The absolute darkness of the bag was replaced with the absolute darkness of a somewhat larger space. Wanblume was on the verge of making a snide comment when a phosphorous flare abruptly lit up the cigar chomping, circular smoked lensed woman sitting a mere four feet in front of her.
She lit a second stogie off of the meteoric end of her own, and passed the newly lit one to Wandblume.
The pretty planes of her face and pneumatic swells, picked out in the firelight, hitched as the tip of the cigar flared. in time to a fit of coughing.
“You inhaled?” Mikuru’s voice, tinctured with laughter, wafted from the zone of glow.
Wandblume’s somewhat affronted response was, “It’s all just smoking, isn’t it?”
“Hardly! You don’t inhale cigar smoke : it’s more alkaline than cigarette smoke and is absorbed in the mouth.”
“Lights!” Mikuru’s voice, taut and terse, brought on an illumination, spastic and endlessly garish. It was all rotating disco ball glitter, flitting gel filtered spots, black light strips, and sputtering strobes that lit the stage upon which Wandblume sat looking across at a Mikuru lit like the final twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I’m tied to a brass pole.” It was a statement of fact.
“Yes! Yes, you are!” She relit the end of Wandblume’s stogie with the prerequisite wooden match until it achieved the cheery red bellows flare of a well and truly lit cigar.
Wandblume expelled an aromatic plume of cigar exhaust. “Cuban?”
“It’s a L-5 Figurado Torpedo : something about zero gee is extra kind to tobacco plants.”
They puffed away what would have been peaceable plumes of smoke had it not been for the laser light disco show of Lazarus Long’s, the premier peeler club of Fen.
Wandblume took in the club’s eclectic mixture of Heinleinian decor spanning the Fifties to the Eighties--19s, that is. “Not exactly Patrol SOP, I imagine.”
“No, not the official standard operating policy, but it’s de rigueur for Patrol POP : Party Operating Policy. We swing all our best in-house dos here.”
“Huh, what else do you hold back from John Q Fen?”
“Besides the final digit of pi and the actual location of Guelph, Ontario, Canada...” She looked thoughtful as she decapitated two more stogies with her sinister looking guillotine-style cutter. “...nothing more important than the alien origins of the Big Mac.”
Wandblume grinned as she accepted the fresh cigar from her captor. “Never trust a person who isn’t capable of being fatuous!” They lit and puffed.
“So, it seems a little under-populated and under-Chippendaled for a Doe.”
“I was beginning to wonder when you’d bring that up.” Mikuru picked up a clunky Fifties styled microphone next to her chair ; spoke into it. “Execute.”
The establishment began to fill with two types of people : employees who were not surprised to be there ; guests who were very surprised. Wandblume noted the guest list with the arch, “Apparently I have quite the dossier.”
“You are half of that outré Venusian celebrity relationship, Vandblume. It doesn’t take master spycraft to concoct your Doe guest list.”
Wandblume raised her cigar in salute to the discombobulated looking president of her fan club, Suki Mashin. That was all it took for the quick-witted Suki to figure out what was really up : she was elated so quickly and completely that her expression of only seconds before seemed but a mistake of faulty memory.
“Wait, did you kidnap your guests too?”
“Please, we in the Patrol don’t kidnap : We enforce civic duty.”
Wandblume grinned around her torpedo. “What, is my Doe jury duty?”
Mikuru returned the combustable object distorted grin. “For your sentencing!” was her laconic response as she removed herself from the stage to became just another forced guest of someone else’s arrangements.
The establishment filled, the DJ marshaled her vinyl, dancers costumed the prerequisite Village People archetypes, servers hovered.
Wandblume was not overly surprised to find Jodie Starling presiding as the red herring MC. Starling proved to be an efficient Alpha minion for everything including providing the target of visible responsibility for mass party napping : she garnered a generous load of laser-looks from people who were not having so much fun as to forget that they had been whisked away to have it. Mikuru, meanwhile, was merely party attendee Number 42.
"For those of you still unsure of why you're in Fen's finest fleshpot, Lazarus Long’s, it's my job to shed light upon your predicament." Starling was in her glory working the crowd like a combination Mata Hari & Abraham Lincoln.
"Not having the time for the niceties of RSVPs & fancy envelopes, I had very little choice but to fall back on the time tested method of shanghaiing the lot of you ! However, you'll be relieved to hear that the terms of your release are as straight forward and as simple as helping to make Ramona’s Last night as a Wandblume the best night of her unmarried life!" With that she flourished in a cut cowboy clad in clingy cowhides.
The crowd reacted with a complex cascade of apoplectic joy that made Mikiru absolutely glad that she was utilizing a minion MC. Starling, being directly in front of all of that strong emotional energy, quickly began to feel less of a facilitator and more of a catspaw. As the throng ogled the gyrations of the thong, Starling gave herself a dose of her own speechifying :
‘Well, Startling, you’re got two ways to survive the night : entertain some of these angry folks into pardoning your offenses and make the others forget your offenses. I’m a pretty good talker; for the rest, we’ve hardly ever touched the Black Ops budget : surely one Doe bar tab will vanish unseen into all that cash!’
***
The premises weren’t exactly destroyed, but they, like the people within it, were a happy shambles. Starling, weaving on her feet and sporting a happy-hat traffic-cone and swagger-stick riding crop (she couldn’t exactly remember where she had attained the crop but the cone had been a prop of the construction stud, Hard Highway!) under her arm she surveyed the after-party wreckage with the aplomb of George Scott’s Patton.
“Veni, vici, Hrrk...” She stumbled over and heaved into the real clay pot of an ersatz coconut palm. “...vomitus!” She slurred sluggishly, before succumbing to a boozy snooze against the terra cotta potta.
Still lashed to the club’s mainsail, Femdysseus dreamt of the siren song of too many Buttery Nipples, chiseled abdominals, and of her own warmed posterior.
***
The Patrol’s Party Emergency Recovery Team’s job was considerable but far from beyond the talents of its masterly members. They had cleaned far bigger shindigs than this. Still, it was an imposing after-Doe.
“Gatsby, help me with these knots. Starling really tied this well-nigh bride!”
“ Cukes & bergs, Kurtz, everything in stride!”
She lit a second stogie off of the meteoric end of her own, and passed the newly lit one to Wandblume.
The pretty planes of her face and pneumatic swells, picked out in the firelight, hitched as the tip of the cigar flared. in time to a fit of coughing.
“You inhaled?” Mikuru’s voice, tinctured with laughter, wafted from the zone of glow.
Wandblume’s somewhat affronted response was, “It’s all just smoking, isn’t it?”
“Hardly! You don’t inhale cigar smoke : it’s more alkaline than cigarette smoke and is absorbed in the mouth.”
“Lights!” Mikuru’s voice, taut and terse, brought on an illumination, spastic and endlessly garish. It was all rotating disco ball glitter, flitting gel filtered spots, black light strips, and sputtering strobes that lit the stage upon which Wandblume sat looking across at a Mikuru lit like the final twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I’m tied to a brass pole.” It was a statement of fact.
“Yes! Yes, you are!” She relit the end of Wandblume’s stogie with the prerequisite wooden match until it achieved the cheery red bellows flare of a well and truly lit cigar.
Wandblume expelled an aromatic plume of cigar exhaust. “Cuban?”
“It’s a L-5 Figurado Torpedo : something about zero gee is extra kind to tobacco plants.”
They puffed away what would have been peaceable plumes of smoke had it not been for the laser light disco show of Lazarus Long’s, the premier peeler club of Fen.
Wandblume took in the club’s eclectic mixture of Heinleinian decor spanning the Fifties to the Eighties--19s, that is. “Not exactly Patrol SOP, I imagine.”
“No, not the official standard operating policy, but it’s de rigueur for Patrol POP : Party Operating Policy. We swing all our best in-house dos here.”
“Huh, what else do you hold back from John Q Fen?”
“Besides the final digit of pi and the actual location of Guelph, Ontario, Canada...” She looked thoughtful as she decapitated two more stogies with her sinister looking guillotine-style cutter. “...nothing more important than the alien origins of the Big Mac.”
Wandblume grinned as she accepted the fresh cigar from her captor. “Never trust a person who isn’t capable of being fatuous!” They lit and puffed.
“So, it seems a little under-populated and under-Chippendaled for a Doe.”
“I was beginning to wonder when you’d bring that up.” Mikuru picked up a clunky Fifties styled microphone next to her chair ; spoke into it. “Execute.”
The establishment began to fill with two types of people : employees who were not surprised to be there ; guests who were very surprised. Wandblume noted the guest list with the arch, “Apparently I have quite the dossier.”
“You are half of that outré Venusian celebrity relationship, Vandblume. It doesn’t take master spycraft to concoct your Doe guest list.”
Wandblume raised her cigar in salute to the discombobulated looking president of her fan club, Suki Mashin. That was all it took for the quick-witted Suki to figure out what was really up : she was elated so quickly and completely that her expression of only seconds before seemed but a mistake of faulty memory.
“Wait, did you kidnap your guests too?”
“Please, we in the Patrol don’t kidnap : We enforce civic duty.”
Wandblume grinned around her torpedo. “What, is my Doe jury duty?”
Mikuru returned the combustable object distorted grin. “For your sentencing!” was her laconic response as she removed herself from the stage to became just another forced guest of someone else’s arrangements.
The establishment filled, the DJ marshaled her vinyl, dancers costumed the prerequisite Village People archetypes, servers hovered.
Wandblume was not overly surprised to find Jodie Starling presiding as the red herring MC. Starling proved to be an efficient Alpha minion for everything including providing the target of visible responsibility for mass party napping : she garnered a generous load of laser-looks from people who were not having so much fun as to forget that they had been whisked away to have it. Mikuru, meanwhile, was merely party attendee Number 42.
"For those of you still unsure of why you're in Fen's finest fleshpot, Lazarus Long’s, it's my job to shed light upon your predicament." Starling was in her glory working the crowd like a combination Mata Hari & Abraham Lincoln.
"Not having the time for the niceties of RSVPs & fancy envelopes, I had very little choice but to fall back on the time tested method of shanghaiing the lot of you ! However, you'll be relieved to hear that the terms of your release are as straight forward and as simple as helping to make Ramona’s Last night as a Wandblume the best night of her unmarried life!" With that she flourished in a cut cowboy clad in clingy cowhides.
The crowd reacted with a complex cascade of apoplectic joy that made Mikiru absolutely glad that she was utilizing a minion MC. Starling, being directly in front of all of that strong emotional energy, quickly began to feel less of a facilitator and more of a catspaw. As the throng ogled the gyrations of the thong, Starling gave herself a dose of her own speechifying :
‘Well, Startling, you’re got two ways to survive the night : entertain some of these angry folks into pardoning your offenses and make the others forget your offenses. I’m a pretty good talker; for the rest, we’ve hardly ever touched the Black Ops budget : surely one Doe bar tab will vanish unseen into all that cash!’
***
The premises weren’t exactly destroyed, but they, like the people within it, were a happy shambles. Starling, weaving on her feet and sporting a happy-hat traffic-cone and swagger-stick riding crop (she couldn’t exactly remember where she had attained the crop but the cone had been a prop of the construction stud, Hard Highway!) under her arm she surveyed the after-party wreckage with the aplomb of George Scott’s Patton.
“Veni, vici, Hrrk...” She stumbled over and heaved into the real clay pot of an ersatz coconut palm. “...vomitus!” She slurred sluggishly, before succumbing to a boozy snooze against the terra cotta potta.
Still lashed to the club’s mainsail, Femdysseus dreamt of the siren song of too many Buttery Nipples, chiseled abdominals, and of her own warmed posterior.
***
The Patrol’s Party Emergency Recovery Team’s job was considerable but far from beyond the talents of its masterly members. They had cleaned far bigger shindigs than this. Still, it was an imposing after-Doe.
“Gatsby, help me with these knots. Starling really tied this well-nigh bride!”
“ Cukes & bergs, Kurtz, everything in stride!”