Part VII
Timothy Leary's Adventures in Wonderland (or LSD is Not a Plaything)
After our rapid departure from the Greek starship, we found ourselves, again, as usual, ad nauseum, in the mystical waystation. This time, it was a cylindrical room, about 30' in diameter, with irregularly spaced holes all along the walls. These holes were maybe 6-10 inches in diameter, and at differing heights. After we relieved Jon of carrying all our stuff, we looked around while Chappell gave us our usual post-mission ass chewing. This time the subject was our wandering off just before extraction time, which we felt was mostly his fault, for showing up right after we'd stepped out. To help keep this from happening again, he gave us a lucky charm, which we delegated to Jon. He was to hold this doohickey, say some magic words, which Jon made sure he had right, drop it and for all of us to hold hands. This would pop us back to our waystation if we got in too deep.
Before I get in any further, let me tell an old, rather racist joke. Q: What's the difference between white and black fairy tales? A: White fairy tales start, "Once upon a time." Black fairy tales start, "Yo, you muthafuckers ain't gonna believe this shit." I know I make some kind of disclaimer like that frequently, but (everyone now) I really mean it this time.
Back to the story, we got ourselves all situated to go again, and Guido (that's Italian for guide) told us to stick our hands and arms in this one particular hole. I was reminded of the Roman tourist attraction, the stone lion's mouth, in which people stick their hands, and it they lie, their hand gets bit off. I didn't say anything about this, however. Still feeling a bit foolhardy, I stuck my hand in first, and was later told that I just sort of turned into mist, and was sucked into the hole. The others followed, and we found ourselves in a misty place.
I should mention the object of our quest this time around, as well as the items previously obtained. Chappell showed us the list of things from across time and space that we needed, with the ones we had yet to get being written in gibberish. The stuff we already had was: the living shadow, the unicorn's horn (the repository of it's power), something Fabio got from the Snow White family while we weren't looking that had to do with the last of faerie kind, the Holy Lance/Spear of Destiny, the fragments from the Gordian knot, the Elder Eagle feather, and lastly, "courage" and "bravery". Each of these was not called by a simple description, but rather by a more complicated name. For example, the unicorn's horn was called the mythical strength of beast (or something) referring to the fact that the horn is the repository of the unicorn's supernatural strength. This time, what we were questing for was the "intermediary between mind and virtue" or something like that, or in other words (Chappell's words), truth.
Anyway, we're here in this mist, that we can't see more than 10-20 feet through, and as usual, Fabio, doesn't know which way to go. I do the old, spit in the hand and flick it, to pick a direction, and we decide to go the opposite way that the spit flew. After walking a little way, we heard music, and headed towards it. We reached a place where some kind of costume ball was going on, with music and ballroom dancing, and people in all sorts of strange costumes.
We got up to the folks, and Sakell found some woman to dance with, while the rest of us split up to see what we could see. We walked around, and I ended up dancing with a very tall person with a "have a nice day" smiley face head, that turned out not to be a mask. We had a spat, and I stalked off the dance floor. I later ran into a person with a pig head, who could only grunt like a pig, two guys dressed like Zorro, who spoke Spanish and danced together, and a crazy woman. She sounded a lot like the nymphs from talking animal land, and she wanted to take a look at my shield. She put it on her arm, and acted like she was in a fight, then she fell down dead, with a stab wound through her back. At this point I decided that reality here was defined by what people thought. I tried to bring her back to life by laying on of hands, believing that I could heal her, but I didn't.
I ran into Jay, and told him this, and we decided to experiment. We'd been hearing fluctuations in the dance music, and decided to start there. We picked a different song, concentrated on it, and the music changed. We then decided to concentrate on finding the truth, so we thought up "the book of truth" sitting on a nice wooden stand. This book turned out to be a King James bible, but when we showed it to Chappell, he said that it was a nice try, and took it. We then started thinking about truth, just truth, and a woman named Ruth showed up. We talked with her, and danced with her, (she gave me some punch, in the stomach) while we found Jon and Sakell, who also had met smiley face man, and filled them in on our discovery.
We walked around the dancefloor, looking for anything vaguely useful or interesting. At one point, there was a rumbling noise from the middle of the dance floor. When we checked it out, and found that a swath had been cut through the dancers that was slowly filling in, but no one else seemed to care. We finally found the band, after we decided that the music was just coming from everywhere. When we concentrated we changed Elvis Presley into KISS (which hit on Jon later). At some point in all this, Sakell, who was acting goofy during the whole adventure, came up and told us that he'd found truth by giving Ruth some tea, and making her T-ruth. We thought that might be useful later (but it wasn't).
While Sakell went off dancing with T-Ruth, we tried to come up with some other physical manifestations of truth, ending up with Superman, Washington, and Lincoln. When Superman appeared, it looked like Jon turned into Superman, and then went off dancing, but Jon later denied this happening. I believe that we also tried for Green Lantern at some point (because honesty is one of the prerequisites for the job) but didn't get anything. We asked Lincoln about truth, and he gave us some nice campaign speech, complete with patriotic background music, but like all politicians, what he said ended up meaning nothing.
We felt that we'd exhausted all the possibilities here, and Ruth gave us her "T", thus reducing her usefulness. Things get a little confused after this, but I'll try to make some sense of it all. We ran into a giant mouse, who talked about going home, and disappeared. I think we somehow sort of went along with him, and ended up in a misty place with these flying colored ribbon thingies. We walked away from that, and came across a big banquet table with giant vegetables eating little people.
After that, we ended up hilly country, where we saw a column of storm troopers (like from Star Wars) marching along, escorting some people. We tried to stay out of site behind hills, paralleling them along their course. This didn't work, as they spotted us and started blasting, so we ran. We went into the mist again and hid behind from stones, which turned out to be Stonehenge. We were still talking about looking for truth, and one stone in the center thought he knew where we could find some. He knew the direction to go, and if we carried him along, he could direct us. He was a little too big for us though, and all the stones were answering our questions in sequence, so we left in what we determined to be the direction the center stone thought truth was.
At some point here, people got separated, Jon and I together, and Sakell and Jay, we had no idea where. After leaving Stonehenge, Jon and I ended up in some kind of undersea region, except, there was no water. There were fish swimming around and all, but for us, everything was normal. As we walked along, Jon kicked into a sea urchin, and got some spines in his foot, but pulled them out, and took some of the unicorn horn he had left to neutralize the poison. We then encountered a miniature submarine heading our way, looking very menacing for a two foot long submarine floating in thin air. Then it started shooting. I took the first torpedo on my shield, blowing a hole in the cheap bronze. Jon was moving to get our of the line of fire, and I was too, but too slow. I took the second shot in the side. By this point, Jon was to the side, in striking range, and busted up the sub with his broadsword. It broke in two, and slowly sank, with fish falling out.
We kept going, and saw a rowboat floating above us. It was only about 6 feet up, so we managed to get in and row along. We saw a miniature Stonehenge on the bottom, and aligned ourselves to go the direction from it that we went from the full size version. As we went along, we saw some bouncy ball type things falling from the sky. One punched a hole in our boat, which didn't affect it any, and they bounced around on the bottom, which was now 20-30 feet down. They went to a floating island that didn't extend below the "surface." This "island" was hollow metal, with sheer sides that we decided we couldn't climb. All the bouncy balls seemed to have gone up under/inside it, and when we banged on it, something banged back a reply. We got bored with this game and left.
We then saw Jay walking along the bottom. Because we couldn't think of a better place to try it, we got the rope we had and dropped him a line to haul him up. We got him to the boat, when he lost his grip and fell. He claimed the drop hurt, but it was only about 30 feet, and he's just a whiner. We did manage to get him into the boat, and made landfall on a beach. We ditched the boat and were walking inland, when we encountered some large, talking chess pieces. The high ranking pieces wanted us to spy for them on the other side, or become new pawns. We couldn't get anything useful from them, so we walked around the board to the other side, and had a similar conversation with their counterparts. We were a bit confused by the game, as the pieces were talking as if the game was going on, but the pawns were moving backwards as if they were resetting.
We left the board, and soon saw a bright light. Hoping this meant we were dead and could finally rest, we went to the light. Unfortunately, it was just a light, and Sakell was there. We goofed around with the light, it flashed violet, and we were in a room with several doors. There was nothing good behind any doors, so we played with the light again (flash), and were in a different room. We did this a couple times, until we ended up in a field with some bunnies. The bunnies wanted to play, so they morphed themselves into basketballs, and we had a little game.
Sakell led us out from there, and into a war zone. He felt he knew where we needed to go, so he led the charge through the bullets. Jay and I tried to follow, but I got shot up and passed out. When I came to, I was floating in the clouds. I flew around, and down to try to find land, but the pressure started getting pretty high. I figured I was on a gas giant planet, perhaps Neptune, and flew around to see what I could see. There were things resembling hot-air balloons floating around, and I checked them out, but they were pretty boring. I then saw a person who looked like me land on one, and go into it. I tried to find him/me, but couldn't find anything. I flew on, and saw Jay on one of these balloon creatures (kinda like what Sagan described as living in Jupiter's atmosphere in Cosmos).
Jay said that we'd been in the middle of World War I, and had been shot at by the Germans. They captured him, and wanted him to draw a picture, but he couldn't understand. They brought in a translator, found out that they just didn't like him, and so they shot him through the heart. When he came to, he was floating in the clouds, like me.
From Neptune, we phased in and out again, and found ourselves at a swimming pool. I got in and was floating around, and the others showed up too. We got onto a discussion about truth, absolute and relative. The proposition was that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that all truth is defined by the observer. I pulled out the apple I got earlier (at some point, we ran into some trolls collecting the tolls, they paid me an apple for the toll), and claimed it was an absolute truth. A worm crawled out, and I called it an absolute truth, it grew and bit my arm.
At this point, I started rambling, and said that no object, can be considered an absolute truth, as they will all change. I said that the only absolute truth was entropy, as everything must achieve absolute entropy. This went on for a while, and somehow, we adjourned to a little French cafe, where we ordered much food and drink. I got drunk, and when Fabio showed, I told him how much I loved him, man. He said that we'd all had enough, and got us out of there, promising that the next thing we did would be to get some explanations.
I should point out the ultimate irony of this story. At the beginning, we were concerned about imposters, so we came up with recognition signals. We decided than when challenged, the challenged party would either respond with "green" or "fuck off" to confirm that they were who we thought they were. We used this several times, and everyone responded correctly every time. However, it later turned out that Sakell (who let us into the firefight) was an imposter. The original Sakell got run over by a large boulder on the dance floor (the rumbling noise that cut a swath), and the other one that was running around being a distracting, dangerous goofball, wasn't him.