“Mr. Junewald, I’m glad that you could make it to my estate for my soiree,” said Professor Feldt as they strolled amongst a grove of lemon trees on the professor’s west lawn.

“My pleasure, my dear,” James Junewald replied. “And please, James. You’ve had no reason to call me mister since the first time that you walked out of my board room.” He swirled his after-dinner glass of brandy. “You deserve every damn inch of this place. I’ve never once regretted my investment in your laboratory.”

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Emblem drove fast. Very fast. Zombies thumped and thudded against the bumper. Each one flashed for a moment in the headlights. The car liberated limbs and torsos and heads from one another, each flying free of the oppressive shackles of bodyhood through the night air. Casimir became less repulsed by the violence and more irritated at the jerkiness of the ride.

“Can you try to hit a few less?”

“Not at this speed,” Emblem said.

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“Oh no!” the King of Exaggeritia wailed. “My little girl, the princess, has been taken by a dragon!”

The King had said this in front of an open window in the castle. His lamentations wafted down into the lane, where a knight happened to be trotting along astride his horse.

“Halt, my steed!” the knight said. “I think I hear of a maiden fair that has been abducted by a lizard most foul, a great evil reptile, a great big tube of flying fewmets, a dragon!”

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Polly sat at the helm of a space ship that gleefully leapt straight across the puddle of “technology” and into the “magic” ocean beyond. The best and brightest designers that the world could offer stood en pointe upon the shoulders of the giants of psychology, graphic arts and physiology to thrust towards the heavens the finest living environment ever in existence.

The design took the principles of the biomes that first cradled the infant human species among its grasses and boughs, but subtracted the burrowing worms and ravenous megafauna.

The technical systems were as if Hephaestus and Athena became drunk, wrote down some really creative but entirely infeasible schematics, then complained to their dad until he changed some very fundamental physical properties to make them work. Within the computer system, packets of quantum data danced along metaphoric strings that harmonized with the fundamental oompah rhythm of the universe.

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A pack of Jersey Devils flowed into the New Jersey convenience store where Oscar worked. Oscar glanced up from his novel, grunted, then went back to reading.

The devils filled the store. They clustered around in front of the checkout counter. The candy bar wrappers on the impulse buy shelves rustled as their hairy bodies pressed against them, and they accidentally pushed magazines out of their racks. The smell of pine trees and raccoons filled the air.

Oscar kept reading his novel.

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Whistleby hacked at another piece of jungle liana. They criss-crossed the path ahead of him like a spider’s web, while the stems behind him that he’d already cut had began to scab over the white, pulpy wounds.

The heat was intense. Whistleby paused for a moment to wipe his brow and experienced a realistic hallucination, likely brought on by heat stroke.

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