STORE ADVENTURES, EPISODE 1500

Closest possible approximation

Miss Tock lives in a house full of clocks. Her walls are plastered with time, her drawers brimming with thrift-store wristwatches. Miss Tock once bought seven wind-up alarm clocks from my store, had me wind them up and fix them until they were working in perfect sync with each other.

"I want them all to go off at the same time, one in every room." she said. I made sure not to ask why.

I was at Miss Tock's house today, to do the usual annual windup and some basic maintenance on her clocks. The cuckoo wall was 15 minutes behind today. Half the Swatch drawer had run out of juice. Miss Tock couldn't handle dissonance. If her entire apartment didn't explode with a sound of ringing bells at 6:30 in the morning, then she couldn't even muster the strength to get out of bed.

"It's important to establish a routine. Artists need routine." she said to me, as I struggled with the weights on a grizzled Swiss cuckoo clock.

Miss Tock has never composed any music. According to a customer who used to work with her, Miss Tock barely even taught music. She'd spent the entire hour whiling away at the piano, creating non-melodies and the students had to shut up and take it. When people would offer critique, she'd blame the metronome.

"Goddamn thing's against me. Messes up my tempo on purpose." she'd exclaim and people would nod and not press the issue any further.

Once, a tennant wanted to sue Miss Tock, have her driven out from the premises. Apparently having the house next to you explode in a cacophony of noise at the crack of dawn every day can be particularly vexxing. Miss Tock responded by locking herself inside the apartment to keep the police away, then climbing to the neighbour's balcony, threatening suicide. A compromise was reached, in the end: Miss Tock would give up half her clocks and pay half the price for installing the tenant's new sound insulation.

"Some people just can't handle Art." she said to me "they see a creative mind and they want to destroy it."

I had no choice but to agree. After all, her hands were hovering over an unattended box-cutter on my workbench.

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Augmentations- Stomping Landward

Visti MrDream's Gallery here

STOMPING LANDWARD
Story by Konstantine Paradias; Art by MrDream

“No” Thr’Top said, as he burned under the concentrated roentgen beam emitted from the land-animal behemoth-suits. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all!”

They called Thr’Top crazy, when he presented his findings to the Elders. None of those fools could admit to the possibility of a world beyond the ceiling-sky. In their methane-addled brains, they considered the tremors from above an ‘inexplicable event’ and would ridicule Thr’Top by quoting Scripture at him. 

But Thr’Top knew the truth. He himself had sent probes up, to retrieve topside-animals. He had studied them for decades, before certifying that the creatures were borderline intelligent and impossibly frail. Crafty, sure. Adaptable, yes. But compared to his own sheer intellectual and physical superiority, Thr’Top could take them over, reduce their hive-cities to ash and then use them to make the elders crawls on their cilia and lap at the excrement from his suckers! Oh yes, Th’Top would show them! Thr’Top would show them all!

Thr’Top left his subterranean lair by squeezing his massive frame through the Idosawa fault, crawled into Nigata Prefecture and began to swallow the land-animal cities’ whole. It took the screaming, milling creatures exactly two hours to mount a counter-offence, sending their behemoth-suits against him, to burn his skin and cut through his exoskeleton with polymer rudimentary cutting tools.

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