Tag Archives: Daddy

Alphabetic Dialogues 11 ~ Your Daughter, Sir

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Franklyn de Gashe fresh returned from adventures with android zombies in the past has crashed a party and fallen in love. It is not appropriate to his station, nonethless he is a persistent man. At length he consults with the father of his newfound love Emily, in the drawing room of her father’s house Greypairs, the seat of the Duke of Welmschably. It is not a comfortable conversation.

FdG “Gallantly, I stalked her across the ballroom”
DoW “Have you a different definition of gallantry, sir?”
FdG “I implore you to be silent while I recount my adventure, else you are like to misunderstand me”
DoW “Just get on with it”
FdG “Knife in hand I slipped past the champagne-touting waiters, and behind the chaise”
DoW “Let’s see, stalking and armed. This is how you come to my party?”
FdG “My dear fellow, one ought not to invite a chap if he can’t attend in comfort”
DoW “No – that’s not the same as arriving without a tie”
FdG “Oh, you and your rules. My dear duke, have you never wanted to feel free?”
DoW “Perhaps you’d consider loosening my bonds that I might embrace liberty myself.”
FdG “Quell your passions man, you’re among friends here.”
[a call from without] “Rally the guards!”
DoW “Spare me and my family and I’ll make you a wealthy man”
FdG “That’s the difference between you and she my good man. While you cower and bribe, she draped herself upon the chaise, surrounded by admirers as I approached, knifely.”
DoW “Unless you release me I shall call for my manservants.”
FdG “Very well. An honest ploy. And yet I doubt they’ll hear you”
DoW “Why you devil. You monster.”
FdG “eXhibiting a great deal of your daughter’s passion now Dukey. I like it”
DoW “Zounds man, if you’ve harmed her-”
FdG “And what if I have?”
DoW “By the good lord I’ll hunt you down if you’ve laid a finger on her”
FdG “Calm yourself. The knife was a gift.”
DoW “Doubtless your stalking was merely a dance step of sorts”
“Every move I make is a kind of dance. With death, with fate. With a lady”
DoW “FRANKLYN!”
FdG “Good lord, I’d no idea it was inheriting your lungs that made her chest so proud.”
DoW “Have you quite finished”
FdG “I have not, I’d planned to recount in full the joys of your daughter”
DoW “Joys!”
FdG “‘kerchief to wipe away your tears?”
DoW “Let me free and I’ll show you where you can put your handkerchief”
FdG “My my, perhaps I’ll have to gag you to prevent your spoiling of my tale”
DoW “No nummmph, nng, nmmuumph”
FdG “Oh, now you are tiresomely inarticulate.”
DoW “Pfah! You’re a monster de Gashe”
FdG “Query: would you commonly insult a man who’s tied you up and expressed his love for your first-born?”
DoW “Relinquish your claims to love sir, for you are a but an uncommonly debauched man and your pretense does you no favours”
FdG “So, you doubt the purity of my love for your daughter’s pale yet musuclar thighs, the bruising of her lips upon mine, the naughty twinkling in her starry eyes, the soft envelopes of her?”
DoW “Talk not of her lady parts lest I call you out in a duel”
FdG “Understand me now Dukey, after I despatched her watchers she and I eloped to a room of finery, gilded about the walls and strewn about with comfort…”
DoW “Vileness! You bedded her in her grandmother’s chamber?!”
FdG “Well there was a bony thing in the bed, but I thought it an odd doll or somesuch”
DoW “Xandria, my beloved mother”
FdG “You might find her somewhat flattened by our passions”
DoW “Zealously we shall hunt you down and make you pay”
FdG “And that’s why I offer to your charming and uninhibited daughter my hand in marriage”
DoW “Believe me when I say I’d rather endure her shame than have you as a son”
FdG “Calm now father, you’re becoming quite purple”
DoW “Don’t patronise me you scoundrel”
FdG “Everyone needs time to think things through, I’m sure you’ll reach the same conclusion about Emily that I have”
DoW “For the last time de Gashe, your insult to my family’s honour will not go unavenged”
FdG “Gallantly then, I shall now go and stalk your second, less attractive daughter.”

Vermouth Thursday ~ Galaxy Team

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“Paris 1993 [Eiffel tower] Thursday July 22rd 17:53 [same shot of the Eiffel tower with a vast spaceship hovering over it]. The first recorded appearance of the intergalactic space villain, self-dubbed ‘Vermouthinator’ (over two hundred appellations to his name have been recorded – all honorific titles, apparently self-created as an expression of his extreme egotism). Vermouthinator contacted all humans on Earth directly, simultaneously entering their minds instead of all forms of traditional communication. His message was short and cryptic and has been pieced together from a variety of surviving sources [montage of confused Parisians]:  

“Greetings human filth. It is I, the Ineffably Wondrous Lord of the Demiverse, Sculptor of Wonder, Imbiber of Galactic Fluids – the one and only Vermouthinator. Congratulations are due to your mixologists and cocktailliers. It is martini time.” [photograph of a martini glass]

This initial contact may have been mis-calibrated in either its force or content. Certainly the overture while apparently contemptuous, did not speak of an intent for the carnage that ensued. While all of humanity received a message (albeit in English, which was wasted on many), the area immediately around Paris, in a roughly 1000 mile radius was particularly affected by the intensity of the communication [map with big red circle]. Religious fundamentalists appeared to take the brunt of the damage, suffering from the now well-documented ‘Mental Expulsion Trauma’ (see appendix xii). 

In summary: the contact forced a paradigm shift upon those affected. Undeniable evidence of non-terrestrial life or the sudden telepathic contact so vastly exceeded their supposed realities that their natural mental plasticity (the ability to compartmentalise irreconcilable information) was unable to cope. The result: their mental states were forced out of their physical structures to a point 14 inches to the left of their skull [image of a ghostly brain hanging above a mannequins shoulder]. It is notable that individuals suffering from schizophrenia and related disorders were less likely to be fatally affected.

Of the affected individuals 98.995% are now deceased, their vegetative states determined permanent. Rumours persist of sentient plants and animals who were within that 14 inch translocation range [photograph of 'Benny the Signing Dandelion' and 'Aquat, the Scholarly Squirrel']. Few of these cases have been verified, nor have the accounts of sightings of Alpha Strangemind and the Galaxy Team in heavily affected regions apparently armed with “high-tech butterfly nets” [artist's impression of techno-net].”

The film jerks to a stop, black streaks overtaken by white which flicker over the curious figure hunched before the screen. He is tall and thin, dressed in a fake silk dressing gown with a dragon cheaply embroidered on the back; his feet and ankles are bony and uncovered. With a snort of disgust he spits on the concrete floor and stabs the button on his arm rest which re-starts the film. The shadows cast by the television throw his long body back across the bleak room; his head tails weakly off the top of his shoulders. The shadow is no trick of the light: his head really is tiny. This is Pip, first child of Anne and Doyle Humpester; Galactobrain to his fans; Milkymind to his brothers; Bollockface to his enemies. The last is cruel but apt observation. He stands and hurls his Kit-Kat mug across the room. It falls short of the opposing wall and shatters on the concrete sending a coffee slick into the cracks.

“Oi. You can clear that lot up right now mister,” the door flies open to reveal the voluptuous figure of Comely Strangemind, wife and partner to the legendary Galaxy Team patriarch Alpha (formerly Mr and Mrs Doyle Humpester). She stands there with her stark black mask in place but otherwise wrapped in a towel, steaming from the shower.

Pip whirls around, his eyes bulging in surprise. They’re the biggest thing in his head, which looks exactly like someone’s taken a tennis ball and stapled a pair of poached eggs onto it. He bursts into tears. The way his face is squeezed means that his tear ducts are unnaturally pressed against his cheek bones and the tears spurt forward like windscreen washers.

Comely crosses the room and crushes her son to her breast, “Oh Pip, you must stop watching that.”

“I just hate him so much mum, it’s all his fault…” his tears soak into Comely’s towel. Quietly Comely extrudes a length of tail-like flesh and scoops the broken mug up and into the waste basket by the door. She sits down and pops Pip on her knee where he continues his bitter sobbing.

Pip is one of only twenty-three human survivors of the ironically titled Vermouth Thursday’s Mental Expulsion Trauma. At the time of the Vermouthinator’s fateful message he had been seven, an outwardly normal boy (if rather tall) with extraordinary mental powers. He had been instrumental in the development of Galaxy Team since before he was born and so had been involved in some of his parents’ earliest experiments on he and his siblings.

On Vermouth Thursday Alpha and Comely had strapped Pip into a device of their devising intended to map and amplify the already prodigious mind he possessed – the augMentation. Pip was a willing participant, keen to expand and develop the neoScience of Galaxy Team. His mind was wide open, the virtual tendrils of their machinery exposing and teasing apart his mind. When Vermouthinator blasted out his greeting to humanity Pip’s mind was naked and vulnerable. The words blasted into him, amplified a billion-fold by the augMentation. Unlike the millions who died almost instantly, the extraordinary mental prowess enabled him to find an escape from the endless reverberations of alien inanities. He tapped into the Quantum Occlusion (which shielded the village of Llandwi-ge-Hw from outsiders) and ejected his mind past the 14 inch limit. He went too far. Bent around the Occlusion, it strained his mind and the physical matter of his brain out into space and beyond. The stream of his ideation found its entangled particles and flowed around the converse edge of the universe, re-emerging into real space inside the Small Megallanic Cloud where it discovered structure sufficient to accommodate his mind, though massively dispersed.

Despite Alpha’s best efforts they had been unable to reverse the process – Pip’s brain was no longer located in his body – it was a galaxy two hundred million light years away. On Earth the shell of his head had buckled, cracking and collapsing unable to tolerate the vacuum within. Somehow he still controlled his body though it was some weeks before he fully integrated his disparate mentality between the stars. When he did regain the power of speech it was a huge relief to his parents who had almost ceased their experiments on their other offspring in concern. With the return of speech came a darkness born of the deep space in which he now lived, and despite being only a child, he swore vengeance on Vermouthinator. 

Anne had grown used to finding Pip watching the news reports of Vermouth Thursday over and over again. Despite his galactic intelligence he just could not find it in him to forgive Vermouthinator for destroying his face. That he had likely gained immortality at the age of seven by replanting his consciousness in another galaxy was small comfort for a young man who ought to be chasing girls like the Beastlie Brothers (though hopefully with more success). All of Comely’s attempts to steer him away from revenge had failed. It seemed the only thing to do was to help him avenge himself. 

“Pip, we know he’ll be back one day, people like him always come back.” Pip judders with rage and the force of tears firing upwards from his eyes.

“He’s not a person mum, we don’t know where he’s from or what he is.” Pip’s fingers begin to jerk in a complex pattern of virtual keystrokes and command gestures.

“Let’s try and find out shall we? You know your father’s been working on the Vortex. We could go and find him, out there.” The holographic screen appears in the room before them, engineering designs, molecular structures and anatomical diagrams flash away with a single gesture from Pip. A detailed image of the Milky Way resolves itself in the air and streaks past to reveal the cloudy mass of stars that compose Pip’s mind. They pierce the outer halo and streaks of stardust. Comely cannot help but wonder what part of Pip’s mind they are looking at. What happens when a star dies in his mind…

Pip’s tears dry up and his face takes on a distant, calculating aspect. He points at a cluster of stars and the view zooms in to show a star with its orrery of planets gliding by, “I wonder if he’s in me.” The thought makes Comely’s second skin crawl under her towel.

Captain Pigheart’s Exquisite Mermaid Adventure

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Gaargh, the view from the crab’s ichorous peeper-pockets was narrow, but directed me eyes onto the Queen’s bosomous bounty. I was content. But me contentment was disturbed by the hammerin’ at ye door. I attempted to better obscure meself behind the kelpen curtain and a hideous vase. Twas tricky, for me own limbs were ill-stuffed into the recently vacated crab shell; I scuttled as if recently scuttled.

The cause of me cuckoldish caution burst into the chamber in a rush of bubbles, thrashing his scaly tail behind him. Twas King Clam of the merfolk, fresh returned from his extermination of the Snorks (a peaceful but rightly despised cock-headed sea people), and was understandably ill-tempered to be find his bed-chamber locked, his bride within.

She, the queen, lounged negligently in a negligee; the negligible garment drifting alluringly in the current like the diaphanous tips of her fins. Not five minutes before she’d been demonstratin’ the ticklishness of her lady scales. I’d borrowed the crustaceous carapace from one of her personal guards, whose innards now quivered in the vase before me.

Delightful though me time in Queen Acacia Finest Tuna’s embrace had been, the return of her genocidal spouse spurred on me roaming spirit. Twas time for me to once more taste that sweet air to which me lungs’re accustomed. After tumbling out of Kemberton Shatz’ misshapen grasp I were taken deep into the cold darkness of the ocean. From beneath me I thought I heard the alluring ruckus of Murray Eel’s Planktones playing ‘Under the Sea’ and then… nothin’.

I woke, drifting on a bed of sea anemones with a pair of sea horses jammed up me nose. A mite alarmed I tugged ‘em out and immediately choked, for me lungs were full o’ water. With hasty reluctance I forced the spiny squirming beasts back in. Twas then, through the gills o’ the mer-nags that I caught a scent in me nostrils, one I’d not tasted for many long moons. A scent that put wind in me sails. A scent that made me drop anchor. Arr, that’s not quite what I meant.

The clam-shell doors opened before me. Twas my beloved merwench, the one I’d spent a moonlit night with on the rocks, while Mick serenaded us with his wails of pain. She’d aged not a day. Arrr, she took me in her fins as if it were only yesterday. I protested vehemently about me current state o’ matrimony in the softest whisper I could muster. Me conscience now clear I delved into her Piscean charms. As we later lay in a thin film of her natural oils I thought I must be the happiest man alive at the bottom of the ocean, me arms wrapped about this fine fish of a woman, croonin’ in that way she’s fond of.

She said to me, “Ignatius, ye noble soul, I’ve a surprise for ye,” (for they talks as do we pirates, tis part of the charm). From under the bed she drew a mermaid’s purse, which revealed its contents with a tiny wail. Me heart swelled at the sight of the wee minnowlad. “Be he?” I asked, “He be,” she replied, “But ye…” I started, “I be” she said. “Aaarr, but he be…” said I, “Aaarr,” she agreed; “Gaargh,” I concurred. He was the spittlin’ image of his mother, down to the fetching freckles on his tail, and had his father’s beard. Sad I was to leave him and his mother, but ye troubles of merfolk on dry land’re well enough documented by the Danes and Disney.

While the mer-queen distracted her mer-king with a cool swishing of her sinuous tail, with her eyes she undressed me once again. When the urgency of ocular undressing hastened, I realised it were a hint to be fleeing. I side-stepped from the room. Twas a smooth crabwise exit, exceptin’ ye the flailing of me spasmic crablish appendages. I’d almost escaped when the claw me arm wouldn’t fit in slapped the King across his dorsal fin. For effect I twiddled the crab’s mandibles in a cheeky manner.

Then twas the running for me. I don’t know if ye’ve tried to walk in another’s shoes, but try running in a hexapoidal crust with ye own limbs in gristled gauntlets, underwater. Tis a curiously clumsy drowned ballet, punctuated with coralline snags and stumbling. My spasmodic gambol were easily outmatched by the swishing of a tail. I was out of me element. I set meself into a spin and made more ground that way, battering the King’s merguards with my chitinous clubs.

I spotted a corral of fishy steeds and lumbered desperately for them. With a  quick prayer for luck I slashed one of them free and punched it in the swimbladder. Twas more effective than I’d hoped: with a terrifying accelerative lurch we hurtled upwards in a deflatory spiral. So powerful were the launch that it tore the crab carapace from me, save for the claw with which I desperately gripped the unfortunate deflating fish.

The merfolk’s vicious tridents sliced past me as I struck the surface and fountained up in an explosion of fish and spume. I found meself tumbling down to land hard on a wooden deck. Loomin’ over me was the overly-gingered face of Grim Pitch (an ill swap for me merlass), who turned to Kemberton Shatz and muttered, “see, he be fine” before wrenching the seahorses from me nostrils. Me only possible retort were to vomit gallons of brine over the pair of them.

We set sail with haste, fearing predation from the sharp-toothed shark riding merfolk of war. In the distance I glimpsed the sparkle of sunset gleaming off the scales of me love as she dove once more into the depths. Gaargh. I’ve still the scent of her gills on me fingers.

Captain Pigheart’s Paternal Adventure

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Gaargh, as I sit here with a pot o’ crude coral rum and me peg leg restin’ on the table behind me, I’m minded to recall a day most dear to me black and twisted heart. The sun were bright in the sky, silhouetting them gulls what wheeled overhead. The sound o’ me playmates laughter were on the breeze, along with the endless clack o’ buttons in their bins. Twas just one more idyllic day at the Merciful Monks’ Manufactory Orphanage.

I’d been left there as a mere babe, with all me limbs, wrapped up in a pirate’s hat. I’d only just mastered the sewing o’ buttons onto ladies unmentionables, but in time I’d be skilled enough to stitch boots of high fashion for gentlemen. The sunny day were barely visible through ye high windows, but ye summery atmosphere were suddenly split by a tremendous thunderin’. No, twas not the portly lad chained to me left, for smoke were rising outside and the walls shook more than were common.

Midst the screaming and the sharp tang o’ something I’d one day know as gunpowder there came a hammering at the door to our workshop. The doors flew inwards. A man stood between ‘em, wreathed in smoke with pistols in both of his fists. His beard were tassled with the skulls o’ mice and sea beasties and his eyes had a glaze o’ madness upon ‘em.

Gaargh, twas the first time I’d ever laid eyes upon me father, Captain Abraham Seaflange. He made an impression I can tell ye. His eyes fell upon me, which explained the glaze. As he pawed the ground hopelessly his hands fell heavily upon my fine pirate hat which dwarfed my child-like head (tis true, as a child I had the head of a child).

With a roar, Seaflange seized me up and ran blindly through the workshop. He was strong in head and hand; he used ‘em both to smash his way out, towing me behind him like a dinghy. After some time and with the aid of me youthful sight he took me aboard his ship, The Vision of Ugliness.

He’d heard tell of me birth and subsequent vendin’ to the merciless manufacturing monks, but could not bear the thought of his blood engaged in such drudgery. Me heart swelled with belonging and warmth, not least on account of ye rum the Captain had tipped into me to dull me squallin’. He was to teach me all I know about piracy, but first we had to escape the monks’ blockade.

Twere the monks’ last desperate effort to prevent me father leaving with their best button stitcher, the bulk o’ their wealth and box o’ ladies fancy goods (me father’s a mean multi-taskin’ captain). They’d piled ye orphans into boats and punted ‘em into the harbour’s mouth. Aaarr, they’d misjudged me piratical papa who ploughed through their plaintive cries, dashing the boats into shark sized smithereens.

In later years we’d lose legs together and go a-whorin’ in exotical ports but just then I were gazin’ at the mismatched buttons he’d jammed into his eye sockets and wonderin’ if he’d need ‘em stitched. Gaargh, I loves me father, the noble Captain Seaflange for he made me the pirate I am today.