Agent505

Thinking it’d be cheaper to travel on a weekday rather than a Saturday, the best value flight I could find came on the following Tuesday. As today was Thursday, that gave us more than a few days to find availability for a truck rental and a hotel stay somewhere between here and Raleigh. While Michelle had been going into work as normal and I still enjoyed an at-home work environment, I’d have a pile of work reports due when I got back. Michelle, on the other hand, was able to use leave without issue. Though it meant we’d be getting on the plane early - like seven AM and arriving at the airport about a quarter after five - the flights for a one-way ticket were as cheap as $79 on Sun Country per commuter. Frankly, I didn’t think I’d find anything cheaper, so I consulted with Michelle, who agreed. As it happened, there was also a U-Haul dealer about halfway between the airport and Julio’s place in Lampshire Downs, an established but newer neighborhood on the north side of town

Quantum Wish (or, the Story of Walter Barrett and the Queen of the Britons) After receiving that phone call from Dr. Chase in April, the spring of 2022 developed well enough for the Claxions and their good friend Michelle. Did I mention that the zoo had been open since July of 2020? No? I guess I didn’t get that particular tidbit until well after our return from Nicollet’s Ceremony of the Tides a few weeks prior. Guess that drive-through experience on the Northern Trail hadn’t gone well. “So why the two-week scheduling thing?” I finally asked Michelle sometime on a sunny but not-yet-warm-enough-to-get-out-the-boat day. Suppose it might’ve been April 10th or so, not quite the old man’s birthday nor quite the end of tax season, though I had of course filed a few weeks ago. “Huh?” Having been meandering Facebook on her phone, Michelle might not have been expecting the question. “Actually, Greg, that had more to do with us bumping into each other behind the scenes more than

"Ah, wow, it's done. I'm going to bring it out to him." I was sitting in the living room of the cabin on my 44th birthday. Everyone was up for the event, as was Raine, Mandy and Nick and little as well as Tessa, though James had to stay home with Cora who was currently knee-deep in her fourth grade of school. Shelly had gone to a lot of trouble for it all, and while I might've been fine with just low-key stuff, someone decided it was a weekend, and as the weather had been grand for late summer in the northlands the whole thing spiraled a little - but Tessa insisted she could stay for about three days, and since Raine and her crew would be here through the weekend, well - who was I to refuse their company? In the meantime, that weather - it had been perfect up until today, when it decided to rain all morning. But it was a nice steady soaking rain, and seeing as how we could use rain anyway, it'd be fine - provided it cleared out so we could enjoy the pontoon later. "Hey, wait

This unnamed maid of Carter’s had carried me by the pickle jar, brought me through the kitchen to the servant’s quarters - a small quadrant of rooms above the garage that had beds in three of the rooms, the fourth being a shared bath - before carrying me outside. What had become the house’s servant entrance had a small brick patio, a little bistro table with an umbrella, and a path defined by circular bricks out along the west side of the sunken driveway to the cul-du-sac. Transporting me to the curb, there waited a yellow Chevy Aveo with an illuminated blue sign in the back window. Uber. The maid came around to the vehicle’s driver side, where the driver opened the window. “Gracias Jose,” the maid said as she handed him both my pickle jar and a $20 bill. He nodded. “Siempre pense que Torrey Pines era un buen lugar. Si?” “Si,” she replied. “Gracias.” With that, this Uber driver - Jose? - put me into the center console and took off. The jar fit pretty well and

With that, we were ordered to leave our folders in the room and return to the assembly area. As we entered, however, we were amazed to see that the space was far less active than it had been previously. The view into the command center was obscured by darkness in the acrylic windows, and all of the passing agents had gone to other parts of the complex. For all rights, we now had the room completely to ourselves - with the only exception being Agent Nokram himself. For a timeline reference, I checked my watch. Six minutes to one pm. Had our meeting taken that long? Talk about a well oiled machine. “Okay then,” Nokram said as he brought us over by the black delivery van we had arrived in. “Now, I’m going to go into the locker room for a few moments, but at 13:05 hours a vehicle from Carvana should be arriving. It will be driven by one of our agents in costume.” “In costume?” Shelly asked. “As an employee, undercover,” Michelle replied. Nokram nodded. “Pay attention

About fifteen minutes later, Michelle returned from the other room. “Okay, I spoke to Jenna, she said she’d cover for me this week.” “Good. That means you have until the seventh of March?” She nodded and returned to her seat on the chair. “Suppose you could take a plane, but it’s pretty risky,” I said. “On the same vein, it doesn’t seem fair to ask you to drive Summer without a pilot the whole way, and especially asking you to stay in hotels.” “You’ve also got the Outback here,” Michelle said. “If you don’t need it here, I’d rather drive it home for you. As I said before, I trust hotels more than I do airports and a confined, pressurized tube in the sky.” Can’t argue with that, I guess. “But you should also stay here if your girls are here,” Michelle continued. “Andromeda said you were going to be there for Nicollet’s ceremony. You are, aren’t you?” I nodded. “Yeah, I did.” “When you folks go home, you’ll drive the truck, which holds two kids and two adults,”

That night, I waited off to the side and watched from afar as Gunther and Ceylara went to work in the grotto’s kitchen. Ayna had brought a full bag of sango stalks, while Nauridia and Emina had provided a large sack that contained long strands of Posidenae Fillagree which looked like obnoxiously long blue noodles of spaghetti. First, Ceylara chopped up the sango with a large chef’s knife that looked like one that would’ve came from the land. The thick strands of coral had a consistency matching that of harvested sea anenome meat, similar to that you’d find in a good sushiya. Second, she took four of the aloe fronds from Shelly, trimmed off the spiny thick skin and cut the leaves in half, using the knife to squeeze the gel from each leaf onto the mixture before wiping the knife off onto a yellow sponge-like mass near the back of the counter. “What’s that sponge back there?” I asked Nauridia, who happened to be closest. “Just a sponge,” Naury replied. “It’s been treated with