now it's sheer stamina suggested something behind it much more tragic and less likely to enterain anyone in the room, least of all the freer, whatever that was.  As for Dr. Vifps, his glance kept flicking back and forth between the front office phone and his desk's.  Skip began to sense he was calculating which one of them was more likely to have 911 on speed dial and/or which he had a better chance at getting to before Skip pulled out a chainsaw or bloody axe.  An expressionless teen who could have been a high school droput drug dealer with an increasing past history of violence for all Dr. Vifps knew wasn't helping the situation.  Thankfully, he did seem distracted with with the cabinet to the side marked "SAMPLE MEDICATIONS" that harbored the stimulant meds that he somehow sensed were there..     "You do... *remember* me, right?"     Dr. Vifps frused some more and glanced back at the office phone.     "Right??"     Office phone.  Desk phone.  Office phone.  Desk phone.     Finally, Dr. Vifps' expression said he'd either given up on his plan to escape in favor of some challenging therapy, or was preparing to create an elaborate deception that he was interested in the man's issues in order to gain the trust that would allow him to leave the room with all body parts intact.      "My good fellow, I have never seen you before in my life.  Clearly at least one of us has suffered a psychotic break, and since I'm the psychiatrist, it's probably you.  So let's have a seat and get to the bottom of this, shall we?  I'm supposed to be meeting with a punctuality-impaired dyslexic alcoholic with ADHD about now, but she probably got drunk, distracted, took a wrong turn, then entirely forgot about the meeting altogether.  So I just happen to have the time for a session!  He lowered his voice just a little as he pushed the desk intercom button.  "Lila, call Darlene and tell her I have to cancel her 1:45 appointment, and clear my schedule for the day."  Skip humored a stray hope that the lack of an answer on the other side meant Dr. Vifps was crazy, too, and communicating wtih an imaginary secretary.     Finally, Dr. Vifps sat down with a suspiciously welcoming expression.  Skip sat as well, and did Kilo, who's expression suggested mixed annoyance/relief that they were kicking off a sudden therapy session without any intention of dedicating it to his teen angst issues.  Both waited for Dr. Vifps to get to his first question.  He simply got out a notepad and waited for one of *them* to begin.  After a minute, he scribbled a bit on the pad while mumbling something about implosive social repression, then began.     "Alright, you say you've met me before, Mr. Friter?"     "Of course."     "Well, let's introduce ourselves again, for my sake.  Just think of this as a roleplay regression to help you deal with the repressed trauma of meeting me a first time.     "I don't think we were ever really introduced in the first place.  All I remember is you starting right off the bat as my shrink, with some intense storehouse of mental notes you'd collected on me."     "That's about all shrink's ever do, yes, is collect dirt on their patients.  You should see my collection of coined phrases from my more creative linguists over the years.  And I have an exceptional collection of songs people didn't want stuck in their heads.  Tossed them off on me, just dandy.  Do you have any idea how long I've had Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb stuck in my head?  A patient burdened me with it when he purchased an uncomfortable mattress that gave him a piercing back pain.     "You know, I can't remember ever being introduced to anyone, really--just bumping into people who claimed to have known me--or at least, nobody more sane than I am, given that some pigeons in an existential crisis and I more or less introduced ourselves this morning.  So, assuming *you're* sane--"     "An excellent assumption given my framed degree and the lack of decapitated hookers in the back room--"     "--I suppose you still have a leg up on me."     At the strange new metaphor, Kilo tried to raise his leg and cross his ankle over his knee in boredom, but since it was exponentially heavier than the specs of dust he probably used to whirl for the same purpose, the attempt had the effect of spilling a half-bucket of water on the carpeted floor.  Dr. Vifps didn't even flinch, suggesting this happens quite frequently to younger patients who have minuscule control over their undeveloped muscle and motor systems or vifa system equivalents.     "I suppose I *would* have a leg up if I bought your psychotic story that we've ever walked into the same room with each other before now, but since I don't, and we haven't--and it appears the same goes for Kilo--we all seem to have equal footing for the moment, which of course gives us plenty of common ground, over our heads in knee deep shallow waterpuns or not.  Dr. Vifps got out a bottled water and crossed his legs as Kilo got his even further stuck in the rug.     "Anyway, I'm Dr. Vifps, and you seem to be Skip and Kilo.  Now we're introduced.  So; what's up with you both?"     Kilo fumed.     Skip frowned.  "Well, you're the one who thinks my sanity is up fo debate, so let's start with that."     "Alright, this amnesia of yours; let's go over what you think you remember."     "I don't *think* I remember, I *remember* it.  I *think* you're mistakenly equating faulty memories with fuzzy uncertainty regarding nonhallucinatory ones."  Dr. Vifps hesitated as his pupils beadily zig-zagged in a panicky possibility that his brand new schizophrenic patient had already correctly corrected him on a matter regarding mental competency.  He seemed to come to a decision, flipped on the token psychologist's mask used to shield the patient from developing insight into his own psyche, and responded in an ambivolent blandless that of course spilled his guilt and damaged ego out for all to see.     "Alright, Kilo, how about you?"     "Don't drag *me* into this, I just popped into existence a couple minutes ago.  I don't really have any memories at all before meeting Skip, so any factual errors in my head are probably his fault."  Dr. Vifps nodded understandingly and scribbled a few more notes.     "Lack of empathy...  Denial of amnesia...  Blame projection via unresolved sibling rivalry..."     "We're not siblings."     Dr. Vifps nodded.  "Domesitc PTSD denial of childhood trauma, teen.. aaaangst... good!  I'm starting to feel better about our progress toward a full understanding of your emotional situations.  And when, precisely, Skip, does *your* denial of your long-term amnesia begin?"     "No, see, I'm fully aware that I lost my long-term memory this morning.  I'm quite sure I existed before 1:11 this morning, and I would imagine Kilo's on target himself with *not* having existed before then."     "Amnesia denial denial... Amnesia delusion projection...  Denial projection amnesia...  Wait, no, I think you missed a criterea for that one."  Dr. Vifps looked toward the DSM-VII but the plant seemed inseperably occupied with it.  "Alright, Kilo, and what do *you* think you remember?"     "If I point out you just asked me that and you don't believe me, could I get some speed for my ADHD?  You do remember where it is, right?"     "I know I asked you, but you didn't answer.  So let's try it a third time; perhaps the third time's a charm here."  Skip thought he heard Dr. Vifps mumble "learning disorder" and "drug addict" as he scribbled some more.     "I thought I said I don't remember anything?"     "Yes, well, you just inadvertantly mentioned that *while* refusing to answer, so let's have a nice straightforward one for the record!"     "Alright, I just popped into existence and I don't remember much of anything before I met Skip."     "*Dual* amnesia denial disorder, and two interacting cases of it to boot!  ... We're really getting somewhere!"  Kilo's leg was still stuck in the rug and his expression said he emphatically disagreed.     The three continued conversing through everything there was to cover which if which if narrated line by line would provide absolutely no more information than anyone following Skip's and Kilo's stories so far have come across or that at the least than Dr. Vifps' all base cover summary below.     "So let me get this clear, Skip.  You clearly remember getting dropped off at Square one this morning with no memory of who you were or how you got there, then remember forgetting just about everything three more times as far back as you can remember, except with increasing deja vu all the while, which has now gotten so bad untreated that it's been fully cured via a full-blown half-hour of memories of things that never happened, and now that you're right back where you started--except worse because you now have false memories in addition to *no* memories--you're elated that you're making progress."     "Sort of, but..."     "--BUT, you *do* remember a teenager just suddenly flushing himself into existence from absolutely nowhere, without even the warning of an Atlantis offworld activation dialing sequence?"     Kilo frused and half-nodded.  He'd probably never thought to compare himself to the trippy puddle-portal of a stargate, never mind one from Stargate Atlantis set in the dead middle of an eighty-billion mile radius ocean.  With any success of Skip's indirect lessons, he was even dedicating a little educational diligence to mentally splitting a verbal vs situational irony hair.     Skip, on the other hand, fully nodded in full conscious deception via phobia of seeming argumentative, and tried to ignore Dr. Vifps mumbling "compulsive liar" as he scribbled on his pad.     "Then in my expert opinion, you both downed some hallucinagens at the train station, and your prognosis is certain total recovery if you simply keep off the 'shrooms.  Case closed!"  He tossed the pad he'd been writing on in the trash and scribbled out two prescriptions.  Skip took a long minute to decipher the messy handwriting and could finally read it:     REST.     FIBER.     WATER.     NO SHROOMS. Kilo's expression said he'd hadn't had the same luck reading his, and he definitely lacked the glow of closure at the end of any helpful therapy session, since they hadn't even gotten to his self-esteem issues yet and his leg was still stuck in the floor to boot.     A strained drop of thought-water dripped right off the top of Kilo's head down toward the rug as the innermost area of water within the outermost area of water that comprised what might be considered his head, infinitesimally surged with the threat of turning into something more corporeal than the hovering liquid it was.     Kilo seemed to be concentrating, and as he did, the puddle thickened like like powdered psylium husk into a fiber laxitive drink stirred way too long after the directed stirring time, the kind you occasionally keep stiring indefinitely to watch the water turn to slush, then goo, then gel-goo, then transparent playdough, and finally into a cup of dried concrete that you thank god you hadn't injested into your body.  Currently the vifa water in Kilo's head was just at the early slush-stage.     Through all this, Kilo definitely had that "frused" look going on.  Since Kilo wasn't very transparent at as far as his emotions went, Skip didn't have much of a clue what was going on inside Kilo's head, but he could wage a guess he was either racking his brain with the flood of information that had just passed through him since they'd walked into the room, or just couldn't fathom the magnitude to which someone in it was being brainlessly retarded, if not all three of them.     Finally, it flipped to a delinquent ambivolence akin to wiping a scheduled cat scan off a white board calendar with a wet psych mid-term, and Kilo resumed trying to pull his leg out of the carpet as if his response required too many upper water cells to spare at the moment.     "A thought, Kilo?"     "I repressed it until I get my f!@ing leg out of this thing."  He continued to struggle with it while Skip felt the need to jump in, as Kilo's elder and someone incredibly more verbatose.     Dr. Vifps sighed in annoyance as at a 3-year old girl who'd fallen off a tricycle her first time trying to ride it.  Without looking, he reached under his chair and pulled out a small bottle of liquid marked "rubbing alcohol" and flicked a few drops near Kilo's leg.  He whipped out a match from a shirt pocket, and struck it on the rug just next to where Kilo's leg was stuck.  The rug--realizing too late it was probably flame resistant--caught on fire long enough for Kilo to yank back his leg.  The vifa air hovering around cursed  and whirled a little to put out the fire, and Kilo looked even more distraught now feeling he should have had some sort of role in putting out the fire.  He sat back and resumed his silent concentration.  If Skip had to guess, Kilo had switched his internal debate from whatever he was thinking, to whether there was enough time left in the session to bring up his chronic elemental issues that he'd had for as long as Skip had known him, just now being no exception.     "I think what Kilo's trying to get at is between the two of us, is he seems to be supplemental.  He hasn't done or talked much of late and I think it's because of his teenage need to avoid the stressful issues of adult life, not to mention not quite being sure exactly what that is to begin with."     "Thank you, Skip, but *I'm* the one playing psychiatrist here.  Err.. *Am* the psychiatrist, you know what I mean."  Skip seemed too worried about the session's direction to consider milking Dr. Vifps's embarassing mistake for all it was worth.  Dr. Vifps glanced at the clock as if it itself was getting apathetic due to peer pressure via Kilo's denial to talk about anything significant.  "Since our session to day is completely unscheduled--not to mention unexpected, unorthodox, and unpaid--I'm afraid we don't have a lot of time left.  So, tabling an analysis of Kilo for another day as he seems the one of you more prone to ramble incessently about his problems, let me explain what I believe is going on with you two."     Kilo yawned and licked his nails.     Skip stared rhetorically as usual.     Dr. Vifps glanced back at the trash he had thrown his pad into for dramatic effect and was likely wondering whether he would loose more face retrieving it or improvising without it.  "The direction of your lives in recent history--as well as your entire lives, for that matter--are utterly, entirely, apocalyptically textbook with what would come to expect given the mental disorders of anyone in your positions."     "And what are those?" Kilo asked with a hint of mischief.     "I meant, the ones I've mentioned.  Aren't those quite enough, Kilo?"     "Yah, but what *were* they again?"     Dr. Vifps frowned for only a moment wondering why Kilo had suddenly developed an interest in his skills, then looked obviously backward at the trash again as he realized he had done so too obviously before.  (And now twice.)  Skip assumed he was making a mental note to add another "lack of empathy" to Kilo's diagnosis to the pad when he retrieved it after Skip and Kilo left.  Quickly he figured offering Kilo an extension on his promised therapy for the session would make him less prone to shrink abuse, as it was probably where the hostility was rooted.     "Kilo, let's move on to your sense of self-relation to your external environment.  How do you feel about your place in the world?  Do you feel *in* place?  *Out* of place?  Do you feel lost?  Found?  Existentially torn from any particle of a grounded perception of reality?     "Well, I was feeling a pretty normal sense of purpose in life until I hit the Button in Darlene's office."     "Button?"     "Yah.  The big blue button that brought back Skip's short term memory and transported us here--or did we just walk over or something?  I forget; it's all so fuzy--and I get this weird feeling that was the whole point of it somehow; anyway, me and Skip ahd these sick plans to go take on the world, or whatever--and now it's like he's ditching them.  Just leaving me to rot when I finally had, like, you know, *goals*."  The last word seemed torn out of necessity from Kilo's mouth.     "What do you mean, Kilo?  We still have our plans, we were just, getting some therapy for starters.  Don't you think we both needed some?"     "But it's all been about you!  I've just sat here and done shit.  It's like, it's all your *story*, you know, like you have something all special and we're about to dive into the entire story of your life, like this is Interview with the Vampire without anything actually worth interviewing you for!"     "Is that a book that appeals to you, Kilo?"     "Not really."     Scribble.  "Any vampiric inclinations this week?"     "Not that I can remember."     Scribble.     "Do you like watching vampire shows?"     "No, not really."     "Which ones?"     "What?"     "Do you like Angel?"     "No."     "True Blood?"     "I don't get cable."     "Sanctuary?"     "I think I've heard of it."     "How about Dexter?  Do you like Dexter?"     "As far as I've heard that's not exactly a vamp--"     "Blue's Clues!  You must like Blues Clues."  Dr. Vifps' had gotten another pad out by now and his pen was hovering predatorily above it.  Skip could tell Kilo was wondering if some type of mischievous lie was in order to beat Dr. Vifps's mind game, or if that's exactly how Dr. Vifps was planning on catching him.     "I love blues clues."     "Denial of homicidal vampire fantasies!  *No one* likes Blues Clues."  Scribble, scribble.  "Now tell me more about this button you pushed."     "I dunno, when I hit it I got this strange feeling like the only reason it was there was to distract the story of my life from whatever its main point was.  It didn't really make much sense.  I mean, I can't even remember whether we walked over from Office B or just sort of showed up here.  It's like... It's like it created a tear in the fabric of space-time and thrust me and Skip into some alternate time line where we were never supposed to be.  Like god had just dropped some... what do you call it, a *deus ex machina* plot point to solve all our problems or something, and now I'm caught up in some fourth dimension reality or something.     "So in other words you can't separate Donnie Darko from reality."  Scribble.  "Kilo, You're definitely hiding behind someone else's fantasy life to avoid your own issues, which his doubly bad because Donnie's schizophrenic delusions were *already* inside a fictional movie, and we all know those aren't real.  Especially here in Flutonia."     "Where?"     Kilo and Skip--thinking this statement chalked up another strike against Dr. Vifps for being the crazy one in the room--stared in an unusually harmonnious unity in pseudo-genuine curiosity.     "Flutonia!  That's where you are!  Don't tell me you don't even know where you are!"     "I thought this was Earth," Kilo said.     "I thought I was in this office," replied Skip.     "I'm so sorry, my mistake..."  Both relaxed.  They didn't know what mistake Dr. Vifps had made, but clearly it was clearly to their benefit for Dr. Vifps to have admitted it.     "...I overestimated your mental coherence.  The first question I should of asked you was, 'Do you have any idea where the hell you even are?' "     "Perhaps you should have," Skip agreed.  Kilo opened his mouth to respond but the sudden tie-dye swirls of fractal chaos in the skies out the window that he just now noticed were there began to disprove his sense that they were supposed to be on Earth.     "Maybe you actually have a point.  I think I need to be grounded.  How many shrooms did I have again, Skip?  Dr. Vifps, Do you have any antipsychotics in the cabinet?  I'm not sure whether I'm schizophrenic or high but I probably need some either way.  I'm ADHD too, it seemes, so you should probably prescribe me some heavy stimulants.  I don't think chocolate milk is going to suffice."  Kilo flicked the prescription Dr. Vifps had given him on the ground and Skip could see what it said now:     REST.     FIBER.     CHOCOLATE MILK.     NO SHROOMS.     "No, no, this wole Earth idea of yours needs to go out the window.  You need to firmly grounded to *Flutonia*--in whatever vague sense Flutonia even has a ground--and for that you actually *need* the shrooms."  Kilo smiled and Skip look confused as Dr. Vifps started writing out another prescription.  "...But of course, they're illegal, so I'm forging you a coupon for some Relaxing Herbal Tea.  It should help you sleep at night as your insomnia has clearly pushed you into delusional mania.  And Skip, why don't you try some Melotonin and Tylenol, too.  Now, I have other things to do, you know, I actually have my sanity--and a life--and other whackos that need me, so off you go.  We'll discuss your perceptions of insurance info at the start of your next session, and if it works out you can stay for the whole thing."  He handed Kilo and Skip each another prescription.     "Dr. Vifps!  You've told us nothing that can possibly be of any help.  We're both lost in a surreal nowhere that doesn't make any sense.  We have deferred dreams, no sense of purpose, multiple forms of amnesia and existential crises, and I don't even know what the hell this Flutonia is all about, even though I've spent a memorable lifetime here.  Not to mention my therapist and new best friend could be completley insane.  What in the hell are either of us supposed to do now?"     "Aside from being the result of delusions I just gave you prescriptions for, those are all issues for you to figure out for yourselves.  They have nothing else to do with psychology other than you have severe anger problems about them to boot and could use some anger therapy as well.  Since you both have some sort of Truman Show complex, why don't you head over to the Developing Arts Council where they'll explain why everything's all about  you and why life doesn't make sense.  That's where I go whenever I feel depressed with a life of solving the problems of others, who only have issues with life because their lives have some sort of significant meaning, whereas--based on my lack of need of therapy as a psychiatrist--mine does not.  Perhaps that's why I chose this field."     Skip and Kilo stared around the room.  They looked at each other, then Dr. Vifps, then the bored plant in the corner still studiously absorbed in the DSM-VII.  Perhaps because of Dr. Vifps' rare heartfelt admission just now, he actually humored Kilo's psychotic world view for a moment; only the token psychiatrist's mask blanking his feelings prevented Skip and Kilo from figuring out whether he was begin genuine, mischievous, brainwashing, or was still engaged in his session-long ploy to ensure he and the plant reached the end of it alive.     "If what you say is true, Kilo; and you, Skip, then perhaps this entire mess of amnesia, higher dimensional intervention, and incoherent plot continuity can be solved by some simple means you have yet to find.  Why don't you consider it your sense of purpose for the day to go find a time machine or theoretical physicist--or at least a Star Trek nerd who knows a thing or two about temporal singularities--and see if you can undo all this mess before it even began.  Maybe your blue button was... a mission from god to save yourselves!  Now off with you and Godspeed; you have your sense of purpose for the day.  Come back when you're psychoses have significantly changed, whether for the better or the worse.  Why don't you try returning with some aliens or talking birds next time to give your claims some minimal credibility."     Skip and Kilo didn't feel obligated to pay for the session as they left the office with near-deadly migraines.	Two cyberpigeons, an ugly Urgg, a psychiatrist, and a siff novelist sat quite confused.     "So, the universe just ended because our friters aren't any further than just about now in our stories, but our conversation is being posted in this 7x7 prose map you're talking about, just because they want to make it look like they have more written than they actually do,?"     "And that's only if nobody reads the box we're being freed in.  Otherwise, it's total fraud."     "Touche."
Developing Arts Council Vifa Temporary Mental Instability Form #131116.     Please read the following vague idea for a form carefully before answering any question.  Then answer *every* question, in order.  If you are dyslexic, answer every question backwards.  If you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you may fill out or re-start the form as many times as you wish, and/or burst into the back office and demand an immediate emergency hearing up to the number times you filled out or re-started this form.  If you have Attention Deficit Disorder, answer every other question beginning with the first, then return to the beginning and answer the remaining questions starting with the second.  If you are currently undergoing therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, please ask the front secretary for a beer and then continue.  If you have ADD *and* PTSD, you may obtain a small shot of vodka, liquid paxil, or 5mg ritalin tablet as needed--and/or watch any of the educational videos in the viewing room on ADD, PTSD, alcohol and drug addiction, or the mating rituals of the stressed half-existent pointy-livered fluton-amoeba and hey what's that out the window?--until you finally sit your ass down and finish the damned form, or until closing, whicher comes first.  If you have any combination of dyslexia, OCD, and/or ADD, you should be all set.  If you are manic, manic-obsessive, depressive, manic-depressive, obsessive-depressive, schizo-affective, elated, sedated, irritated, or have any combination of the above conditions or one not listed, please ask the secretary for further instructions, but keep your distance.     If you need help filling out this form, please ring the bell to page Helpy the Friendly Fluton who will aid you in whatever way you need.  If you're not sure whether you need help, Helpy the Friendly Fluton will be helpy to scan your brain and estimate your IQ, legibility, literacy, and mental competence.  If Helpy informs you that you're able to fill out this form without help and you disagree with this analysis, you may fill out the Competence To Complete the Temporary Mental Instability Form Override Form.  If you need help filling out the Competence To Complete the Temporary Mental Instability Form Override Form, or are not sure if you need help, Helpy will be glad to give you a second opinion on your level of competency.  If your appeal is denied and you are asked again to fill out the Temporary Mental Instability Form and stop bitching about it, and you still disagree, you may fill out the Request For An Indefinite Form Appeal Extension Form, which if accepted will grant you a general right to file a canon of red tape paperwork to the point that you will be diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Red Tape Temporary Mental Instability Form Stress Disorder, and your original Temporary Mental Instability Form will be automatically accepted.     Please note that for any competency appeal form to be accepted, you must accept Helpy's help for every form you file beginning with the Competence To Complete the Temporary Mental Instability Form Override Form, otherwise you will be subject to charges of fraud on the basis that you were competent enough to fill out the Temporary Mental Instability Form Override Form but somehow incompetent to fill out the much shorter original Temporary Mental Instability Form.  If this occurs and you cannot afford a lawyer, you will be appointed one by the Developing Arts Council, who will argue that your temporary mental instability somehow only affects your ability to fill out Temporary Mental Instability forms but not any of our Competency Override forms, at which point you and your appointed lawyer will be deemed mentally ridiculous, and you will both be admitted to the Permanent Red Tape Obsessive Distractive Fraudulant Insanity Psychiatric Stress Ward for the duration of your mortal life.  If you believe this form to this point is itself evidence of the DAC's obsessiveness with forms or screwed up clients, you try dealing with someone who's won an Office Paperwork Clarification Policy Incompetency lawsuit and see how obsessive you get.     Please print clearly.  Please answer every question.  You may skip this form entirely if your name is Kyle, Koby, Tiz, Jebb, Piq, Kolphin, Skip, Sid, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Sneezy, Cranky, Dirty, Dizzy, Dan, or you are the acting commander of a vessle facing a temporal amnesia anomaly and your entire crew has forgotten how to operate your vessle, or are any other main character whose frwoa friter has hit massive writer's block and contrived their plot arc to deliver you here for lack of anything better to do with your story, as it will  be automatically rejected until your friter finds a self-insertion frwoa anomaly, writes him or herself into their own story, and fills out their own damned DAC Temporary Mental Instability Form.             When you are finished with the form--or lack thereof if your situation falls under one or more of the above conditions--please hand it to the secretary at the front desk, unless your temporary condition has significantly improved by the time you get to the last question (or the first, if you are dyslexic).  The office will then evaluate your form the moment someone qualified to evaluate it submits an Application for Employment form and is hired by the DAC.  Thank you for your anticipated cooperation.	DAC Temporary Mental Instability Override Form # 1311x6 - SECTION B             Please read Section A of this form before filling out Section B.  If you have read Section A and have failed one of the criteria for continuing yet are doing so anyway, please complete this section in its entirety before moving on, otherwise skip this section and move on to Section C.     First Name:______  Middle Name: _______  Last Name: ________  Full Name: ___________ Nickname: __________  Nickname Name: ________  Name Nick Nick: (write "Nick"): ______ Second nickname if your name is "Nick" to avoid confusion: __________ Namenick (nickname backwards): ________  Nick's Name (write "rhetorical"): __________ Gender: ___     Desired Gender: ___    Gender Attracted to: ___    Opposite Gender: ___  Opposite Opposite Gender (write original gender): ___  Nick's gender (write "M"): ____ Address: ______________  City: _________  State: ______  Zip: _______  Unzip: _____ Country: _______ Planet: _____  Solar System: ___   Galaxy: _____ Ku: _______ Existence (write something): __________   Unexistence (write nothing): ____________ Phone: _______  Cell: _______  Jail Cell: ______  Jail Cell Phone: ____  Jail Cell Cell: _____ How the hell you managed to sneak a cell phone into your jail cell: __________________ How the hell you managed to fit a phone number on any of the previous lines: ________                                  Why do you feel you have the right to fill out this form when you have failed the criteria for doing so?  (Circle all that apply):             1 - I cannot follow directions and have documentation to support this.             2 - I cannot follow directions and have lost the documentation to support this.             3 - I am a unique individual who refuses to conform to the expected behaviors of society and revolt every chance I get for no other reason than I enjoy doing so, and believe this may contribute to being classified as being mentally unstable.             4 - I have short term amnesia, and hence simply glazed over Section A without reading it in detail and skipped to Section B because I got a strange deja vu that I had done so before and didn't need to bother again, yet my conveniently selective dysfunctional memory doesn't extend so far as to remember the part about not actually continuing whatsoever if I met one of the criteria for not doing so, which I did.             5 - I am just passing through this time line and need directions to the Central Flutonian Anomaly and the damned desk secretary said I have to fill out at least one form before giving me directions, so I simply chose the Temporary Mental Instability Form in case the form results in me being classified as Mentally Unstable and unable to operate my mot, dot tot, dot thought, dot train, train, thought, neon red bike, 1992 Toyota Corolla, 2020 Talzima Peachlaunch, blimp, ship, starship, battleship, ghost ship, hey you sunk my battleship!, FedEx ship, infinite probability drive ship, infinite probability drive rip-off ship surreally similarly named an "infinitely dimensioned spaceship", space station, Florbban Cerebro-rip-off deus ex machine machine that lets me wander my known universe just by thinking and basically do whatever the hell I want, dome shoot, pongboard, horse, dragon, ancient dragon, evil dragon, good dragon who I think is on my side but whom I have no clue is going to betray me at one of the most crucial moments in my story somewhere around 167-66/, ott, ott mot, ott tot, ott thought, dot, tot, or big crunch xnet surf board, for a given period of time.             6 - I can't read.             7 - I'm dyslexic and mixed up "continuing" with "not continuing".             11 - I'm dyslexic and am reading the form backwards and haven't gotten to Section A yet.             12 - I bio-engineered an anger management serum and am going around trying to piss off as many Dot Flutonians as I can to make sure it doesn't turn people to raging vifa meta-zombies before releasing it into the general air supply.             13 - I just want to flirt with the front secretary 'cuz she's kinda hot and I'm trying to piss her off because she looks like the type of girl who's cute when she's angry.             14 - I bio-engineered an anger inducing serum and am testing it out on all the kinda-hot secretaries I can find to make sure it makes them kinda-cute-angry but still not turn them into raging vifa meta-zombies before releasing it into the general air supply.             15 - I'm a nameless evil super genius of the fifth cycle of Flutonia who is bio-engineering a serum to turn people into raging vifa meta-zombies because that's just what I do and I'm extra pissed off today because coincidentally the cute main desk secretary wouldn't give me her phone number.             16 - I see something after #7 on this list I want to circle but can't because I'm mathematically incompetent and don't understand base-7 numbers and have no idea why the numbers are going up like this.             17 - I'm mathematically competent enough regarding alternate numerical bases to know what they are, yet are confused about the line ordering because I'm too stupid to realize that using the digits 1 to 7 instead of the digits 0 to 6 as Frangles often does, is a perfect ismorphic relationship, and even if I wasn't, would be too tired from reading this run-on condition alone to go on subtracting 1 from from every single digit on this page to make it all make sense to me.             21 - I think I could understand this numbering system just fine if it just had a few more than 33 base-7 non-zero-digit terms.             22 - I'm blind.             23 - I'm in a coma.             24 - I'm nonexistent.             25 - I'm dead.             26 - I'm red.             27 - I've been fed.             31 - I'm the President and fill out whatever damned form I want.             32 - I forget whether I'm the President but am I taking my chances.             33 - OTHER             If you are now done with this section, please stop immediately and hand this page in with an apology that you filled out anything at all, then go away and stay away until your situation no longer falls outside the prerequisites for completing this form.  Thank you and have a nice day.	DAC Temporary Mental Instability Override Form # 1311x6 - SECTION C            Please read Section A of this form, and fill out Section B if you meet the criteria for not doing so and are too stubborn, incompetent, delinquent, obsessive, and/or desperate enough to follow instructions, or are egoistical enough to believe you warrant special consideration due to a situation not taken into account by the DAC when drawing up this form.  If you are in a special situation, or you have met criteria for not continuing with this form explained in Section A, Section B, and the sign to your left that reads "DO NOT FILL OUT THE DAC TEMPORARY MENTAL INSTABILITY OVERRIDE FORM FOR ANY REASON, FOR THE REASONS BELOW LISTED BELOW, WHICH FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE ARE ALSO LISTED IN SECTION A OF THE TEMPORARY MENTAL INSTABILITY OVERRIDE FORM, AND ELABORATED ON IN SECTIONS C, D, E, F, AND THE ENTIRE FRACTAL WORK 0F ART CURRENTLY KNOWN AS 'FRANGLES' WHOSE SOLE EXISTENT PURPOSE FROM THE FRANGLE OF THE DEVELOPING ARTS COUNCIL IS TO SERVE AS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL EXTENDED DAC TEMPORARY MENTAL INSTABILITY OVERRIDE FORM" and are still !@#$ing doing so anyway (or are incompetent enough to have been unable to parse this sentence to this point or any other point), and you wish to be officially designated as mentally incompetent, please fill out Section C of this form, as you have met the first three dozen criteria for officially being so. (Idiot). WHAT IS THE MAIN REASON YOU FEEL YOU SHOULD BE CLASSIFIED AS MENTALLY UNSTABLE?             1 - I  already told you, I'm the acting commander of the U.S.S. Ionizer and my ship was hit by a freak flutonic memory alteration anomaly in section 331-116.4 while transporting a V.I.P. to negotiate a peace treaty between two local solar nebulae, when my ship was hit by some sort of amnesia phenomenon while transporting somone between two unspecified areas of space, when something happened to my ship which erased our short term memories while transporting someone or other to negotiate some sort of deal, when something happened while we were doing that, and, oh right!  We were transporting a V.I.P. between two local nebulae, when we were hit by a tippy flutonic memory ADHD alteration suspential anomaly, or something like that,  and what was the question again, I--hey is that cheesecake?  Ambassador Viffpsh, what have I told you about using the bridge replicator during a level-one flwoa anomaly?  Get that shit off my bridge or I'm gonna turn this whole Flutonia-Flurth treaty training program right off, and you can see how far you get with next month's DGEC Ambassador Re-evaluation without the aid of a decorated fleet captain.  Alright, Bix, begin a distress signal to the DAC.  THIS IS CAPTAIN KIRBY OF THE U.S.S. IONIZER.  OUR SHIP HAS JUST BEEN HIT BY A FREAK FLUTONIC AMN#@%NO_CARRIER             2 - I DMed your entire freaking realm for seven years for my multi-galaxy frwoa-harmonization dissertation, I think that's enough to classify me as mentally unstable.  If not, at the least, it should give me the right to fill out whatever dammed DAC form I want without anyone questioning my motives.  This entire area of Flutonia wouldn't even exist without me.  I stood in front of the KEFF and defended the Flwoa Funding Bill for your area when no one else would, so don't lecture me about having to explain myself if I want a "MENTALLY UNSTABLE" stamp on my hand.  I think I've earned it.             3 - I'm a Kroffonian begram programmer from Section C of Area 1-151-1x6 and am doing QA for our form/location number harmonizer.  I was supposed to be checking out this relative area in the last known universe no one's ever supposed to know about (don't ask, don't tell), but the number guy keyed in two wrong numbers and sent me to 1-131-1x6 instead of 4-151-1x6 where I was going.  I'm not even sure if you're supposed to know about the seven-digit fage/form designation system yet,  so I really need a blink back to Kroffonia before I reveal anything else that might rupture local frwoa space.  The whole thing is giving me a headache and I really need an aspirin, and I figured maybe being classified as mentally unstable would give your local flink a reason to prescribe some.  You do have a flink, right?  Oh wait, is this the frwoa with that idiot Skip who gets his memory wiped by the Blorkk Zorgons and then blinks to the frangle that the stability of Okuaka depends on his lame manuscript, that he has to re-write because he looses it arount nova 4 of Writers' Bricks in the explosion that takes out the publishing building that rejected his manuscript?  I'm not in Writers' Bricks, am I?  Holy !@#$ I am.  This is not good.  Tiz, hand me the--Orbo are you still running that recorder?  Shut that thing O#ffffffXSP##$NO_CARRIER             4 - I accidentally cast an oblivion firebomb spell on all Northern Generika instead of the blue goo blob I was aiming for.  My friend Dex told me the ensuing dark ages were all my fault--as did the surviving king, queen, prince, and people of Vilville, and I'm on a quest to find some wise wizard named Mezoro who I hope can diagnose me with ADHD or bipolar or something and tell everyone I have a genetik tendency to !@#$ up every other campaign I go on, rather than just being an idiot.  Anyway, someone said I should find this frwoa fairy and ask her to teleport me somewhere relevant that would aid my quest, so she sent me here.  Can you give me a scroll or something that says I'm disabled that I can bring back to King Toggler?  I'm starting to get thirsty and I completely forgot the Create Food & Water spell I learned last year in cub stouts.             5 - I'm a fracolic dolphin from the final Age of Man swimming through Flutonia on my way to help out Bobby Kirby with the classic Great Blorkk-Zorgon Invasion of 222-155, and became really bored since it won't happen for at least a dozen billennia.  While I'm here, you don't happen to remember if the term 'mieon' was coined yet, do you?  I forget whether it was coined in the first or second age, and I still can't remember why it took so long for someone to think up a term for "a period of a million years", when 'millennia' and 'bllennia' seem to be pretty popoular.  I thumbed through our records but the issue seemed to omitted in the archives for some reason.             6 - I lost my memory three times since 1:11 this morning and everybody keeps telling me I'm the most important writer in the first Age of man, and I'm supposed to write this story or book or something like that; I'm not even quite sure anymore, because everybody keeps using undefined terminology, external Frangles references, and allusions to twenty-first century 155th billennia Earth artworks, because my friter is on his very first frwoa and doesn't yet understand the subtle differences between structuring intentional plot holes and mysteriously defined terms to feign the aura of well-crafted fractal writing that you can jump into at any point, and just plain throwing in a bunch of random shit hoping it will all make sense by the end of the book, which is likely not going to be worth the wait, especially if I'm the one who writes it.  To boot, everybody is acting like a whole bunch of other stuff is going wrong too, which I'm extra unequipped to deal with since I'm not even sure what the problem is.  The only normal people I've met here are a flock of pigeons who seemed as unconcerned as I am about the increasing crisis, mainly because they lost their memories too, to the point where they even forgot about me, thrusting me into into even deeper levels of peer abandonment than the last two times someone left me to fend for myself after only a few scenes, who all clearly had better things to do than help the Emperor of Artistic Importance write the book that will solve all their problems.  Now I've lost my memory, sanity, friends, my horse Artax, the Empress's Orin, my broomstick, ruby slippers, dog Toto, the jump co-ordinates to New Caprica and my cylon detection device, and my way on the path to Fair Use external copyright enlightenment.  If that's not enough to convince you, I even have an official certificate of Complete and Total Indefinite Psychotic Break Syndrome Post Traumatically Crucial to the Very Existence of Existence Itself from the shrink next door.  After all I've been through this morning so far, I think I deserve a little official recognition, and some sort of push in the general direction of not imploding the known universe, don't you?             7 - I'm just an Earth freer reading Frangles on my local internet, and got so confused by the final line of the Final Phylo of Zeroa that somehow I frwoa-blinked straight into the fictional world of Flutonia where it was the least relevant.  It's like sorta digital, but sorta a dream.  Maybe I just fell asleep on my keyboard after than shot of Tequila.  I'm really confused, and just want to get home.  I found your secretary through some kind of surrealy corporeal chat room, but she just told me to sit the hell down and fill out a .php form first.  I think she's short a few marbles but I didn't want to bring the issue up in case she's mentally unstable enough to have a shotgun under the counter for people who insult her intelligence.  So, just for the pure irony of it, I filled out a mental instability form for myself, but really I just need directions through cyberspace or hyperspace or whatever back to my home dimension.  I could also use a glass of water; your water bubbler keeps getting confused and dispensing fire and earth instead, and it's not even quite sure what those are either.  It would be great if dumped me to 'Earth' with a capitol 'E' instead of the lowercase word 'earth' meaning 'ground', but the thing just keeps plopping out some stinky mud and occasionally a spell of Fire2 and a puff of Dragon's Breath.  I held up a Temporary Mental Instability form up to it for it to sign, but it just cast a small fireball and incinerated it.  It also set one of the plants in the office on fire, which is another reason I want a glass of water.  The air around the plant doesn't seem sure how fast fire should burn, given the confusion of the fire involving a plant that itself produces oxygen (or what the flutonic formula for oxygen even is, or whether matter should even have a molecular formula other than ratios of fire, earth, wind, water, heart, and GO CAPTAIN PLANET!)--so I think I'm safe for now, but I happen to know there's an entire storeroom of nitrogen oxide next door when I was playing on line Quake, so it shouldn't get much bigger without being put out.  I'm not sure whether nitrogen oxide is flammable or not, but my netbook can't detect any wireless signals in the area, so I can't bing or yahoo it to find out.  Google's down, too.  I tried using fFlip, but he too keeps forwarding me to the DAC online form.  So here I am.  Can I please go home now?  I have a turkey waiting in the oven, and my plant hasn't been watered all week. If you've circled any of the above, you've completed section C and meet all of the criteria for being designated mentally incompetent by the Developing Arts Council.  However, if you had payed closer attention to it, you would realize that you were only asked to fill out this section if you wished to be deemed mentally incompetent, and not mentally unstable.  Since this is a mental instability form and not a mental incompetency form, you've basically wasted your time filling out sections A, B, and C of this form, and reading the sign to your left that reads "DO NOT FILL OUT THE DAC TEMPORARY MENTAL INSTABILITY BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH", and have qualified to continue filling out this form, beginning with Section D and proceeding to section F, or section F to section D if you've completed sections A through C in order but have thought of a clever way to fake dyslexia as a further condition for official classification of mental instablitiy since you began filling out this form. Thank you and have a nice day.	"Welcome to All the Answers You've Been Looking For.  Can I eschew your confrusion?"     "This isn't the Developing Arts Council?"     "It was, until we realized how confused and ADHD the local freers are--not to mention the friters--so we figured we'd suck all our visitors right in with the promise that whatever you're confrused about today is all going to make some sort of sense in the very near future; or at least the far future."     "But it's not?"     Depends on the confrusion.  Don't worry, Tots will explain everything when he gets down here."     " 'Tots'?"     "You know, 'kicks for tacks, ticks for toks; tocks for hips, hips for hawks'?"     That doesn't even have tots *in* it."     "And why should it?  He just left and he's on his way here now.  Can't be in two places at the same time, you know.  Well, unless you know a good deal about infinitely dimensioned space."     "Touche."     "Psah!  Nuh!  None of that!  This is a strict Flutonian office, not some conclusive proof at the end of time.  Though I suppose the end of time *would* be a 'touche' itself; wouldn't *that* be worth the wait!  Look!  You made me do it.  Nuh!  I'd better get back to work."     "But what's your name?"     "Right now my name is 'Have a Seat, Shut Up, and Let Me Get Back to Work', *therefore* would make the most sense for you to do so."     "Touche."     "Nuh!"     "Oh, sorry."     "Skips!  How providential your visit considering Lindsy just buzzed me about it a moment ago, not to mention it being the perfect time to kick off the first frwoa of the rest of your lives!"     "Actually I think my name is 'Skip'.  And this is 'Kilo'."     "No, it's 'Skips'.  You look like a Skips.  And I'm sorry dear Kilo, I didn't even notice you there."     "Really?  A big mass of humanoid water is kind of hard to miss."     "Well, it's not like he's a pseunami.  If he were a psunami, now I'd definitely have seen him."     "He was a puff of air in a previous life.  Maybe his current form hasn't caught up with him."     "And I'm moving on to fire as soon as I get my alcohol body percentage high enough."     "Doesn't really matter, it's all the same to the first moments of the greatest frwoa to ever be fritten, since the basic primary elements of Greek Philosophy are the very beginning of philosophy itself, and foreshadow the evolving of all future philosophy in which philosophers can do a bit more than look at life and count to four.  Anyway they're a wonderful start to foreshadow Kilo's dynamic character development, especially toward the revelation that you're just hallucinating him and I'm simply playing along at the end of our frwoa.  Oh dear, I shouldn't have said that."     "What do you mean, a great frwoa?"        "Well, you do know why you're here, right?"     "Not a clue."     "Exactly!  It's time for everything to start making a whole lot of sense, assuming there's an everything hovering around to begin with.  If not, then the next few minutes will just be *confusing*, as no one not following everything will have a clue what's being clarified.  But of course, they'll be able to deduce it from the implications of our meeting, just as anyone experiencing everything should have deduced much of what we're about to go into from its implication in its confusion wherever they jumped in!  That's why you're here now.  Make sense?"     "No."     "Then you either have amnesia and have forgotten everything, or have just jumped into existence a moment ago.  Either way works for me.  Hooked on phonics works for me, too, incidentally.  But that's not relevant right now."     "But when does this place start making sense?"     "As soon as everything else does!  It's both or neither around here, come on, let's go sit down and converse before all our freers drown in solid dialogue.  By the way, if you are truly confused, then you must remember to narrate immeditaely.  That's part of what all this is about, right?  Why don't you give it a shot as we're walking as this all might make more sense as a single scene without a popcorn or restroom intermission, because anyone who gets one is likely to run the hell away and not come back."     " 'The strange trio walked into a very Earth-like room that Skip was too confused to bother describing well at the moment.  Though if he wasn't, he might have noted that it was in a surreally ambivolent and conflicting state as if it couldn't decide whether it was an Earth or Flutonia setting, or if was intentionally something inbetween that whether it's particular confusion on the matter was a type of fuzzy, inductive, or gray-area phylical logic, or some combination of any or all of the above, adinfin.' "     " 'Kilo was pretty bored and didn't give much of a damn, but fortunately there was a really good soda machine in the room for him to at least get a snack and soda from.' "     " 'But Kilo's hopes were fried when he realized if anyone in the room should be able to fabricate something into existence just by thinking or narrating it, that it should have been Skip, because Kilo wasn't a frwoa novelist and the fate of Flutonia didn't depend on him being able to do what Skip couldn't.' "     " 'But Skip was wrong, as Kilo was *so* important that Skip's rising abilities in narration-creation were just a side affect of being anywhere near him.  He was surely going to suffer a horrible loss when Kilo became bored with him and thought up another adult more willing to let him have stimulants, booze, and premarital sex.' "     "Would you two stop bickering?  You're doing well contriving your narrations to up the freers hopes that we're progressing toward some sort of narration that will describe what on Earth is going on around here--maybe some vague physical descriptions of us or something--but you have a long way to go in harmonizing your narrations to be nonconflicting and flawless.  Narrators simply don't bicker.  That isn't what frwoa friting is about, and it certain isn't what All the Answers You've Been Looking For is all about, either."     "Then maybe you should clarify, and start living up to your name and telling us just what the hell is going on around here."     "Alright, then, let me explain why you're here."     "Didn't we run through that earlier?"     "I don't remember.  It doesn't seem so, but even we did, freers come and go so quickly here that any given one at any time might want to know just what the hell is going on.      "But how can we possibly introduce ourselves every few moments?  We wouldn't be doing anything else?"     "That's called instantaneous frwoa riffing.  Basically means your whole story is one big contrived introduction.  You'll get to that later.  For now, just deal with the people who are switching in on the half-hour for lack of anything better to free than their lame last-half-hour sitcom.     Look, if you're really going to write your first story, the first thing you have to take into account is your audience.  Freers are hovering about all the time, you've probably just never noticed them.  But if you're going to really tell a story, that's the first thing  you have to take into account.  Your first step in getting to know your audience is act like they've just jumped in to your story and haven't a clue what's going on.  Try awkwardly contriving your narrations to explain the more relevant terms and themes while pawning off the summaries as something original to the freers that have been with you for quite awhile.  That should help you get to know all your audience     "There once was a man named Skip, thrust into the sporadic middle of a confusing haphazard world of literary rubbish, with little sign anything would ever start making any sense."     "Good, now you can sympathize with the freer's situation perfectly.  Now, now that we have your narration pretty much down, let's start getting to the point of all this."     "I thought that's what we've been doing."     "Nope, not even started yet.     " 'Kilo and Skip stared forward like a... like a...  like a--deer in.. uh...' "     "So, I'm afraid you're here because we're in dire need of literary geniuses to think something up for the ATAYBLF to even be here for.  We were contracted with the mandate to find and susten as many creative literary geniuses and scientific prodigies as possible to grow some sort of foundation for the idea of Art in general..."     " 'Which am I?' Skip wondered."     "Neither of you are either, but if either of you were even close, Skip, you'd be the literary genius and Kilo here would be the mathematical mastermind slash scientifical prodigy.  Since we couldn't find any even close, you two currently serve as our best hope.  Think 'The Last Starfighter' except without any of the trained pilots who all died in a big space battle before you, and without you having any sort of talent as the last hope for Earth alive.  That's basically where we're at."     "..."     "So, shall I begin?"     "If we didn't begin quite awhile ago I'm afraid I'll have to... To... to--  See?  We've been doing this for so long I've run out of metaphors entirely."     "Or you never really had any to begin with."     "Touche."     "To jump into things, as much as I know about narration and dialogue flow, I'm afraid no one around here has the slightest creativity to be able to use it.  Everyone around here--and in general all of Flutonia, but you know that--can easily mimic what's going on, but we can't really think up anything new.  Around here, if a mind is creative enough, it's exponentially easier for their ideas to in fact form solid, tangible reality than in some place like Earth, where such solidity only happens if people's ideas make enough money to go build something real out of them.     "For instance, sitting here talking to you in this bland empty office, I feel the need to reference something that would help organize my thoughts and our meeting, but I can't think of anything to think of, and if I did would probably be too untalented in creative writing to narrate my idea into, say... say, for instance, say..."     " 'A quaint vifa clipboard with a dozen important-looking sheets of paper that Tots kept looking down at like any good literary agent facing talent that could make or break his career."     "Ah!  Thank you!  Perfect!  That's great.  Now, I see here Skip that you've submitted a Temporary Mental Instability Form.  We've reviewed this at length and determined that your long and short term amnesia--"     "Don't forget his full recovery from the short term kind just recently."     "Ah yes, how could I forget?"     " '...Tots replied, juxtaposing his own poor and selective memory with the ironically perplexing intertangled mix of amnesia disorders for the sake of its own sense of irony, ironically paralleling the already-ironic intermingly of Skip's disorders now over-alluded to twice in this horribly run on and rhetorically redundant narration and hey what's that on my shoe...?' "     "(I'd correct that, but your own demeaning of it says it all...)  Anyway, we've determined that your 'perplexing intertwinement of ironic amnesia symptoms' in fact create the best possible fuel for our current collective crisis!"     "Which is?  'Skip and Kilo looked equally ready to be even more thoroughly confused than each could ever imagine at this point...' "     "Why, to frite the first and greatest frwoa ever fritten in the entirety of the entire known universe known as Okuaka!!"     "Why do I get the feeling we're about to get exponentially more far from all the answers we've been looking far than we've ever been in the history of our mortal lives?"     "Sarcasm!  That's great!"     " 'Tots scribbled down a few more things on his increasingly frustrated clipboard who was now vaguely contemplating the idea of eventual suicide.' "     "Now, now, let's not get ahead of ourselves."     "Skip, I think it's time for another drink."     "No, Kilo, it's okay.  Somehow I feel this part is going to be more helpful than it will be confusing.  See, my whole life this question in particular has been at the heart of everything I've felt doesn't make sense about myself and this entire place--"     "That doesn't exactly make much sense, but go on..."     "...and somehow I feel this very man here is the one person who can finally shed light on the whole damn mess."     "Good call, Skip.  So, to the point!"     "Skip, are we there yet?"     "Hold your water, Kilo."     "Before I begin, are there any final questions you have whatsoever regarding anything we've just gone over?  Because once we dive in to why anything we've gone over matters or what its relevent to and after that there's no turning back."     " 'Skip and Kilo stared with the blankness of a sheppard who'd been instructed to pull an asteroid out of a sheep's womb in less time than it normally took for it to give birth to a lamb.' "     "I'm not sure if that was sarcasm or insult but if it was both they went as good together as... as.."     " 'Peanut butter and jelly'?"     "Or chocolate."     "Or bananas!  I'd comment triple metaphors are just dandy, if it wasn't for the fact that 'Triple' was a copyrighted cereal if I remember correctly..."     "I'll take the non sequiturness to mean we're already straying dangerously close to getting to the point and it's too late now to ask any of those 'final' questions either of us might have had."     "Good call!"     "Alright, now I'm dying to know, why must I frite the great Greatest Frwoa Ever Fritten in the History of the Known Universe Known as Okuaka?"     "Wouldn't *you* like to know!"     "That's it, Skip, I'm outa here."     "Kilo, wait!  Alright, alright, alright, you called my bluff.  I haven't any more clue what any of all this is about than you do.  I just got this memo on my desk ###49x this morning saying that you'd be in today inquiring about something important, and I've basically just winged the whole last twenty minutes trying to buy time to think of some interesting reason to bullshit you of why we're here and why what's going on is going on, but I'm afraid you've called my bluff.  That's why we erased your memories this morning, so you could both start from scratch and think up some kind of interesting reason for why we did so, but I'm not doing to well thinking up a method to get you to *do* so, so there it is, the truth; now would you kindly narrate the scene further to the point where it makes any sort of sense and actually clarifies some answers around here rather than just raising more?  The whole ATAYBLF would be in your debt, and there might even be a publishing contract or two involved."     "Now we're *getting* somewhere!"     " '...Skip selfishly exclaimed, as he was too worried about his own career to realize Tots' deal hadn't offered Kilo anything.  He frowned, realizing that Kilo was narrating him into a swamp of rancid guilt, but he knew there wasn't anything he could do about it because he realized that by now Kilo was !@#$ing sick of playing sidekick.' "     " '...Kilo narrated via a very short-lived childish outburst, for he was about to learn that Skip had become skilled enough in his narration by now to remind Tots that there was an entire ten-year contract for a Surfbored Do spokesman ready for Kilo to sign in his briefcase, along with a lifetime's supply of Do.' "     "Oh!  I see it.  Were you going through my papers earlier, Skip?  Why is Tom Brady scribbled off with Kilo's name above it?  I suppose Kilo might do.  He's already a splash of water, after all."     " 'Kilo swallowed his genuine, nontrivial long-term grudge for the moment if only to not piss anyone off before the deal was signed."     "Momentarily."     "What?"     "You could have used 'momentarily instead of 'for the moment'.  It would have used one less letter, or three including the spaces it would take to type it out."     "But..."  Kilo's brain seemed scrambled.  Tots was getting together some forms for them both to sign.  "Momentarily has five syllabels, where as 'for the moment' has only four."  The full-time novelist tensed at being corrected by a teenage English flunk-out, and his grip tightened on the manuscript all of them just now noticed he'd been carrying with him since they walked into the ATAYBLF.  The whole turn of events was quite enough to push Kilo into infinitesimally caring about the rest of the meeting.  He twisted his chair 180 and sat back down with the mild intrest of a chem student whose teacher had touched upon suggesting that the lesson might yield the cure to acne if someone in the room happened to have in their bag a winning lottery ticket and a can of flying pigs.' "     "Well, how's the contract, Skip?"     Skip and Kilo simultaneously realized that the papers in front of Skip werent his missin manuscript but rather the contract for him to actually write one.  Tots slid a thicker one over to Kilo.     "I don't know about you, Skip, but 'All the Answers I've been Looking for' has created more !@#$ing questions than I know what to do with.  I don't know if I trust this fine print not to implode the universe with an infinite density of unanswerable questions."     "That's a good point, kid.  Mr. Flick, before I sign, I don't suppose you have any answers why getting the Answers You've been Looking for Confuses You Into a Brain Impoding Nightmare of Bafflement?"     "Ah, they have those at the Developing Arts Council.  across the hall; it's called the Developing Arts Council."     "The wha--?"     "Just go back to the front desk, exit the building, and walk right back in the front door, and I'm sure it will all start to make much better sense.  All your confusion about Flutonia, prose, space, frwoas, freers, Lindsy, and your missing manuscript, will all make perfect sense once you forget why you came here and have to go through the whole thing again."     "Skip, my brain's dead."     "Me too, kid.  Let's just do what this guy says."     "See you around, fellas!"     Alright, I think this is the door.     "Welcome to All the Answers You've Been Looking For.  Can I eschew your confrusion?..."	"Welcome to the All the Answers You've Been Looking Forward To.  Can I foreshadow your confusion?"     "Yes!  We'd like to know why for the third time in a row these crammed !@#$ing scroll boxes have destroyed any hope of coherent or lengthy reading material."     "Oh, that's just temporary.  Come back later when Tots will explain all that and give you something to do."     "But--"     "Out!"     "Oh, Skip!  This would be a great time for you to work some good gay jokes as not too many freers are likely hovering about and you probably won't get sued for homophobia!"     "What do you mean, Ed?  Why now?"     "Y'know.. 'Out!' as in out of a closet?' "     "Oh!  Yes, that would certainly be innapropriate."
"Well that was unproductive.  'Toad frowned as if Skip's spoken phrase caused him an uncomfortable frwoa-vu that probably was a result of Skip saying something similar at least once already today.  Toad rudely shot Skip a glare as his needlessly alliterative narration of his discomfort bothered him even further.  Apparently there were more important things on Toad's mind than assisting with the retraining of the skills of the most pinnacle and Pulitzer Prize-worthy friter the known universe would ever--' "     "Enough!  This is serious.  Unless your short-term memory has been fried too, I shouldn't have to remind you of the penalty for us if you fail to publish your first frwoa novel by 7:77 tonight.  You might enjoy narrating our situation into a comedic lump of mockery, but being bricked to death is no laughing matter.  I'd dive into a worfllan take on the ethical paradox of comedic satire juxtaposing a terrible looming death, but some smart-ass phylor would probably step right of the tot to correct me.  There's only one thing I can think of to do, Skip.  You have to get back on the train."     "But why?  When *these* pet medications are exactly the same and cost a lot less.  And they're delivered right to your door!  Just call 1-800--"     "What??"     "Sorry.  Little intuitive non-sequiter comedic infringing situational irony humor."     "Not helping.  Here it comes."  Skip realized he'd been following Toad without noting where they'd been heading, and they were now uselessly back at the train station Skip had originally stepped off.     "Here *what* comes?"     "The tot!  The train of thought!  The Dawn of Time Train of Thought!  The dot tot!  I swear, Skip, lost forgotten dot tot or not, you still can't seem to absorb the simplest--"  The rest of the worflii's words were a muffled mush as the weight of the crowd of tourists exiting the train inadvertently pushed Skip back onto it before Toad could even instruct him where he was going, what he was supposed to do when he got there, or how doing it could contribute to solving the greatest writer's crisis Skip had ever faced in his first seven mots as a sentient being.	"Well that was unproductive.  'Skip followed the man who'd called himself a phylor back to Imaginary Station, afraid to ask any more questions as he seemed even more frustrated than usual.  The man's mind spun and whirled with a frantic worry, desperately trying to calculate a plethora of variables that just simply wouldn't harmonize.  The station arrived, just like a train would arrive, except the station didn't actually arrive, but rather seemed like it was arriving because Skip and the Nameless Phylor were walking toward it.  Then, the man who'd called himself a phylor--'  You know what?  I'm going to have to call you something.  I really don't see how telling me your name can contaminate my time line any more than all the information you've already given me, but if you really insist on keeping me in the dark, I'm going to have to call you something other than 'the man who calls himself a phylor'."            "Call me 'Something' then.  Or 'Mwchap'."            "Is that your name?"            "Sort of.  It's derived from an acronym."            "What acronym?"            "I'm sure you'll figured it out."            "Is it hard to figure out?"            "No.  Your freers have probably done so and are laughing at you for not realizing it yourself.  You normally wouldn't be so dense, but I suppose the stress of the last two sours along with the shock of being thrust into a largely unfamiliar world has taken a decent toll on your usual competency.  Or at least your usual delinquency."            "Touche."            "Do you have any idea what happens now, Skip?"            "What do you mean?"            "Well, we seem to be inside some sort of self-similar fractal plot structure.  Everything we've done in the sour or so since you stepped off the train seems to have mimicked something else you did the sour before that from 1:11 to 1:17.  Now it's 1:27, and we've followed a similar path as the one you took before, which is probably the thing augmenting your deja vu.  It must be a crucial plot element that this whole crisis will hinge on at some point, and the only way I can currently think to use it to our advantage is if you can remember what happened one sour ago.  Because if we know that, and have developed some sort of understanding of how things have progressed this time around, then maybe we can figure out what's going to happen in the next few moments."            "But what good would that do?  Then we'd just know precisely how we're going to !@#$ things up some more before we bothered doing so."            "Touche."            " 'Skip and his strange new friend stood in a harmonious, ponderous silence for a few long, deep moments.  Their minds each spun in a similar dizzy nightmare of paradox and fearful symmetry in a strange dark fog.  Skip was lost in the maze of a confusing new world, the other in the maze of an ancient one.  Each lost more innocence as the moments wore on, Skip as a child waking up to an adult world, the other in realizing his timeless knowledge was inept to guide him through the horrors of its own failures.  Skip faced the irony of ancient vastness hinging on fresh ignorance, the phylor of vastness being so great as to bend back on itself and become young and innocent again, and beg of itself to continue to thrive and learn and grow even after reaching the ultimate limit of knowledge and growth and mass.  Both started as a train of thought approached from the South, and all that could be done was to keep thinking.  It was all there was left to do.' "            "Alright Skip, that's it, then.  I suppose you should get back on the train and head for your next sour."            "But why?  When these pet medications are exactly the same and cost a lot less.  And they're delivered right to your door!  Just call, uh... I forget the number now."            "What??"            "Sorry.  It was a joke that came to mind, but I'm not quite sure from where.  I was experimenting with breaking from my serious narration into a brief moment of comic relief before the end of the sour."            "Not helping.  Alright, it stopped.  I'm afraid I can't disturb your time line any more, Skip.  You're going to have to take your chances by yourself."            "But what if I forget everything again?"            "With any luck, your memory will continue to improve at the start of each sour, and your deja vu will serve as a keystone plot device for the freers to follow you along and wake up to the Age of Flutonia along with you.  In hindsight, I suppose you're right, this is definitely one of the greatest plot techniques that could ever be devised to accomplish your great introductory frwoa.  I can only pray you're the one who thought it up, or the future frwoas of all of Okuaka--all stemming from yours--could be doomed to the eternal red tape of Infringement trials right from the start.  Good luck, Skip,  I hope to see you again.  Off with you, now, it's about to leave."            "What is?"            "The tot!  The train of thought.  The Dawn of Time Train of Thought to the Third Sour of the day.  I swear Skip, greatest frwoa writer in the history of Okuaka or not, your AAD is still as abysmal as I have ever--"            The rest of the phylor's words were a muffled mumble as Skip pushed through the crowd of tourists to board the train of thought to the third sour of the first day of Skip's short life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between the dawn of the dawn of time and something o'clock Monday morning.	"Well that one wasn't very tasty."  Skip bumped into his three new friends as they all walked back to the park.  Skip assumed from Ed's comment that they'd learned how to eat for themselves, but there didn't seem to be any food around.             "Oh hey guys, did you figure out how to eat already?"             "Oh.  No, Ed was just commenting metaphorically about the value of our therapy session by comparing it to our sense of taste.  I don't think the metaphor worked very well, but we don't know what else to compare anything to as we've only been here since this morning."             "Actually, I was fantasizing that we were killer pigeons and ate Dr. Vifps for breakfast."             "Aww Ed, I liked Dr. Vifps."             "Oh, I know, he isn't so bad, it's just I was so hungry and I didn't know who else to eat since he was the only one in the room."             Skip had little idea to what extent the pigeons were being creative versus the possibility that their ideas actually became reality the more they thought them so, and figured he might be able to use the skill to his advantage if he could master its subtleties.  "Ah, well, I did much better, as I found a million dollar bill and a free hooker lying just next to the Developing Arts Council just a moment ago!"  Skip checked his pocket.  Nothing there.  Skip looked backwards toward the DAC.  No hooker.             "No, no, you're doing it wrong."             "How's that?"  Skip thoroughly checked his pocket and looked backward carefully.  Still nothing there.             "I... I don't know, you just sort of, do it, you know?  Like the Star Trek TNG episode where Q loses his powers and describes what it's like to change the gravitational constant of the universe with a thought rather than a set of scientific procedures."  Skip frused as he almost remembered the episode as Ed spoke of it, even though it likely didn't exist until Ed had thought it up.  If the pigeons could create reality with thought alone like the unrealistically tuning power of John Murdock in the 1998 film "Dark City", what the hell was the point of being a professional writer who just comments on everything?  Perhaps that's why a great frwoa was so important, because anything less wouldn't really do much of anything around here.  He looked sad, and Todd thought he needed some saving after all the pigeons had contributed to Skip's troubles.  He thought up a way to spin the event towards optimism.             "Yah, but Q's suggestion prompted Geordi to think up a scientific solution to the problem.  So maybe we can inspire Skip to think up some basic writing methods that'll help him."             "Then he can finally write some bread crumbs and a way to eat them into our scenes!"             "But if we're so smart, why can't we think up the same thing?"  The pigeons looked toward Skip as he seemed to have all the answers, if not the ability to delude a million dollar hooker into existence.  Everything seemed to have an answer from the frangle that life is a story, but none of the pigeons could figure out what could possibly be wrong with a story in which everyone lived happily ever after and had been doing so since the dawn  of time.             "Conflict."             "Hunh, Skip?" Ed asked.             "Hunh, Skip?" Eagle asked.             "Hmmn,"  Todd nodded solemnly at Skip's answer as if he should have known it all along.  It was the same demeanor he'd adopted in Office B, and Skip wondered if he'd already been robbed of an innocent youth of whatever sudden event the blue button had prematurely pushed into the very dawn of Todd's life, just like Skip had been robbed of the experience of developing his writing skills from a talented young age.  Skip realized it was for the same reason, as well as the reason for all his own troubles since 1:11 that morning in addition to his loss of writer's innocence.             "Conflict."             Todd nodded with Skip again, doubly thoughtful.  Skip smiled a bit, realizing he had probably spoken the very first instant of exact repetition for an emphatic poetic effect ever spoken, and someone approved of it to boot.  It was a clever invention, which hence begged to be shot down by an inexorable critique.             "Oh, say it twice, that'll help me figure out what the hell you're talking about.  And what's with you, Todd, you turned all boring ever since you saw that button.  If you were that curious, why didn't you just flupple up to it and push it to see what it did?"  Todd ignored this.             "So what now, guys?  I keep getting this feeling I have to write this important story ever since Eagle mentioned it, but the more I start to figure it out, the more lost I seem to get.  I get more lost every mot, which by now I can only assume means 'moment' or something like that."             "More, lost, every, mot, trains-to-tie-them thought by tot..."             Eagle almost seemed to be hopscotching up into the air a little higher each time, his task taking up most of his tiny little brain leaving little room to worry about the sophisticated literature that the fate of Flutonia depended on.  Skip's evolving methods of launching the Great Flutonian Flwoa were no less fluttery.             "Maybe you need some more poetic disjunctive rhetorical alternation irony," Ed offered, only a little more concerned.  He was fluttering up better himself, though Eagle seemed to have a wing up on him.  Ed risked a few glances now and then when Eagles's back was turned, trying to peck apart his technique..             "You're cheating, Ed!  No copyducking!"             "How in Nonbeing did you--"             "I have eyes in the back of my head."             "And eagle eyes at that."  Todd a step forward.  "Look, Skip, don't get so down.  Maybe you've been around longer than us--"             "Or at least got a little more done while we chased bread crumbs all morning..."             "But from what I've seen around here, things are exactly like they're supposed to be, so don't worry about being so important all the time."             "What do you mean, 'exactly like they're supposed to be'? "             "I just mean, this whole place just doesn't seem to know what to do with itself, and quite frankly, neither do you.  What other type of life is there, really?  This place--like any other place I can think of--is kinda here, and there, and--"             "Here and there and everywhere," Eagle riffed as he flupper-scotched into the air.  "Hey Skip, you should write a story about Square One!"  Skip took this to mean some fictional suggestion, and figured he'd add the brilliant epiphany that the vifa world above the train station actually was Square One.  It seemed a brilliant plot twist seeing how Eagle hadn't mentioned anything about where Square One was.  He was proud of the idea and decided he might be able to mimic the pigeons reality-creating thoughts finally.             "Square One?  That's what the square outside is called, isn't it?"  It definitely felt he himself had named the entire Square above--even if Eagle had thought of the name--just as the pigeons seem to have thought up the square to begin with, or at least thought they did.  It wasn't much, but to the best of his memory, it was the first truly creative idea he'd had other than just uselessly narrating world around him.  It was a good feeling until Ed fluppered up toward a sign on the station wall that had been there all along with an arrow pointing toward the stairs that said "<-- TO SQUARE ONE".             "Look!  I bet he saw it earlier and forgot!"             "Idiots!"             "Hey, what I do?"             "What'd I do?  I didn't even say anything."             Only a need for Todd's advice--if his pigeon brain could muster any more--caused Skip to shrug off the need to mentally calculate whether the sign might actually have been there before, or whether Ed had competed with him by thinking up the fact that the sign had always been there, when in fact Skip actually had named the square above.             Todd now looked like he was reaching downward in the back of his mind to access some pool of aged wisdom, but could only seem to scratch the surface, and to boot he could barely verbalize it anyway.  "Look, what are the top frwoas that thrust us into a confusing mush of bird turd and proceed by tying it all together as if the writers had planned it all along, when they probably just scribbled out the first half of the story on the back of a napkin, then got stoned and tied everything together later?"  Ed and Eagle, still air-hopping, answered in a creative fluppery high.             "The Matrix Trilogy!"             "Memento!"             "X-Files!"             "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!"             "Battlestar Galactica!"             "Yah, stupidest out-of-nowhere plot twists in history.  I'm a cylon, my best friend's a cylon, my dog's a cylon, my entire extended family on my cylon mother's side are cylons..."             "Don't forget the other side!"  Eagle flupupled upward.             "Great frwoas just throw us into a heap of mush and explain everything when they gets around to it.  The chaos of a fresh new world is the only thing worth dragging a reader into!  What great work of art ever started out all normal and obvious and explained the whole problem clearly right from the beginning?"             "Fellowship of the Ring!"             "Star Wars IV!"             "Aristotle's Metaphysics!"             "Wheel of Time!"             "The Book of Revelations, The Republic, The Declaration of Independence..."             Skip became increasingly troubled with each allusion as if each was a gunshot straight into his competence as an aspiring writer.             "Idiots!"             Eagle stopped air-scotching for a moment.  "What?"             "Alright, well, at least half of them start off with a bunch of random !@#$, right?"             "Probably less than 10%, Todd..."             "More like 5!"             "If you two don't shut the duck up I'll think you right back into oblivion!"             "Fine with me, at least we won't be hungry there."             "You couldn't do it anyway, Todd.  There are two of us and one of you."             "I thought up a whole park, didn't I?  What have you two done?  You thought up the word 'idiot' and bickered like a bad rerun of The Three Stooges all morning!"             "Wouldn't that necessitate a third stooge?"             "Todd can't count very well for park-creating demi-god."             "Whatever the percentage, Skip, the story of your life is one of them!  And a superb example it is to boot.  You should feel lucky; your story may be as confusing as hell, but what way is there to tell the story of a clueless dolt with amnesia, other than to instantly drown the reader into the seventh circle of confused, terminology-unexplained lobotomized duck-brained oblivion?  It's the only thing that the story of your life--or at least the past few minutes--could possibly do, to accomplish your freer-drawing medium.  Nothing else would break the fourth wall."             "Psst, what's a wall, Ed?  Am I supposed to know that by now?"             "Not sure.  Maybe we should try flying into one to find out."             "But Todd, couldn't it also be the scenario that those writing my story actually are just writing a bunch of random nonsense with only a vague sense of style loosely connecting it all, and an empty promise that it will all make sense in a couple billennia?  How could I know the difference?"             Eagle accomplished his highest flutter in the air yet.  "Maybe it depends on your point of view!"             "Eeg, I think that's the only intelligent thing you've said all day."             "Well Ed, I'd be wondering about now whether that's a compliment or an insult, but I suppose I'm too idiot to ever figure out the difference."             "Maybe it depends on your point of view, Eeg."             "Thief!  Police!  That wasn't even a creative alteration of my brilliant philosophy!  That can't possibly fit under Fair Use!  Is there an cop anywhere?  Officer!  I'm being robbed!"  Eagle flew up the stairs, given that they had all been, incidentally, at the train station that Skip had originally stepped off for quite awhile now (if that wasn't already apparent from previous clues).  Ed ignored Eagle's fleeting fleeing as a brick-wall crash back to his unenlightened idiocy--or possibly a dive into the deep waters of going too far for a lame joke--and used the time to attempt to match Eagle's record breaking height without being further accused of ripping off his technique, which he could now rip off freely and thoroughly.             "Yeah, Skip," Todd continued, "Eagle has a superb point.  Maybe you're chained down with the idea that Flutonia is all supposed to make some sort of sense; or at least, that whether it makes any sense or not is a solid, clear, disjunctive alternating truth.             "So maybe it's not one or the other, but rather both and neither?"             "Makes sense to me.  And until you meet your confused philosopher again--or your midget friend who seems to be more with it but still not have a clue what themes your story should have or how you should write it--I can't imagine a better world view to help you keep your sanity around here."             "But Todd, what does the the story of my own life have to do with the one I'm supposed to be writing?"             "Well... well..  I really have no idea!  But at least now you're running through a world of chaos with a more open mind that it may or may not make more or less sense than you originally thought it might.  What better setting for a writer to concentrate and be inspired?"             "And realizing that is definitely enough dynamic character development for my third sour as a sentient being, I'm sure."             "Glad I could help."             "Dammit!--"  Ed had gotten a quarter-inch to Eagle's record height, and was frustrated enough to consider flying after him to stalk him for some more techniques, eyes in the back of his head or not.  Perhaps it was still a profitable accomplishment to beat someone with their own tricks.  Skip looked left and right in confrusion as if the tot to the next sour of the day had already come and gone a dozen times in the past minute and he had simply missed it by thinking too hard on Todd's words.             "But--oh Todd, where do I go from here?  Great All Important Friter and I haven't the faintest idea for a character or plot.  Or even a structured medium in which to write!  Life has seemed to line up in sours of seven; I keep having the same seven bouts of deja vu, and I can only assume from the pattern life lines up in some sort of repeated patterns of seven..."             "Why the hell would you assume that?"             "...And I can only guess that that's how things work around here.  Even if I'm right, and stories work in sevens--and hence that's the structure the story I must right should have--how can know what type of medium I should be writing in?  Am I supposed to write a poem?  A novel?  A napkin-scribbled frwoa screenplay?  Even if I know all that, how do I even begin with characters and plots and themes and style?  I only have a vague idea of how those should work to boot, and only then if fiction closely mimics the structure of reality!  For all I know the Greatest Frwoa of Flutonia has nothing to do with the structure of my life, and is a 9 line hai-ku!"             "Or just 3!"             "Let it be just one!  How should I even know what this frwoa thing is or how to go about creating one?  Having increased clarity that everything around me is more fuzzy and relative than I ever suspected it was is a plus, but I'm afraid I just haven't a bird-brained spec of a theory of a hint of a clue on how to even start this whole 'frwoa' thing!  I still don't know what the hell a frwoa even is!"             Todd took a deep moment to rack his tiny bird brain.  He seemed to be reaching down inside his psyche to access some deep, unconscious pool of wisdom, as if he'd been a great, wise wizard whole lifetimes ago, and that only the wisdom was relevant here and not the exact details (which would ruin the story of Todd actually being the sixth-age wizard Mezoro Moldorin around the sixth period of the Sixth Age sometime around Frangles book 661).  There was only a sliver of surprise or annoyance that Skip was begging for the aid of a brainless pigeon; it was as though Skip already picked up that Todd would have the answers from a great experience that he entirely lacked, not to mention everything else that he could possibly have forgotten--or not had at all--to begin with.  It occurred to Skip that perhaps any advice the pigeon might be able to dig up for him would be aided by Todd himself being vaguely in Skip's situation, and could relate to it more, and mix the old with the new, just as the phylor had sort of done.  Then again, the pigeons hadn't said a whole lot about where they were from; perhaps Todd actually was the Emperor of Pigeon Oblivion and wasn't digging deep at all, but simply taking a moment to carefully decide what to say to a clueless peasant who accidentally wandered into the castle courtyard.             Whatever type of time there was in Flutonia seemed to pause indefinitely, and Todd's calm allowed Skip to wait with near-infinite patience, save glancing left and right occasionally at the vifa very late train which also seemed to be waiting patiently for Todd's reply before it decided to arrive.  Skip turned and noticed that Ed had already became bored and flown out after Eagle.  Perhaps the peer pressure was getting to Todd, because finally, he fluttered up as if to leave and gave Skip the most useless answer he could possibly give him.             "Beats the turdshit out of me!"  And with that, he was up and away as he called back the best of luck to Skip and his hopes that they'd meet again soon.  Just as he was almost out and the slivers of light from above lightly draped on him (almost as a pigeon angel if he hadn't blurted out a completely useless and idiot answer devoid of any sort of angelic aura whatsoever), he decided it wasn't quite enough to leave Skip with.  While he may have had all the answers and decided to thrust Skip down a path for his own good or was just plain revealed to be the bird-brained pigeon he really was, he decided it would only be polite to offer Skip just a little more than absolutely nothing to aid the greatest crisis of his life.  Skip would have to decide whether it definitely meant one or the other, or was sort of both and neither, and which it was if it was any of them at all.             "Skip Square One, Skip!  Skip Square One!"             The ensuing train of thought was the most memorable and irrelevent Skip had ever been on to date.	"So that's Earth?  Incompetent secretaries, nutty shrinks, skanky beer, and endless answers to life's problems that only confuse the !@#$ing hell out of you the more you find them?"     "Not to mention clunky train stations we should probably mention we're at right now for the sake of our freers."     "I don't think I can write about this place.  I need something more exciting."     "Didn't you want a cat--catalyist?  Why not just use this Earth place as a foundation for somewhere more interesting?"     "Kilo, that's a great idea!  But *where*?  When *these* pet meds cost half at much, and they're delivered right to your door!"     "Hunh?"  Kilo wracked his brain as it seemed he'd been given a positive response followed by the most non sequitur comment he'd heard from Skip since he'd known him.  Still, if he gave a clever and useful answer (assuming the question "but where" could be separated from the pet comment and was still directed at him and hence he was still being asked a question), perhaps his character would have a high score entered in the vaguely same ballpark as Skip, who seemed to be the main player.     "Perhaps it's time *you* took control, Skip."     "Easier said, Kilo."     " 'Easier said'? "     You know, 'Easier said than done'?  I was abbreviating it."     "But how would I have known what you were abbreviating?"     "It's... well... haven't you ever heard the expression 'Easier said than done'?"     "I have now.  Looks like you thought that one up.  See?  Maybe you don't suck as much as you think."     "Just because I've read a grammar handbook doesn't mean I can re-write the greatest frwoa of the known universe."     "Then start small."     "There's no time, Kilo!  I only have 6 hours!  Or was it 7?  13?  49?  My brain can't even count anymore.  Wow, I'm !@#$ed."     "See?  If you can't even count right, for all you know you have a year."     "That's a point."     "Besides, things work so weird around here that you could easily stumble on a time machine before the day's out."     "Or a duck and a dead whore."     "Uh, sure; 's a plan."     "Instead of looking all over for one, why not think one up?  Or some other place that has something that could help. "     "We did think up a bar when we really needed to get smashed."     "See?  And you need not to die a lot more than you need another drink."  Skip got the gut feeling that Kilo's eschewal of more drinking was mostly a self-preservation mechanism, or at least a drop of life insurance.     "But I don't know how to do it *consciously*.  The bar just sort of came to us.  For all we know, we knew it was right around the corner but didn't knew we knew.  Or maybe it was just coincidence.  How many public city squares don't have a pub named Frank's Bar?     "I've only been to one so don't ask me.  Why not just get back on the train and concentrate really hard?  Maybe it'll take ya somewhere else for once.  This can't be the only stop in all of Flutonia.  There's at least gotta be a Square *Two* somewhere.  Skip?"     Skip had his eyes tightly closed.  His face was that of someone taking a shit while trying to materializie a missing role of toilet paper in a bathroom out of it.     "Skip?"  Skip's eyes opened.     "Oh well."     Kilo surveyed the train track.  An old blind lady with a neon German Sheppard seeing eye dog was with her.  It wasn't helping her, though.  It was simply running around her in circles panting and barking.  She reached in her coat pocket  and tossed it a liver snap to shut it up.     Kilo turned back to Skip who was staring with a deathly expression of failure.     "What is it, Skip?  You couldn't think up your train?  I wouldn't be too hard on yours--     "I was trying to hallucinate a free hooker into existence."     So nothing happened, big deal, Why don't you just keep--"  Kilo finally saw what Skip was still frowning at: the old lady who'd just appeared at the moment he tried to think up a free hooker.     "Oh."     "Ugh."     "Well, at least you're doin' shit.  Your memory's getting clearer, you've lived a little, and you still got 13/14th of the day left!  I'm no genius, but there doesn't seem to be much else to do than get back on the train and try again.  You know what I do whenever I have a report due I haven't done shit on two hours before it's due?     "What's that?     "Anything but nothing."     "Hmm."     "Look, if you can't write a book, get a coupl'a short stories in.  At least you'll be bricked to death knowning you weren't a *total* failure."     "Who would remember?"     "Aw, comd on, think half full, Skip."     "Hunh?"     "You know, it's good to look on the bright side that your glass is half full rather than half empty?"     "Who said that?"     "I did I think.  Then I stole your cliche-castration technique.  I was thinkin' you'd be smart enough to pick up on it."     "Touche."     "I have an idea, why don't you--"  A loud train of thought approached from the south.  It looked new.  It's whole outside--and inside that Skip could see--was of a unique realness that only someone seeing it first hand for the first time could properly describe.  Skip sensed this to the relief of any of Skip's writers hovering about who's utter laziness was the only thing holding them back from doing so themselves.  The station air swayed the "Imagination Station" sign above as if to be rid of a poser only using their imagination as a gateway drug toward a goal of published material.     "Even if I had time to finish the book, Kilo, what the hell's it going to be about?  An anal secretary, a psychotic shrink, and a bed-wetting 15-year-old?  I can't exactly re-hash *that* for 300 pages.  And the more I wander around, the less time I'll have to incorporate it into a full frwoa.     "What do writers *ever* write about, Skip?"     "What do you mean, Kilo?"     "No frwoa's ever full, Skip.  They're all always half-unfinished.      "What about your optimistic beer bottle?  Shouldn't they be half-*finished*?"     Not if they're never full.  Anyway, I *was* being optimistic; *your* hour's half-finished, and look where it's gotten *you*!  I was saying why not look to the fact that something is *un*finished as a positive thing?  A half-blank slate?"     "You're a pretty smart kid after all, Kilo."     "Maybe I was a brain cell in a previous life."     "Or a cell phone."     The train had arrived and was now impatiently chooing for someone waiting for it to board it.      "Skip the present, Skip.  Skip to the future, even.  If present day Earth-Flutonia sucks, write about a day when it won't suck anymore.  If this place isn't very adventurous, imagine a time when it *will* be.  Call it... Future Fiction!"     The train of thought collided with Kilo's suggestion in a magnificent big *bang* of molecular thought-matter implosion, and Skip thought-rode off to whatever future lay beyond the dull and mundane boundaries of current day Earth-Flutonia.	"So that's that the future of Earth is all about?"     "Aliens, genecidal Artificial Intelligence, and Interplanetary War, that about does it."     "What comes next?"     "Well, mostly those three just repeat themselves.  That's about it."     "But other than that?"     "Oh, well, other than that, a whole bunch of useless scroll box jokes."     "What?"     "You know, like in the case that our freers are stuck in a cliche nonlinear fractal scroll box environment?"     "What lazy friters."     "To be continued!"     "Hunh?"