“Zorlond’s gone what?” asked Gidget.
“Bye-bye,” said Dabbler distractedly. “Off to la-la land. Off the wall in the case of his phone, I think, though it sounds like he’s gone off the wall, too.”
“So he, um, hung up, I take it.”
“So emphatically I don’t think his telephone’s ever going to be good for anything again.”
“Dabbler,” asked Gidget, practical as always, “why did he smash your foot with his scrying stone?”
“He didn’t say. He didn’t even let me finish asking. Any anyway, he hardly even seemed to know I was there, I might have been anyone calling as far as he was concerned.”
“Well there has to be some reason he sent you his rock. And if he can’t or won’t tell you why, we’d better figure it out.”
“Figure what out?” asked Dolly, entering the room. She was Dabbler’s other live-in girlfriend, named for and strongly resembling Dolly Parton, probably because she was in fact an e-version of Dolly Parton. Only younger, and without the sag the real Dolly Parton would have if she was naked the way this Dolly was.
“Why Zorlond’s playing Prudential agent and giving us a piece of the rock,” said Gidget unhelpfully.
One slightly less unhelpful explanation later, Dolly was as much in the know as the others were.
“Any ideas?” asked Dabbler.
“Not a one,” said Dolly. “Want me to hang this thing up somewhere?”
“I don’t even want you to touch it,” Dabbler told her. “These things are dangerous. Remember the time you fell into the Mirror of Galadriel?”
Gidget shuddered. “It took us weeks to de-static the carpets,” she said remembering. “Not to mention figuring out how to change Dolly back into herself from that busty version of Liv Tyler. Though why she became her when Tyler played Arwen in the movie—”
“My point is, keep away from the thing,” Dabbler broke in. “No need to rehash old history.”
“Well what do we do it, then?” Dolly asked, now rather annoyed. “We can’t very well leave it in the lobby for anyone to trip over.”
Dabbler snapped his fingers, removing the stone (and the three of them to his workroom. “Right,” he replied. “Here is much better. Now then. Given Zorlond’s condition when I called him, I’m beginning to wonder if he even did send us this. Maybe it was Kiya, for instance, trying to keep him from doing something loopy with it. Trouble is, I can’t very well call her about it, since she lives with him.”
“Who, then?” asked Gidget, a dangerous glint coming into her eye. “Her daughter Anna, maybe?”
Not even Dabbler was dense enough to miss the iron fist within the velvet glove of that supposedly innocent question. “Perish the thought,” he said quickly. “I’m just trying to figure this out, and obviously the one who sent the thing would be the best one to tell us why it was sent. Anna’s not likely to know; she and her folks aren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye these days, I hear.”
“I wonder why?” commented Dolly, the ice in her voice implying that she, for one, would have little difficulty coming up with a cause, and that if Dabbler wasn’t careful it could be the same cause for fireworks here.
Her lover took a breath. “I think,” he said, “what we need to do is ask the stone itself.”
Dolly’s anger vanished. “Oh no you don’t!” she cried. “These things are dangerous! You said so yourself!”
“Yes, and this thing is probably only supposed to be used by Zorlond or Kiya to boot,” Dabbler agreed. “Nevertheless—”
“And Anna,” Gidget pointed out. “She used it to send us a picture of some of your little shenanigans once, remember.”
“Like you’d ever let me forget that,” Dabbler muttered. “As I was saying, nevertheless, I am an Author, and dealing with weird shit like this is my job. This stone is used to send messages, pronounce oracles, show things far away, the whole magic mirror/crystal ball routine, so the mere fact that it’s here must be a message of some sort. What better medium than itself to tell us the rest?”
“Or if Zorlond has it in for you,” said Dolly darkly, “what better medium to entrap you?”
Dabbler blew that off. “He’s not into entrapment, that’s more his daughter’s line. No, I think I’m onto this, now. Zorlond, Kiya or whoever sent this will be aware that I know how the various sending-receiving devices making up the Inter-Authorial Network function, and this, whatever else it might be, is one of those devices. That, and the fact that it’s obviously here for a reason, demonstrate that they knew I’d figure out what to do.”
“Oh yeah, it’s so clear,” sneered Dolly. “So crystal clear you had to call Zorlond to clear it up.”
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Mon Aug 23 15:33:58 2004
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