FIREBALL NOVEL: CHAPTER 1

                                                       

                      LOOKING BACK THROUGH THE FIREBALL

                                    Copyright Tom Leonard

                                       Edinburgh June 2022

                                                              1. TRIANGLE OF FRIENDS

                                                                               

Pippa Pipette was of in vitro Scottish descent. She was blessed with jet black hair and distinctive blue eyes, and believed that she was made in exactly the way her creator had intended. Humans had long co-existed in the Aton solar system in the Red Trojan universe, with the non-hominid Icarians and the many colourful species of Apollo.

The Apollos had rapidly evolved from hominids, owing to the influences of the Siegfried-Kappa rays that came through the black hole from the Quanta universe. Interspecies marriages of humans with Icarians or Apollos were socially acceptable, though other talking animals were taboo.

All sentient life on Planet Earth in the Milky Way universe had become extinct during the fireball of AD 2593. However, before that humans and golden Icarians had teleported between the sister planets using an elaborate system designed during the Ice Ages by the neutro-ants of the Belt of Orion universe.

Planet Qinsatorix was colonised, and brutalized, by the exploitative British, during the twenty-fifth, and early twenty-sixth, centuries. That led Pippa to wonder how much her psyche had been influenced by the various post-colonialist attitudes that prevailed in the Red Trojan universe during the early twenty-eighth century.

Pippa liked purple ferrets and fluffy cream cats. She lived as a child in the planet capital Trivoli, a mystical ‘City of Lanterns’ located at the source of the Tiber in the western region of Trystonia, the comet-shaped mainland of Qinsatorix.

Trivoli was once the sister city of Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A., and Pippa identified with the Native American Culture of the Post-Barronist era. She grew up in the downtown Isthmus area between the exotic Lakes Nefertiti and Akhenaten, on sacred ground where the indigenous Dakota Sioux were once butchered and scalped by the golden-supremacist militia led by the fickle Crockett Lincoln himself.

Pippa was brought up in a log-cabin by her adoptive Talking Wolf parents, surrounded by a hi tech, industrialised, Icarian-ruled society, and regarded herself as a uniquely talented individual. When she was only nine, she learnt from her Social Economics teacher that fixed term growth creates long-term exponential profit. Pippa therefore wondered why Capitalism did not suddenly implode upon itself.

Pippa was intersex, but self-identified as a girl. Gone were the days when intersex humanoids were burnt at the stake, but the golden-skinned Icarian medics either killed or mutilated Pippa’s kind at birth. However, the Apollo Fox doctor at Lake Wingra Hospital left Pippa unscathed, and she was never told the reason why. Maybe she would be secretly scrutinized throughout her life, she sometimes wondered.

Pippa's loveable, adoptive parents nurtured her as a highly studious pupil at Greenside Primary. They were thrilled when she passed her Pre-Teen Qualifiers, with a score of 100% on the Deary-Burt, golden collar, IQ test. Pippa was permitted to wear a bright blue uniform, and to receive a quality education at Horizon High.

Pippa was a jolly student at high school, good academically and too strong to be bullied, and she blossomed into a trophy-winning, all-accepting teenager. Life could not have been better.

But everything went dreadfully wrong when Pippa was sixteen. Soon after she'd finished her Highers, her eagle-eyed chemistry teacher caught her smoking 'green' behind the changing rooms. When Pippa answered back with the crass insolence of youth, the teacher dragged her into the Social

Re-Alignment Cell, strapped her to a greasy pole, and lashed her with a poisonous snake-tawse. Three hockey forwards ran in to defend Pippa from further grief, and punches were thrown.
The hockey players were carrying Pippa towards safety when, a pig-van turned up, lights flashing and sirens wailing, and Pippa was suddenly left alone on the ground, writhing in agony.

“Section her!” growled the officious teacher, nursing her cracked jaw. “She's one of those unholy beasts!”

The rozzers put Pippa in a stiff neck-hold, dragged her away, and confined her to the Royal Triv, on the bleak, southern shore of Osiris, the Lake of Bones. She spent a few days in a windowless isolation cell, before being dragged into a plush office, and thrown, quivering like a weed in water, onto a plush crimson carpet.

A neuro-dissection consultant with cauliflower jaws took a single look at Pippa, diagnosed her as suffering from Bad Attitude Deficiency Disorder (B.A.D.D.), and prescribed heavy doses of an enzyme-poisoning, atypical anti-psychotic. A massive rugby prop forward from Melrose 7 injected Pippa's first dose, very cruelly in her ribs, and she squealed in agony.

After an anxious wait, Pippa's adoptive parents succeeded in negotiating her release from the Royal Triv, but the awkward neurologist signed a 'rendition order' placing Pippa in the custody of Sir Sargant Tredgold, the Headmaster of Laughlin Penitentiary College on the Isle of Nod.

Dr. Tredgold was a golden Icarian psycho-eugenicist of repute, and a mind-gut-organs specialist of note. His college and lab were financed by the Pioneer Fund, created many centuries previously by Harry Laughlin, the Nazi-esque superintendent of the United States Eugenics Office in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York.

Pippa's adoptive parents were scared that the technicians in Sargant Tredgold's lab might turn her from a cranky teenager into a comet vampire. They went ballistic when they heard that Tredgold was a leading member of the Janians, a sect that used long tubes, during their annual Lancaster Retreat, to give forced rattalin enemas to participants with mental health issues. When the furry creatures learnt that Tredgold had sent a psychotic Talking Koala to die in the Deep Sleep Room in the Dr. Owen David basement of St. Thomas of Trivoli's Hospital, they tried to challenge the rendition order in the High Court of Qinsatorix.

Unfortunately, Pippa's case fell apart when Sir Donald Jackson-Cowdenbeath K.C, F.R.S.E. drank too many brandies on the proceeds, and screwed up the evidence for the defence. So off to the Isle of Nod in the Archipelago of the Lost Multitudes Pippa was sent.

After a tortuously hot voyage, down the Tiber and across Oceania in a rendition coffin deep in the hold of the slave ship Colston, Pippa arrived, at Harry Laughlin College in mid-August 2712, where she was registered to study for four A-levels.

Pippa took solace in the companionship of Slim Quick, a clean-limbed, openly gay, golden-skinned lad with trauma-induced mental health issues. Sometimes the youngsters imagined they were part of each other’s fantasy. They particularly enjoyed landing on the top of Harperbury Hill together, where they sometimes met up with angels of their dreams.

Slim was green-eyed, ginger-haired, and from the mainland naval port of Drumkok. He'd lived on the Isle of Nod ever since he was sent to Laughlin Prep in a bird cage at the tender age of eleven. His appalling experiences in the Pied Piper larder during the canoe trips to the bizarrely fortified islet of Little St. Jules left scars on his mind. They'd doubtlessly been character-forming ever since.

Pippa and Slim befriended an indigenous Apollo Alpha called Dreyfus Dreadnought. He was trans male, an outcast from Angervast, the capital city of the Inner Moon, and he grieved for his look-alike love-buddy, who'd been exiled in chains to die in the copper and arsenic mines on the Outer Moon.

The three friends slept on a huge, unkempt, communal mattress in their third-floor dorm in Bligh Hall, the beds having been removed by the prefects to intimidate the browbeaten Lower Sixth. The building was named after the much decorated, golden-skinned Vice-Admiral Billy Bligh, who exterminated 100,000 hominids during the attack on Asmara 13, and enslaved the indigenous people of Rum.

When Pippa awoke on the second Thursday of September, her pet otter Scatty was sitting on her chest, and Dreyfus was untangling his hooves from his wings. Pippa's grimy bedfellows included eleven diverse Qinsatorans, and a metallic, four-legged Psychlops from Planet Gallium Arsenide. When the Psychlops began to stir, Pippa bounced off the mattress, and rushed to the loo.

Pippa slipped on the urine-sodden asbestos floor, but recovered her balance and sat herself down on the edge of the dirty white, communal lavatory bowl, clutching her cleaning brush. She day-dreamt about her childhood, and a multitude of colourful pictures flashed two inches in front of her right eye.

Pippa was envisioning her furry Auntie Mabel sunbathing on the Isle of Mustique, with the princesses with tiaras and Royal Commandos with big bushy hats, when the breakfast gong clanged inside her head. Pippa opened her left eye and returned to her apparent reality.

A droolworthy, green Drinkon was sitting next to Pippa on the massive toilet bowl. Tempted by the smell of bacon, Pippa leapt to her feet, pulled up her grey jeggings, and scarpered.

Pippa took a bite of rancid bacon and a sip of lukewarm tea in the brinner room, before scurrying across the gravel to her sombre class-space. There followed an hour of irritating co-ordinate geometry, and two heavily retentive hours of Classics.

When the grandfather clock struck noon, Dr. Jake Skulltwister was still teaching from the Odyssey of Agrevius. Upon completing the line, 'So Agrevius to his foul and painful fate did go, and all was sickening woe', the horribly boring Apollo Fish glowered at his students, and growled, “Now vamoose and get lost!”

Pippa packed her satchel, and headed for the Rolfe-Gotto Dining Hall, an insect-ridden place. In the corner lay a fading, golden-painted bust of the, once iconic, Hyacinth Rolfe-Gotto, the editor of the widely-sold text Interplanetary Applications of Negative Eugenics.

When Pippa sat down, she recalled that Dame Rolfe-Gotto's quote, 'Starve the degenerates and improve the species', was highly influential during the liquidation of the highly cultured Visigoths, and long thereafter. That put Pippa off eating in the damned place at all. She put her mouldy, cheese sandwich into her pouch, and headed across the bridge over the Lower Blackway for the beach.

The lush bushes of Eden dominated the view across Tawi Sound to the west, and, beyond Eden, hundreds of tiny islets stretched to the perfectly horizontal horizon. A rookery of albatrosses was flying south over Opihr, while a squabble of jet finches gathered over Sark. To the leeward of Lundy, a school of dolphins were splashing in the white-tops, and the Bald Hermit’s fishing boat came in around the Mewstone, with the basking sharks in tow.

Pippa recalled the good times vacationing with her furry adoptive family in the Archipelago of the Tree of Life, and tears welled into her eyes.

The paddle-steamer Mississippi was moored by the jetty, and Pippa took the opportunity to chat with the ferry lady from Tibermouth. The white-feathered Talking Ostrich was gladly reciting her life story, when Pippa saw her chums Slim and Dreyfus slinking across the pebbles.

Why are they speckled with gold dust? deliberated Pippa, but as they drew closer she realised that they were coated with grime.

“Are you going on a trip?” Slim inquired, limping on his battered right leg.

Pippa took a whiff of Slim’s odour. “Can't,” she blurted. “I don't have any microdots left. What's up with your calf? Did Mr. Ruskin dead-leg you again?”

“Not this week, but Dr. Tredgold threw the fire extinguisher at me for screwing up on my Hygiene homework.”

“That brute’s almost as cruel as his ugly husband,” Pippa angrily replied. “Dr. Jake gave a homo erectus girl in our Classics class a purple spleen scalding, and that was only for spilling her bright green ink.”

“Why don't we chillax under the bull-conker tree?” suggested Dreyfus, relaxing his paws.

“Good idea,” replied Pippa. “Come along, Scatty!”

“Not Scatty again!” moaned Slim, and Pippa’s pet otter was, as per usual, nowhere to be seen.

All three pupils were wearing their regulation, dark grey tunics. Slim's pink, scampi-like eyebrows blended with his sumptuous golden skin. Dreyfus's piercing black eyes distracted attention from his silver hair and bronze wings, and Pippa's light brown freckles contrasted with the nicest red lips on the planet.

The triangle of friends created a bubble-huddle in the shrubbery under the bull-conker tree. Pippa thought the tree's mossy roots radiated energy. They were infested with intelligent, star-shaped insects called festoonettes.

“You look like Silver Beauty when she was about to be shot, Dreyfus,” observed Pippa. “Is Mr. Grimster still sticking needles into your hooves?”

“That newt-skinned throwback can’t find his damned darning kit,” replied the horsey-faced Apollo Alpha, “but he’s just spent an hour teaching us about Fisher-Finney genetic linkages between abnormalities. He believes that our babies should be forcibly aborted whenever their parents are regarded as genetically inferior. He’s as bad as the High Tea Party, and then some.”

Pippa grimaced. “How utterly appalling! And Mr. Ruskin’s teaching us about a statistician called Gini who invented a famous economic index in 1912, but damaged all the native peoples of north-eastern Africa with his ideas on racial superiority.”

Dreyfus pursed his lips. “Professor Corrado Gini was a twentieth century Musso-fascist. He even poured scorn on the original hominids of Eritrea 1. What an ill-informed bigot!”

“Will you be chumming me to the chemistry lab this afternoon, Dreyfus?” asked Slim. “The Talking Dingo teaching assistants are planning the best 'stinky gas' experiment of all time.”

Dreyfus flexed his biceps. “No chance! I'll be cutting class, 'cos I'm playing rugger at Saint Slug’s.”

Slim gave the Apollo Alpha a funny look. “I don't envy you the icy cold shower afterwards.”

Dreyfus balanced a couple of lively festoonettes on his thumb. “That's the fun bit. That's when the peng geeks start admiring me.”
That prospect put Pippa into a tizz. “I’d love to watch you too," she blurted.

Dreyfus grinned, and turned goofy. “I understand your feelings, Pippa,” he murmured, “from the way you smile, and the look in your tender eyes.”

“I love the way you walk,” enjoined Pippa, feeling enraptured. “and even the way you stalk. Please don’t take that away from me.”

Suddenly, and without warning, the fish-faced Classics teacher, Dr. Jake Skulltwister sidled up, and glared inquisitively at the happy trio.

“What the fuck!” exclaimed Slim.

Skulltwister took a group snapshot with a mouse-cam attached to his ear. “I'll wash your mouth out with carbolic!” he retorted.

“That’s an absolutely stupid way of taking pictures,” complained Pippa.

“It's for the Old Laughlinians magazine,” replied the intrusive Apollo Fish. “Your conversation intrigues me by it’s sheer loopy craziness. It would make an excellent script for a cameo hologram on Qinflix.”

When Pippa spurted nonsense, she sometimes didn't understand, or even know, what she was blurting. “I hope you and your malignant wife will attend our all-intriguing First Night, Dr. Jake,” she spieled. “Our cast will also include a po-faced Schweinhund and twelve smelly fish from the evolving hominid museum in Portobello 6.”

Slim spluttered on his cinemuck. “You're as zoned out as my three bipolar sisters!” he exclaimed.

“You're one big bully!” retorted Pippa. “I want to scratch your eyes out.”

Slim smiled. “But we're one big family, darling. Dreyfus and I are your pet siblings.”

“Cut me some slack. I have my own family, in Trivoli, waiting to visit me.”

“Hummmm...I wouldn't bet on that. I was hauled here when I was eleven, and I haven't been allowed to see my family since.”

Skulltwister chuckled. “That's only to be expected after what you did to them.”

Pippa began to shed tears again. “I'm sure I'll see my Mum and big bad Dad, and all my furry brothers and sisters soon. Yes, I'm sure I will!”

“No, you won't,” snarled Skulltwister, with a sadistic grin.

A conundrum of thoughts throbbed through Slim's head. He felt horses' hooves pounding the inside of his skull, and wondered whether he was the Roman Emperor Caligula.

“Mother, Father, Grandmama!” raged Slim, grimacing like a ghoul in Purgatory. “Don't leave ME to die. But are you still alive, Mother? Mother! Where are you, Mother? I DIDN'T kill you, Mummy, or Daddy, or Granny, but where are my lovely little sisters? Maybe I throttled you all too.”

“This could be inter-generational!” shrieked Pippa.

“We should revolt against the entire fucking system,” wailed Dreyfus. “Revolt! Lynch the shysters in their ivory domes! They’re not worth tuppence. Revolt!”

“It’s about time you obnoxious street-urchins saned up,” snapped Skulltwister, heading, in Pippa's perception, for the ferry boat to Eden.

The festoonettes in the mossy roots were fascinated by that noisy encounter, and spread the word to the all-powerful and the divine.

Feeling uptight, Pippa retreated to Rolfe-Gotto Hall, where she polished off a sour-tasting cream bun, only to be disturbed by clicking sounds to her left. To her consternation, two Nazi-esque overseers strode up, flashing their steel spurs and clucking their golden teeth.

“We’re taking you to the psych lab for open brain and gut surgery,” announced the squat one, with a stern blink.“You’re as outrageous as Virginia Whining Wolf, and then some.”

“Dr. Tredgold is waiting with his extra-incisive connectome-confabulator,” added the thin-necked coot, with a curt grin. “Maybe he’ll give your Third Eye the once over.”

Slim emerged from behind a statue of an evil, racist phrenologist of yore. “Don't you dare hurt her!” he howled.

“Don't you worry about her,” retorted the squat geek. “You're next.”

To the north of Laughlin College lay Harperbury Hill, an extinct volcano where pixies and wood fairies once fought and played. The hill had been stripped bare, and surrounded by the Shockley Collider, a daunting steel edifice. Fifty-five imported American-Chinese labourers and black technicians had perished there in AD 2511, while constructing the Galton-Penrose Laboratory way beneath the hill and connecting it to the fearsome collider.

The overseers dragged Pippa past the ridiculously uninhibited Grecian statue of Sir Francis Galton, Sir Lionel Penrose, and Seven Vine Snakes Entwined, and into the lab. She was wearing only a dirty, white towel, and her goose pimples contracted every arrectores pilorum on her skin,

Pippa was met by the head orderly, a remarkably tall, blue, sugary-skinned Trinkon, known only as the ‘Yin'.

“What manner of creature is this?” asked the Yin, disdainfully.

The squat overseer handed the Yin a thick file, and glared. “This one's Scottish, born by centuries-delayed in vitro. Her ancestors were Highlanders who teleported here from Ullapool during the nineteenth century land clearances by the Duke of Sutherland.”

“Now he was a fine homo sapiens!” declared the Yin. “Dr. Tredgold sometimes imagines that he’s a Highlander, but maybe he was the alien monster in Loch Ness.”

“I can see through my Seventh Eye,” spurted Pippa. “It reveals the Ultimate Truth. We're all made of pulsating random waves!”
The Yin narrowed his gaze. “Perhaps we should give her a two-month course of old-fashioned E.C.T.,” he growled.

“Do you mean the neuro-destructive procedure that Jock Scotius pioneered at the Royal Ed in Morningside 2?” inquired the thin-necked overseer, with a leer. “It strikes like lightning.”

“Scotius was struck off for his pretentiousness!” retorted the Yin. “The E.C.T. developed by Professors Heel and Shorten at St. Bonnie’s in Toronto is far superior since it promises brief periods of euphoria. Those feisty Chattering Owls really knew their shit.”

“It'll still destroy ten percent of her neurons, sheer off her frontal lobes, and put her into deep, long-term depression,” added the squat coot, licking his salivating lips.

Pippa went berserk at that outrageous suggestion, and had to be frog-marched the entire length of the Galton-Penrose Lab, much to the consternation of the gunge-beetles and covid-roaches, who fled in dismay.

The lab was a hive of activity. Teams of sugary Trinkette nurses were busily testing and treating their patients, many of whom were attached to curious pieces of neuro-scientific equipment. A paranoid schizophrenic sex-criminal was getting injected with disinfectant on a vibrating sling, and a naked lady with sagging skin was dangling in space, flailing her limbs, her head imbedded in the plasterboard ceiling. To cap that, a wired-up, psychotic convict, with head in a cranium constrictor and a ‘pangolin’s tongue’ down his throat, was reacting to his live action, brain and gut surgery by gyrating head over heels all around his animal cage.

Pippa saw a beautiful young woman lying unconscious on a Prince Charles davenport, a griffin straddling her chest, a horse neighing at her feet.

“Wake up, Cinderella!” cried Pippa, only for an orderly to empty a jug of noxious fluid into her face.

When they reached the end of the corridor, the orderlies paused to pay homage to the towering portrait of Hippocrates of Kos, before tearing off Pippa's towel, and spraying her with bleach.

“Don't you dare!” howled Pippa, only to be grabbed by the nape, and thrown into the M.K.McGill operating tank.

A few seconds later, Pippa peered nervously upwards, only to see Dr. Sarg Tredgold standing there bolt upright, as if in a trance, next to his mahogany desk. The Icarian's ugly dark green eyes were staring blankly into space, and Pippa wondered whether he was a wicked demon from the primeval swamps.

A huge, platinum-framed, black and white photograph took pride of place on Sargant Tredgold’s desk. It depicted the twelve member Qinsatoran delegation to the highly influential First International Eugenics Congress at the University of London in South Kensington in July 1912. The Qinsatoran leader, the formidable Countess of Madron, was smoking a long cigar.

{According to the August 1912 edition of the Trivoli Onion: The eminent British eugenicist Alfred Tredgold met the Countess of Madron during the conference reception in the Duchess of Marlborough's mansion. The couple retreated to the back garden, and cuddled behind a blueberry bush, where the UCL statistician Karl Pearson was ‘in dilecto flagrante’ with his highly assertive protégé Ronald Aylmer Fisher, recently graduated from Gonville and Caius.

Fisher squeezed a mouse to death in celebration, as was his want, before beating a UCL beefeater with a stick for his discourteous attitude towards women.}

Fully eight-hundred years later, the Yin coughed politely, and Dr. Sargant Tredgold stirred himself, only to look as brain-smothered as a utang on lithium.

“Where the Daffy Dickens am I?” mithered Tredgold. “What century am I in? I’m a gentleman of noble lineage, I’ll have you know. My dear ancestor Sir Alfred Tredgold was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, no less. He taught neurology in Bedlam, and tormented children suffering from ADHD with particularly frightening ordeals. That sorted them out for their laziness!”

“You’re so British, Sire,” simpered the Yin, “and yet as golden-skinned as the almighty Janus himself.”

“I’m my own special breed,” purred Tredgold, preening his orange eyebrows.

“You’re full of hyperbolic baloney,” yelped Pippa. angrily.

Tredgold peered at Pippa through his haze of antiquity. “It looks as if we gave Keir a good starmering,” he blustered. “So much for his bag of tricks!”

The Yin chuckled, and handed Tredgold a thick folder. “This isn't Keir, Doctor! It's Pippa Pipette, and she was born of Almighty God’s third gender. Her last consultant thought she had B.B.A.D., but his diagnosis was unusually totally arbitrary.”

Tredgold twitched. “But what happened to Keir?” he moaned.

The Yin paused for reflection. “The ragamuffin’s on a high, following his outstanding treatment, though he's still recovering from his heart surgery and cracked femur. His dark green skin is returning to its natural colour already.”

Tredgold acquired a fresh aura. He looked God-like.

“Excellent! I'm so happy for him,” he said, before flipping through several pages in Pippa's folder, blinking furiously. “So Miss Pipette, that B.B.A.D. diagnosis was way out in left field. How does it feel to be manically infused?”

“What!! protested Pippa. “I'm NOT infused with anything, and what happens on Nod is enough to make anybody manic.”

“Hold your horses! One of your Trinkon overseers noticed you tangentialising onto a ridiculously extraneous topic, something to do with 'twerking' as I understand, and you were heard blurting nonsense on at least three separate occasions. You sound like Chancellor Rishi when he’s trying to balance his Austerity Budget.”

"So what? I'm high functioning and neuro-diverse.”

“Poppycock! My hubby’s has got your measure. It's all too apparent to both of us that you're suffering from hyperkinetic brain damage. Your organs are clearly at fault. So we'll perform multiple, key-hole surgeries to see if you need any transplants.”

“Stop!!...why?”

“Because your entire body is part and parcel of your damaged brain, you fool. Throw her onto the rotating frame, Trinkons! I’ll insert the incisors into her abdomen myself."

“Her neuropsychological readings are way over the top, doctor.” announced an eagle-eyed, sugary-skinned orderly. “According to the state-of-the-art ‘Bayesian Ogre’ statistical simulations, a kidney transplant is vastly preferable to connectome-surgery, or a sliced spleen.”

“The Bayesian Ogre always know best. Rotate the wench to angle minus thirty, Trinks!”
“Mother!” wailed Pippa. “Mother!”

[A Bayesian is a follower of statistical methods based upon Bayes’ Theorem. Some Bayesians are into brain modelling and thought experiments.]

At that very moment, two Apollo Hyenas dragged in Slim, in all his attractive glory, looking as traumatized as a koala escaping through a blazing forest of fire, his eyebrows raised high in consternation.

“Pulverise him, Carstairs 2001-style,” demanded the Yin, and the hyenas dutifully twisted the mesmerised patient's arms behind his back, kicked and walloped him, and made patterns on his glistening skin with their four-toed paws.

"Just look at him,” growled Tredgold. “He's a narcissistic psychopath."

"The red-hot invigilator for his evil sins, Herr Doctor?" suggested the Yin. “We could put him into an induced coma later.”

“I'm not going into a coma for you bastards!” howled Slim.

Tredgold grinned like a Zaragonese pirate. “No problem, darling. It's the DNA-deconfabulating capsule for you.”

“Why??”

“Why not?”

“Why not indeed?” enjoined the Yin, his eyes flaring deep crimson as he twisted a curved, ivory needle into Slim’s abdomen.

“Leave my DNA alone, mind fucks!" wailed Slim, as they hauled him up the steel staircase for his hour of speedy rotations around the Shockley Collider. His screams could even be heard by the wise witches and insightful gnomes in the grassy canyon below the House of the Holy Trinity.

“This could be twentieth century Planet Earth,” opined an Apollo Pixie from Trimontium 2.

“It got infinitely worse when the rainbows vanished,” replied a bronze woman of learning.

Back in the psych lab, the Yin looked fit to grovel. “You appear, at first sight, to have no rhyme or reason, Dr. Tredgold,” he pandered, “and yet you're so Rosalind Crick prize-worthy. They should fill your cup to the brim with silver acorns.”

“Pippa and Slim are part of my Master Plan,” purred the devious knight of the realm. “I will enslave their souls.”