Extended Dance Mix

Once upon a time there's a dragon. Nothing else. End of story. Quite a dull story you might imagine.

Optional maths/history/cultural warfare/scapegoat/linguistic/don’t take your eye off the ball joke

And what about the egg? It all happens inside the egg. If there was more respect for the egg we wouldn’t be in this situation.

Ooof, point taken, but there is no egg.

Of course there is; there’s always an egg; the dragon has to come out of an egg.

What egg?

Flee Fleance flee.

The egg is the dragon & the dragon is the egg.

Aye, aye.

The egg is implicit throughout; at the beginning & at the end.

No it isn’t; there’s no egg.

They’re both whatever you imagine & what is there to say about an egg?

Well, a dragon could hatch out of it, or lay it, or become it.

Dragons are lovely. An egg is nice; an egg can’t hurt anyone; it’s all going on in the egg. Just keep your eyes open & remember, don’t say hippocampus.

Is pineal better?

We’ll come to the cuttlefish later, but there probably won’t be time for cosmic rays, animal photosynthesis or the synchronised saga of melatonin & melanin, let alone consider eyes in the skin.

Artistic license.

Exactly.

Like a shaggy dog story then, going nowhere.

Except eggs can’t tell stories; that would be the other guy.

You know nothing.

Touché.

What’s that?

Zorro.

Quidquid id est. Tell that to the Greeks.

But it’s Latin. You’ve lost me.

It’s a joke. Do you think people will like it?

No, go on. Everyone loves scapegoat jokes.

Well, you know how if you have to explain a joke it spoils the joke. Well a scapegoat joke is more like an omega; it doesn't quite get there.

Hmmm. I know that if no-one finds it funny, then it’s a non joke.

Well, the way it’s told, the Ancient Greeks, who did love their propaganda & their politics, came up with everything that stops us from being illiterate philistines, philosophy, democracy, many many words & legends, competitive sport, etc, but they abandoned Gaia, for a load of sky characters that are like big humans with superpowers, lived on a flat earth & couldn’t conceive of zero when everyone else loved the idea.

They took in everything else off the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Indians (the ones from the Indus), Tibetans, Zoroastrians & everywhere east, who revel in jokes & puzzles about nothing, but they just didn’t get zero.

Here, we didn’t have to deal with not knowing about zero until a bit later, but we already knew about zero when it came to it, as we’d neglected to not know about it at any earlier stage. And even if we had, it’s not like it doesn’t spontaneously regenerate.

Quidquid id est indeed.

Same as a phoenix. But that counts for naught as a joke.

Well that’s the funny thing about zeros. Let’s stay with dragon; it’s more universal & let’s leave Zeno’s paradox, the Ancient Greeks & heraclean propaganda out of this; evil hydra & malevolent centaurs were of their time & place, so, let’s return to dealing with our present mythos.

Too late, but my point exactly. Sorry Greeks; no disrespect; you know I love you really.

Omega of scapegoat joke.

Optional chemistry keep your eye on the photon experiment:

In this universe we can happily call the dragon hydrogen; I think that’s the perfect name; it’s even got o in the middle. Subtle; & yet there it is; almost mocking. Can you be mocked by an o?

Careful about how you read your symbols; you have to imagine the thing itself; remember to keep coming back to animation.

We have our sphere; take it on faith there’s a massive positive charge in the centre even though the whole thing is neutral & its surface is negative & light. Consider the outside & watch. If you start with a dot on the surface & animate it, it starts to move around. It may be trying to go in a straight line, but it’s actually going in circles & describing the sphere around the heavy massive thing of complementary charge. Give it some breath & see how it shimmers & begins to dance in waves around the focus. It comes & goes, completely describing the sphere, & as you add more energy the spectrum glows brighter & glitters with an opaline swirling iridescence.

Never forget what we’re dealing with is alive.

Look, it’s somehow an H that’s got one of those & one of those, quick or you’ll miss it.

Yeah, but that one’s become positive as that one’s negative.

But they’re not quite the same, or the opposite; that one has mass & that one’s going really fast.

It’s less about opposition & mutual exclusion, that would be the short-sighted, razor’s edge perspective; animate, follow it through & all the way back around & it becomes more complementary toward the whole. And the speed is relative; that one’s travelling too, really fast, just in a larger realm & never anywhere near as fast as the small one. Here’s the thing; it’s so big & so slow, we can’t actually see that one; it’s imaginary; we had to perform atomic vivisection in order to obtain proof that it was there; we shouldn’t really have to put it through that any more. The imaginary version should be fine, as long as the picture does it justice.

Who did this atomic vivisection then?

Dragon did it to Innocence Gold; flattened her into a really thin sheet by taking possession of a primate, then assaulted her directly using a “ray gun” he’d got the primate to build, specially for purpose.

You say directly; are you quite sure the impact was material.

Well, no your honour, we just sort of deduced.

You imagined it?

Yes, your honour.

And you could not have imagined it without performing this procedure?

No your honour; we did not believe so at the time.

I find that highly unlikely. For what possible purpose other than malicious could you have built a “ray gun”.

Well, the dragon told me enlightenment might be a good thing.

Yes, but that’s not enlightenment, or illumination; your ray gun is ludicrously overpowered; what you are telling me is that you were insensate to all external signs of life & yet clearly perceived the golden colour, sincere gravity, soft texture, willingness to yield, malleability & readiness to melt, knew well of the immaculate clarity of her perfume, her silence under torture by aqua regia, all signs readily offered as to her nature & purity of heart, yet continued to proceed with this most violent & intrusive violation into the very depths of her material body.

Guilty as charged.

Give that man a Nobel prize.

Why; he’s an anti-faery.

It was obviously the faery’s fault; it’s quite clear she seduced him.

Yes, but we’re not going to start trying to prosecute ghosts now are we?

The whole thing was completely imaginary. You don’t want to believe everything you read in its contemporary context. The man was obviously a complete fool, obviously possessed by the dragon, so he probably can’t see the nose in front of his face. We should feel compassion towards people like that.

But the faery is still alive; imagine what she went through.

Seriously, it was worse in the inquisition days, with the aqua regia. Nah, only kidding, she’s actually one of the dragon’s special ones; you know what, she loves to be the centre of attention, does love enlightenment & that trick with the ray gun; I tell you again, it was all imaginary, that ray was reflected by an invisible forcefield, they just couldn’t imagine how he pulled it off, you can’t touch her heart, all the dragon’s idea; what you need to do is give her a bit of warmth, knock her back into shape & she’ll be right as rain; like putty in your hands. Come to think of it, I think she might be a bit simple.

Like Krishna's trick with Draupadi after the dice game.

Now you’re getting it; everyone plays their parts & the archetypes can do it so we don’t have to go through the process again ourselves.

So if your elders forget to say their prayers?

You can hardly blame them for falling for one of Krishna’s miracles, he is pretty spectacular in that department. And Draupadi has beguiled many a man in the past; she has hidden depths & yet she’s just as she seems to be; through & through.

Yeah, just don’t get the matter & spirit mixed up there. When it’s yellow & black, I think you know.

Ah, but mimicry...

You know what, I think it’s like water off a duck’s back; I can quite easily spend a lifetime in love with gold.

Love indeed Arjuna, but she must be shared between all 5 brothers & always, always respected in her freedom to follow her heart.

Ah, that heart again.

Yes & is it pure?

And is it my imagination or is that a dragon I spy?

What, the one that’s telling me about all that glisters, the one reminding me about the imaginary situation & words, or the one looking straight back at me.

Oh, we’ve been here before haven’t we. I got so lost for a moment there. Good thing the narcissi are about.

Don’t you mean 3 magi?

No, I mean it’s all gold, all hydrogen, all dragon.

Let’s not get hung up on trinities, what about frankincense & myrrh?

Well at least those two are real?

Are you sure? I was pretty sure for a while that gold was real, or was it hydrogen?

I think the answer’s pretty bleeding obvious.

What, all is vanity, all is maya, it’s unwise to stare at the sun for a reason, or can I go out to play now?

What about me?

Oooh, look, who’s back.

And that one has some mass; it’s not as light as a photon, but see the colours & see how it likes to dance with them. That’s what you call resonance. When the small fast one gets excited & gathers energy it can move higher from its ground state orbital & settle into a new dance further removed from the centre. It can gather free energy in all sorts of subtle & mysterious ways from its environment. It’s mainly of the electromagnetic & kinetic variety at that scale of things, balanced by potential considerations & a relatively insignificant amount of gravity, which is a slightly less insignificant consideration for the proton. It’s less the quantum leap that’s important than the quantum collapse. Once the energy no longer sustains the electron’s more distant wanderings it collapses back to its closer, more stable ground state.

Depending on which orbital it has fallen from, the energy released in the fall is released as a repeatable quantum of characteristic colour.

Different faeries have different characteristic colours.

Because E = hν?

Because faeries enjoy communicating & introducing all their friends to the wonders of the dragon. The visual pigments in our retinas, & in the things we’re resonating with using those pigments. That’s why we resonate with what we resonate with visually in terms of colour.

Like carrots in the dark.

Well, they were originally purple, most everything in vision is back to front & inverted; all organised the opposite of what you might very well otherwise imagine.

So the plants use the animals to do their bidding using colours & scents & flavours & rewards & memories. Monkey orchids give the game away somewhat; to the primates at least.

Indeed, but before you go attributing power & manipulation to one or other side of the relationship, remember these are relationships that have co-evolved symbiotically in 5D over the whole of evolutionary history & light was about & signalling in the dark times, before any elf ever witnessed our sun; it all goes very, very deep & we should care about the ones we’re with just now; all of them, not just the ones we see ourselves in readily because of anthropomorphic features, but all the persecuted ones as well. Primates are visually & logically biased; but the most fundamental & primary modality for all living communication is chemical. Those are the most ancient relationships of all, & it seems like their relationships have not been told in this language & virtually nobody appreciates we’re just a bunch of well organised bacteria, who are themselves just a bunch of well organised faery dust.

Hallelujah.

I’m doing my best. It’s one fucking hell of a responsibility.

Correct; deep breath; that’s why we need to remember we’re a team & it’s all for love of the spirit.

But at least light travels at the speed of light still doesn’t it?

Apparently that’s known as a physical constant; in this case, c, otherwise E couldn’t = mc2

So hv = mc2, each expressing the energy in the photon as a characteristic first of its wave frequency, assuming no mass & then through its momentum as function of its particular mass & speed, assuming no dancing. Light is a wavicle. Waves have mass & matter moves in waves; if that’s what you choose to resolve. Thus are mass & energy interconvertible & neither are quite the thing on their own, but the idea that they are ever alone is simply not paying attention; it all depends on what you’re looking at or for from it.

Actually c assumes a vacuum, & there is no such thing.

Is there now?

Yes, the speed of light is dependent on the medium. I think what this represents is the element of air, meaning the atmosphere, which can be still or moving, warm or cool, light or heavy, but always a gaseous fluid, in contrast to a solid at least & can’t exist above or below certain temperatures. It’s held in orbit by the gravity of the earth, but it’s pretty elusive otherwise; every time you look at it closely it vanishes; that seems to be its essential quality. I’m not sure the dragon can perceive it at all except by contrast with what it isn’t. You might think it’s everywhere & it must surely be as everything has to take place in some context when you pay attention to it. Maybe it’s the true O, as opposed to the H2O, or the H or the material realities those things represent, yet it’s a state which cannot exist without all the others & long before absolute zero things will no longer be gaseous.

But when shall we 3 meet again?

There’s a wonderful drink you can share; that’s Martini. How about Woodstock, Wight, Womad, or that place with the Tor?

The intimation of illusion; the impossible thought. Yet, it’s sort of incontrovertible as otherwise how is there wind, what does all the gaseous stuff exist in & what is everything travelling through? But whenever I examine any of these things I just come up with things that can be perceived as watery, firey or earthy; but the way I’m looking at everything now it’s as if I’m blind & must have been staring too long into the sun. Which leads me in the direction of it representing the mental actuality of the holy trinity formed through the other 3, but maybe they all do that if you adopt the appropriate perspectives, like a sphere around every trinity, a connection point at every centre, or both.

Aether to all extents & purposes. It’s like a pure version of each presented through contrast, the antithesis; what’s that in the shadows?; or at least certainly that way for fire; light, elusive, free & heats the aether & its absence cools it, albeit via radiant resonance, via its material (conduction) & humoural (convection) representative constituents; earth in air just seems to symbolise the air; light, aerodynamic, sensitive & responsive to pressure, may initially warm, but ultimately cools it & is drawn to return through gravity or material vehicle; water in air is the vapour, humidity, rain, snow, clouds, rainbows, all just passing through as part of its cycle. Again, may initially warm as a vehicle for fire, but also ultimately cooling to the aether.

Regarding the fire, as it transforms & burns it is always withdrawing free energy from the universe & returning it to it; this one will require some reimagining; the laws say this one goes in one direction, but I suspect it’s simply that not everything is being taken into consideration, as the process of life is looking to balance the chaos out with equivalent order & some of that organisation is simply not being accounted for as it’s hidden in the dark as untapped potential; the sucker move would be to go all brainy about this.

Zigackly, just relax into it; the aether here represents the imbalance between reality & imagination. That stuff that gets called noise, waste heat, lost, not of direct appreciable value, a virus, “bad” bacteria, weeds, parasites, vermin, pests; it all comes back in the end, just evolved in a way that relates to the quality at the time of last separation. Something is returned in the dark relating to the death process & contributing a secret, invisible order, which is imperceptible & fails to be accounted for; it’s the paradox, the ubiquitous thing which is there & not there. I think this is what’s known as dark matter, dark energy or dark irony.

Round 1; Newton beats Goethe. Return match scheduled to take place somewhere in the near past. I’m pretty sure we’ve turned round & are on the return leg; signs have been there for a while; the mystery & magic’s becoming ever more evident & seductive.

Oh, but shhh, is it? Well, no, druids, wiccans, black dusk, yolkmasons & rotaroty clubs, that won’t do any more will it; it’s too late, the genie’s out now we’ve all got to put this one back in together & we can’t do that by pretending the shadow doesn’t exist.

Or we could leave it out of the bottle; or put solomon’s seal on it.

Talk about solanaceae!

A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.

Yes, but perhaps not serve as usefully in the elucidation of cholinergic signalling & the understanding of autonomic function as the fate with the scissors.

Paanchy, nga ha lima?

Black state express & JW red label>$100 legit.

Shoony. Ek, do, teen chaar; chhe, saath, aath, nau, das. Main tumse pyar kartha hoon.

Thone-nya. Tit, hnit, thone, lay; chaut, khon-hnit, shit, ko, ta’hse. Ngar min ko chit teh.

Suny. Neung, song, sam, si; hok, chet, pet, kao, sip. Phom rakh kuhn.

Nol. Satu, dua, tiga, empat; enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh. Aku cinta kamu.

The light source can’t perceive its own shadow, but there’s more than one of us now. No-one gets left behind; throw out the life buoy.

Fuck me, this is the key to refinement! Tuning in, synchronisation; the mistakes through which we learn; the unwritten history; the unexpected results of cooperation & symbiosis, the invaluable values of liberty, diversity, genius & originality, the benefits of hindsight, unaccountable qualities of the philosopher’s stone, holy grail & water of life; the healing properties of sleep, the implicit qualities of food & the constructive properties of pain, inflammation & the immune system.

For some reason I find myself ideally situated to make use of this, but, if I don’t do it someone else will.

However the wind blows, fly with it; castles made of sand, houses made of straw, wood or stone are all doomed. Bamboo bending is fine, but flying is better sometimes. Ah, pegasus airlines; been using it for years, just never paid too much attention to being scared of the dark, but I remember getting into trouble at junior school for having my boo painfully misinterpreted by the teacher as a boo. Once the boo goes on too long it’s too late to make it shorter. Never really thought it through, but it was something that always haunted me, despite working it through with the teacher at the time so that everything was healed afterwards. Very significant lesson. Both sides, I’d imagine; she was lovely. Called her Mum once. Never did that again.

Joe Root!

Good old Himalayas; not so old.

Semiconducting faeries that live on the borders between metals & non metals are the most rare, compassionate & beautiful things to have emerged from Tibet since the Dalai Lama.

Does dwarf Olympus rather. Mongol centaurs with golden eagles, sky burials, wheels, bells & horny resonant overtones; cup of camellia Dorje Ling or would you prefer Assam?

Ker-ching & smooth as mulberry fibroin on a cold & frosty morning;Elfhome, Lhasa, Besakih,

Borobudur,

New Selo;

Elf on Merbabo:

Merapi;

Land of Bubble & Squeak;

Come on Cowboys:

Land of Bubble & Squeak;

Krakatao, Toba, Singasongasixpence, Angkor Wat, Mekhong, Krung Thep, Chiangrai, Chiangmai, Rangoon, Irrawaddy, Pagan, Thimphu, Kangchenjunga, Ganga D’accord. Kali cut what Tiger?

Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Sonauli, Pokhara, (Allahabad, Agra, Pushkar, Mehrauli, Amritsar), Parbhati, Dharamsala, Srinagar, Harmukh, K2, Multan, Samarkand, Tashkent, Isfahan, (remember the) Alamut, Ankara, Troy, Ephesus, Masyaf, Beirut, Damascus, Acre, Amman, Babylon, Jebel Ali, Muscat, (Cochin, Mauritius, Bourbon, Libertalia, Zanzibar), Aden, Addis ababa, Khartoum, Alex, Tripoli, Carthage, Marrakesh, Timbuktu, Monrovia, Green Canary, San Juan, Princeport, Nassau, Havana, Kingston; end of the line; everybody off.

The dragon’s revealing itself to us visually here.

And now he’s on his world tour.

Have some respect & consider the egg.

Well what we have here is an expression of endless circles within circles; you can hardly say consider the egg. How small does a circle need to be to look like a dot?

These days, larger than femto, smaller than nano; essentially picoish; should do, albeit very small, although some still don’t get the pattern of infinity until it’s resolved to around double that. Take Avogadro, for example.

Oooh, I’d rather not just now if it’s all the same to you.

If opposites attract, why doesn’t the small one head straight for the heart of the large one?

It’s a function of energy & mass; the small one is always seeking that; it used to imagine itself to be travelling in a straight line in that direction but more recently it dances this way & that; it’s beautiful, but we don’t want to make it too self conscious, recently it’s shown signs of imagining itself to be too massive or too small, too hairy or too bald; too fast or too slow; too early or too late; it’s having a hard time being itself; it’s always going too fast to stop & as it always has some momentum as a function of its mass, it always overshoots; don’t think it isn’t trying.

Maybe it should just let go & be itself.

As if….

Polly puts the kettle on; Cal (codename Suki) takes it off again; I don’t see Mary or Susan yet, but we can come back & get to know them later; Susan sounds so sweet, bet the faeries love her & Mary sounds like a passionate, oceanic sort of lass, bit of a dreamer; lots of hard Cal here; maybe we should go into milk production, call it Bristol see if anyone gets it.

At absolute zero; where there is no free energy, the ultimate fate for which everything in the universe is doomed; then at last the electron & the proton unite; everything comes together for the big party then. Or very very very small party, depending on your perspective.

So that we can all be swallowed up by the dragon & recreated.

If you like. Or Humpty gets put back together again.

How about geothermal refrigeration?

Sounds crazy.

Doesn’t it just. Don’t you just love that idea?

Double dragon.

The creation event takes place once & continuously forever; it only needs to have happened once & for all, so long as time is appreciated as circular. Then you can appreciate the continuous flux; H is never alone for long; it can draw friends in from the other side. Given life exists, it will continue to exist; it’s all part of the same flux. Descartes was just an egotist. Fowles does it better at the end of the Magus, quoting the anonymous vigil of venus.

A dragon evolves; evolution produces a dragon.

Everything enters as whatever it’s differentiated into over the course of its time, but the only thing it can reemerge as is H.

And it can only enter as H too; ultimately?

Yes, it’s the ultimate form for all H.

Never you mind what it enters as; same entry point as it comes out.

Nowhere?

No, there’s an actual place called nowhere.

At the centre of things. See that 23/32 supposed boundary?

Looks like fireworks from a polar volcano.

And also all the edges.

So which is the actual, real black hole?

Well, other than the one slap bang in the centre of everything, see the direction you’re headed in now?

Yes.

Well it’s behind you!

Ooh yeah, the black scary hole. This place again. Neverland. It’s where we’re all headed.

So, something infinitely heavy goes in as nothing & a dragon pops out. Somewhere in between we go from a state of infinite potential to an alternative state of infinite potential.

The cycle’s around 13 M years; or half a cycle; depending on which way you turn the clock when.

So, what happens in between.

You have been warned.

It’s a joke.

The very darkest; you don’t even need maths to go there. The story’s visible everywhere if you look in the dark.

So how do you get there?

It’s paradoxical. Work it all out, run away from it; back away towards it; use your imagination; make your way very carefully to the centre of the black & white room, & then be prepared for a surprise, turn round & shake hands. The only way in is love, or death, or pain or separation; any number of vehicles actually, the gate is a circular window & it’s always just there for your use, but there’s always a delay before you’re aware of coming out again. You have to let it go to get in & you only know you’re out once you’ve emerged as a dragon. And you can tell how long you’ve been away by reference to something you didn’t take with you; that won’t actually be how long it took, but it will be how long you’ve not been on the common maya for.

So why did Stephen Hawking need maths?

Another one of the dragon’s tricks; all for the benefit of the mathematicians. An elitist scapegoat joke you might say; it’s what happens when you over embellish or disrespect your original assumptions; they could have stopped at 0; or taken it to 1, 0, 2 & infinity; pentadactyly is implicit, but so is the special opposable digit; you have to keep breathing life into it; as then is decimalization; mirroring is an important part of it, as is that smoke you were breathing.

That part is quite stunningly beautiful.

There’s a hypothetically infinite number of faeries, but look see when they get too fat they explode & revert to some or other types of original faerie; the periodic table shows us how many numbers we need; the fatter they are, the shorter they live for & the more energy that transformation is associated with releasing; we all have a range that remains comfortable for stable life, but beware of concentrating on the extremes there fellahs; those big guys would love to be slimmer & more streamlined & those light guys are just looking to make friends & gain gravity in a way that doesn’t drag them down too much or obscure each others’ light excessively. It’ll all work itself out in the end.

Well it might be helpful if you didn’t use fat to imply heavy, when it’s actually less massive & contains the potential to liberate more water than CHOs which bind it avidly & require lots of it to function.

Hence CHOs (Cals, & Siouxsies, but only the spirit of Stevia Severins) for plants & fungi, (Marys & dragon tails) lipids for animation.

It tends to separate that way indeed; if you need to carry water in the desert imagine a camel; fat storage lumps; all it needs is O & hey presto, water & energy.

Where are the lipids in plants?

The animate stages; & the CHOs in animals; sedentary brain food & potential for conversion; don’t convert it, you need more water. Aha!. Oooh yeah!

Lipid is the light, slow release form; it’s had some horrific propaganda, no wonder folks are so confused.

Perhaps we should clarify that lipids appropriate to the environment they are operating in are the best sorts of lipids to have. What we’re really after is diversity & freedom; don’t overindulge the saturates (mainly big, warm & animal) unless it’s conditions are big, warm & animal; oils from tropical plants like palm & coconut also fit here, & diversify the PUFAs (more temperate nuts, seeds, fish) for movement in the other direction.

Which is the best fish bait?

I’ve heard hemp can be quite attractive; seems to follow humans around like a very loyal & faithful companion.

That’s Shiva saying lo in his elo hello halo, what’s all this then, voice, which is the body of Vishnu. Reunite them & call it Brahma.

Good catch; we should be so much more careful.

But mathematicians say maths is the universal language.

What else are they going to say? Tell that to Stephen Hawking.

Oh yeah, very funny.

He got the joke; you could tell.

What he actually needed was to think the unthinkable, let go of life & enter the black hole himself; he had to be willing to let everything go, which he of course did, the dragon gave him the formula in dragonese & when he came out, he found himself with the version in mathematical language. He thought the maths was the language necessary for proof, so that’s what he tried to do. Good thing was how often he banged on about singularities & got more people imagining the black hole; making it all a bit more familiar & unscary to people. He couldn’t have done that without respect; well, at any rate, he reached the people he did on the basis of having played that game long enough to get the respect.

Well good on him, you can’t say he didn’t do a great job.

Dragons are the lightest corporeal thing about & contain within their memories, surviving each transformation, all that is necessary for the creation of all the faeries, water & future organic life. In their natural state they each come into existence alone, but choose to exist as complementary pairs, way up in the aether, dancing beautifully symmetrical patterns. Their heads are mostly flashing violet fire, their bodies are spectral, but further towards their tails the more they become red, disintegrated & ultimately mostly dark, concealing earth. They breathe & exist by choice in a environment of fresh air, but the more oxidising conditions become, the more explosive their reactions are when they interact with others & ultimately they are all doomed to live & die for love & give themselves up for the greater good of the whole.

It’s the dragon’s fate to become love & love’s fate to become the dragon.

Oxidising?

O. Here we go.

O, we’re going to have fun with this one.

You better believe it.

Yes, the O. Passionate, polarising. Literally acidifying. Subtle, eh? The O might be in the dark for a while, but there it is, call it the female circle & it’s a positive, centred in the heart of the negative dragon; he goes nowhere without it.

So, how does O get to play the beast?

That’s what you call a joke, or a getting to know you test. The dragon’s love needs the dragon to acknowledge awareness, respect her & take responsibility for the painful devastation taking place in its wake, whilst the dragon needs to make that decision freely & remind his love that all is ultimately well; & they each take a tantalising look in the mirror, but only when they have to.

They are each seeking a state of dynamic stability, with freedom & security; nature & nurture; spirit & love all in balance, bearing in mind there’s an optimal range of tolerance for life to thrive, which actually represents a disequilibrium.

Negative feedback tends to heaven; slow, monochrome, easy, stable. Positive feedback tends to hell; fast, colourful, meaningful, wild. Cooperative use of them both leads to moksha, or enlightenment, thence the milk of blah blah.

People really should spend more time in hell; it’s a great place once you get used to the music & faery lights. Remember 2012?

Vaguely.

Don’t think we have to push too hard on that front.

Oh, you.

Back to the body of the dragon then. Let’s take the view from the core.

You see how the other one is always leaving, with sparks & darkness in its wake if you look really closely. But then it comes back, bringing light. And then it leaves again & the core is sad. And then it comes back with more energy.

Sometimes it leaves for a long time.

Yes, but keep waiting, you’ll find it always comes back, & occasionally there’ll be friends.

I missed all of that.

You’re being too big. I could say, wood, trees. Cloudy overhead conditions often put a damper on things; don’t worry, you know what little orphan Annie says…

Stop right there. No please, I beg of you.

Bobby McFerrin?

It’s funny alright; perhaps a little suki.

They say that small light one holds the key to all of chemistry; follow that & it will all become clear. Well that & all the other characters.

Yeah; you’ve sort of got to do it both together & pay attention to the relationships. Do we have time for the amorous adventures of casanova; I’m not sure we do. Just some fundamentals.

Oxidation is loss & reduction is gain. Oil rig?

If the electron leaves that’s oxidation. The nucleus is cooler now & becoming increasingly passionate & more positively charged.

Oxidation is also the addition of O, or the loss of H.

When the electron returns it’s reduction. Things warm up, there’s energy & light to match the internal solidarity of the nucleus.

Reduction is also the addition of H or the loss of O.

In this universe, it is in the nature of the lighter faster negatively charged one to value its liberty to explore & share the energy & make friends & to ever be drawn towards where the ease of fit is most relaxed or the positive charge is most passionate, depending on the current state of play, & ultimately most intuitively attractive, whilst carrying the spirit of the mass, gravity, loyalty & benevolence of where it’s been & the ultimate value of what it’s off to do, as a resonance in its soul.

From the cradle bars….

Why not indeed. Likewise in this universe, it is in the nature of the heavier, slower one to be saddened by the departure of the light & made more passionate & positively charged by its absence, whilst forever balancing an emotional game of creative confidence about the qualities of the adventures, influences, relationships & returns of the other, that lies beyond the realm of their control, but which they intuitively know is not unaffected by their attitude & courage & the memory that she contains the dragon alive in her heart & he contains her alive within his.

Ah, the spinning room. Keep music evil.

You can say it all with Siouxsie & Adrian. Siouxsie gave her voice; stellar, heroic; immortal. Adrian is so shy, ghostly, but he knows how to keep a party personal.

But everyone says necromancy is bad.

Wicked. Isn’t it just if you misunderstand. Gold, O, Water & Hydrogen.

Careful with that mixture.

I love it already.

Gather your nuts in May; but this is April.

I just want to make sure I have enough to keep me going through the winter.

Looks like plenty to me nutkin.

Don’t call me nutkin; gather nuts when they’re available; they’re different things at different times of year; when you may, in may, whenever it’s nuts. Stop with all your stopping.

On a planetary level, certain things may seem inverted, but it’s a matter of perspective.

Scale is very much a matter of which types of natural interactive forces play the most significant roles. The primary energetic sources for any planet are presented from the historic, present & expected flux from its star, analogously, its inherent kinetic & potential energy & its core. None are infinite, but some can be expected to last longer than others.

On the slow calcified carbonate, essence of earth, level, looking towards infinity, that giants & mountains, rocks, planets & stars appreciate, the larger things become, the greater significance material values & gravity play & the smaller they are, the more influential free energy, spirit & electromagnetism become; where these influences equilibrate is the optimal regulation range for life.

Ah; Earth is the macrocosm.

From a giant’s perspective.

And an elf’s.

Good name. Although I suspect the giants imagine her to be dead.

Only inasmuch as we imagine them to be. They’ll wake up; be patient; you just have to see things from each others’ perspectives.

Well situated in time & space.

Location, location, location.

Not forgetting, location.

Keep it animate.

Small & large life forms are ultimately physically limited by the physico-chemical properties of water; in order to get beyond that, communication, involving the movement of water, is required. Trees are ultimately limited by the extent of their mycorrhizal relationships & the cohesive qualities of water, which is also highly influential at water surfaces, depending on & determining scale. Spores can survive in a dehydrated state for indefinite lengths of time in a state of relative suspended animation, awaiting suitable conditions for proliferation, as can mycobacteria. If we are looking to colonise other planets before we have found a way to inhabit our own in a sustainable manner, bacterial spores would probably be the most expedient way to start & multicellular organisms like us could follow along a couple of billion years later, once we’ve remembered what the point is. Or we could try now, put on spacesuits, claim ownership of the universe & turn it into a dull, square, mechanical warzone. You have been assimilated.

Water is vital & serves as an important illustration of the limitations & tolerances to scale & to energetic intensity & buffering.

If the temperature is too low; animation & transformation is retarded. Ice crystals; ouchy; get out the antifreeze if you want to make a living here, but don’t expect much activity in this state.

Where water is fluid, life is happiest, but the more energetic the water, the more disruptive it is to the hydrophobic chaotic components of the dragon’s tail & the cooler it is, the more freedom the dragon’s tail has to settle into a fluid, non-turbulent state. Too cool & the dragon can’t fly at all. The porridge has to be just right for Goldilocks.

Abracadabra! Lead into Gold.

Who’d be a star, eh?

If the temperature is too high, water & ultimately hydrogen alike flee, everything comes apart goes off elsewhere & transforms. For whatever life form you’re considering; this is the end for that incarnation, although its spirit is retained in the escaping fire, fear not. It may just be a while before it comes back round again in that form, if ever, because it will also be its individuated, unique & evolved self.

You’ve got to get the scale right with this one.

Just as well we’re all here & now.

You might say Uranus/Pluto.

Nice catch. Or Underworld & Sky. Best not use Earth here, people will get so confused.

Will they bollocks. This, here, now, both; all 3; & 2 beyond; 0 peripheral & . central.

Que?

Spicy!

Life has tricks which enable extremes beyond these ranges to be negotiated by certain heroic & intrepid pioneers at the boundaries of history, but they remain sustained & nurtured for their commitment only through the ultimately symbiotic cooperation & tolerance of all life forms to a mutually beneficial environment best suited for the prosperity of all life in all its diversity. Whatever level of organisation excludes or fails to account for all participants a unique life form may be lost & its place taken by something better suited to the challenges imposed. If we are going to challenge our members, we need to show respect for the consequences of our actions & cherish our diversity.

Water playing in the dragon’s realm, entering & leaving the atmosphere also depends on a number of factors including temperature, & the resultant of its attractions to remain where it is, or move elsewhere & these too are affected by mass, scale & local interactions involving animate & seemingly inanimate, hence more physically represented, particular & general vehicles & energetic influences.

This is a good realm to work with weather magic, I mean meteorology.

Not my field.

Could be though, just imagine.

What, ELO? Sounds like BS thinking.

Yeah, but it ends as Wild West Hero.

I get your point. One club for heavy irony & the other for heavy irony.

Electron may come back with a friend; depending on their relationship & whether they bring a nuclear companion, this will either make the whole situation more conducive to life or bring additional energy expressed either kinetically or stored as potential; either fast or slow intertransformation, but always within the realm of conducive time.

There is no noise that has no meaning to someone & it’s the same with pain, discord & any chaotic factor that’s unaccounted for.

Proton may wonder whether electron will bring friends & strange news from another star. Thank you for Augustus, Hermann & you Ray & you Siddhartha. Or whether they’ll be not too dull, but honourable sorts of characters; she generally trusts his tastes & she trusts his, although it’s never quite lifeless. It all seems to work naturally enough.

Although it ionizes into hydroxyl OH- & hydroxonium H3O+ ions, simplified to aqueous protons (H+)aq, according to its ionic content & thereby signifying its pH, water is most comfortable in its neutral state, when O has two dragons; that way it can always see one of them facing it whichever way it turns & the dragons are generally more content that way too. Analogously, an atom is always more stable with paired electrons of complementary spin; & hopefully the reason is now appreciable.

Sounds a bit Mickey Mouse. Cheers again Walt; your soul’s not localised exclusively in your brain though, but at least you’re aware of that now. Maybe time to put the deadhead out of its misery.

The rest is all about mutual respect, trust, love & creativity in how the story evolves.

This is the secret reward. Respect for liberty, originality & cooperation in teams is the key to our values & we can illuminate the way for each other. This makes diversity something to be taken as better than the sum of its parts; likewise genius, originality, respect & liberty.

A good idea is better than democracy & lcd government; that may work from the perspective of a brain that imagines itself hierarchically organised, but if the brain isn’t inclusively open to feedback, which it modulates according to significance, it spends all its time just arguing with itself. If you leave the brain to do its own thing, significance is allowed to change & indicate bias. All you need to do is let the carrot & stick go to play honestly & not mess too hard with it; feel satisfied with a catch & dissatisfied with a drop, but don’t start projecting responsibility elsewhere or you’ll miss the point completely.

This benefit is an essentially mysterious consequence of life in a new plane of symbiosis that cannot be accounted for mathematically; & it comes about as a result of mutual respect, originality, diversity & liberty.

There you go; pioneers & climax; acellular & cellular; organelles & organs; wandering cells & differentiated tissues; organisation at the holistic level. Jacks of all trades & specialists together. Jacks of all trade symbolise changing times; specialists represent a stable basis for symbiosis.

That’s a quantum leap right out of the dark. Perhaps most relevant here would be the unperceived hidden qualities of recreation. The ball is right under your nose.

But if they call the one that leaves negative, surely that’s going to make leaving seem like a bad thing. Only inasmuch as coming back is a good thing. And vice versa.

Quite. Meanwhile, let’s have some respect for the faeries, close the door on chemistry, at least at any subatomic level & know that anything else is a bit like faery erotica; I think there’s already been quite enough of that. We’ve seen infinity, we’ve got the essential image, now it’s time to put it all back together again.

Good luck with that. Faeries & erotica are intimate.

Positive & negative is just a convention; it’s not meant disrespectfully. And if you look more closely you’ll see that big positive one, plus that wee negative one, plus a little je ne sais quoi makes one of these neutrons, which we’ll need to keep the whole thing stable if we’re going to go any further in the story. So neutral or earth takes us into the future;

Somewhat. Or back into the past. Or onto terra firma. Down, at any rate.

The quintessential question is where is life in all of this?

Hang on, what’s that little je ne sais quoi you mentioned?

The quidquid id est? Again; have some common decency. It’s all living.

I see what you mean. And yet the dragon lays itself open for all to see. Shamelessly.

That’s why it has to be your call when you stop.

Indeed & happily, but the dragon loves all forms of play, it always leaves a little bit of mystery to follow if you want.

Really? Can’t you just let it go?

It should be easier for us; when this faery vivisection started they’d just emerged from a Victorian era that had been pretty repressive in some respects. After WW2 ended the way it did, you’d have thought.

I know. Things go from bad to worse for the faeries.

No, actually, that would be, for the primates. Hello! Mushroom.

Well you can tell a lot about how a faery is feeling by its colour.

Its aura?

Don’t start that. Although, let’s keep that one in the bag for exploration later.

Careful with that humour.

The bag is elf fibre, perfect environment for the peaceful & respectful needs of the aura. See how they’re happy & dancing together. Everything’s non-invasive.

Except that’s a lie isn’t it.

Yes, some death was inevitably involved; we’re calling death a bad thing, assuming it to be an intolerably painful process & assuming that the transformation will be in the direction of oppression rather than liberation.

Let’s choose to believe it to have been donated willingly & lovingly, knowing it will all come back around in the end.

Yes, but what end.

A wholesome one. All parties are seeking their harmony & unity.

If you’re really concerned for your faeries give a smell; call it aura if you wish, you primates have to have a visual symbol for everything.

You have to wonder what H is trying to tell us.

As below, so above.

Well, there was Gravity’s Rainbow; that worked for me, at slow junctures hitchhiking around the UK; powerful dose though.

You know me, game for anything.

You’ll eat those words.

Inevitably.

This is what happens when you start using words.

You confuse yourself.

And then go nuclear; fucking hilarious.

No more than what’s right & what’s sinister I suppose; people are calling the dragon sinister & negative, so then language becomes meaningless.

Fortunately, yes; it’s all a matter of mutual respect. Or spinning it both ways. Maybe now would be a good time to rebrand the dragon as conventionally positive; switch which is a positron & which now an electron, & the proton as conventionally negative; & change its name to negaton. Elektra doesn’t need to come into this; the greeks were just looking at the dark & mistaking it for light.

It’s too late now, think of all the things named after her; the point is, negative & positive are defined relative to one another, same as good & bad. The leaving of the light needs to be trusted & more positively valued now, dark magic has had its time as a threat, the truth can no longer be hidden, the sacrificed witches are all coming back & the avarice, ignorance, destructive qualities of genetic preference & exclusive nuclear family values, the demanding intensity & enslaving force of dogma & externalised will needs to be recognised & people need to stop getting too fat in the name of glamour & likewise all the skinny ones & start taking some personal responsibility; don’t they realise they are loved?

It’s not about the receiving; the best way to love yourself is to love others. The big one in the middle needs to know all this elitist selfishness is not going to solve it.

Reverse the polarity captain. Good work Isaac.

With all due respect to the apple, this is not about balls, this is about recreation.

So, start with a dot, turn it into a short line, turn the line into a curve & follow it round; hey presto.

Oh. I thought we could spin it the other way this time. Shouldn’t make any difference which way you tarot it; we’ve got infinite potential. Pfff! Aaaah!

Alchemical allusion over.

Try again. Once upon a time there's a dragon who finds itself all alone, but wants to play, feels a sense of yearning creativity, goes fruitlessly round in circles with it for a while, then comes up with a brilliant bubble, which like everything the dragon imagines, takes immediate physical form. Abracadabra; Compartmentalisation.

Optional biochemical cleanse; a less supersaturated solution.

Woah there faery snowy. Listen to you with the big words. You mean this is about phospholipid bilayers, saponins, terpenoids, sterols, hydrocarbons, fats, oils, waxes, resins & all that; how’s water going to be with this? Sure, the lipids like to play fast & loose, but water likes order.

It’s more fundamental than that. Water loves to share, she’s just very original & can be subtle & extremely passionate, but she knows herself well & is completely on board; just keep your eyes peeled.

I’ll do no such thing; that sounds really painful. I think you mean onions.

No. Open. Water likes to play as much as the next man. If you need order, consider atomic elements, organic molecules, organelles, cells, organs, organisms, organisations, communities & superorganisms, solar systems, galaxies; stop before we have to commit to a number for universes though.

But the word itself commits to the number; there’s one. 0, 1, 2, 3, infinite multiverses or not; it’s all the same. A bit like singularities. A thing which both is & is not simultaneously. Everything’s going on everywhere at once, it’s about where your attention resonates.

? Don’t tell anyone funding theoretical physicists then; if they keep looking up their own arses they will find us; but only if we walk & talk like a dragon.

Same with the atomic vivisectionists.

Let’s not go there.

Agreed.

Should be ok then.

Exactly; life’s too short for coercion. This is all for the enjoyment of water, & not forgetting Titania, & we’ll make membranes semipermeable. The story could be, what water goes through for love.

Oh, I think I’ve heard that one.

Not the way Adrian Borland tells it; people always choose Siouxsie. In between lies the glamour. Beautiful.

The ghost in you. Love is not a ghost.

Well that’s the thing; water is promiscuous; it loves others like itself, together they can do wondrous things & they are highly accommodating towards minerals, ions & other polar people, but water is passionately in love with the head of the dragon. It’s a mutually transformative relationship, but unfortunately, the tail always turns away & flees from the imposition of order, as if it would rather be with the earth, air or anywhere chaotic rather than water. But even if it means navigating a way through the aversive reactions of the dragon’s tail, water would go through hell to get to where its mates are most in need, even if they’re all on the other side of the void.

What void?

Caught me. There is no void. Just the styx & the underworld. Or paradise, or heaven, or westworld; I can never tell which is which. Only kidding. Hell is empty & all the devils are here. Which direction are we spinning again?

This way. Ok. But if one’s on their own, surely the mates will be the ones to come across.

Indeed. It’s about equilibrium; & disequilibrium, as that’s the sign of life; either way it’s sincere, loyal & cares deeply, but beware of Romeo & Juliette, & Orpheus & Eurydice.

That’s water’s story?

If you like Cerberus as a glycerol-1,2, 3-let’s go sort of character. Otherwise, it’s cohesive qualities, occasional phase shifts, oxidative phosphorylation, pH & photolysis.

Nice phlip. I like your style, but apparently membranes don’t flip phlop, & that’s a long one. Don’t let’s get overconfident; nobody wants to hear about nernst equations; the principal actors; all the anionic prisoners; lavender Qali & her green vapours, usually indoors but prepared to go with the flow & help with timings; musical golden canary Nana & limey brickhouse Cal, kept largely outside to send definitive signals upon entry, & halitotic chartreuse Chlorus, always looking to keep things relaxed, including inhibitions. There’s also hot yellow spirit Flora; earthy red volcanic Bromo, a liquid asset just like quicksilver & water herself, cryptic purple or brown eyes associating with catecholamine precursors on Tuesdays in the throat, how Lili red riding hood interferes with deep sea diving or how brilliant Mags is, going everywhere the dragon’s head requires; though I don’t believe Milk Snatcher liked to play.

Oh. I hear she was a big fan of monopoly, careers & risk; maybe dabbled in some fantasy wargaming. It all came out in the end; written all over her.

That’s funny, I bet she cheated.

You’ll get no odds from me. Let the undead rest won’t you? Either way, neither neurophysiology nor biochemistry are going to sell it. And yet we must tell everyone about the Raphe, that’s the second hand, not to mention the reticular formation.

Relax, go back to sleep, Aldous has already written the Doors of Perception, all you need to do is introduce 5HT, D, NA & ACh, the AA 4, Histamine, Eicosanoids….., Adenosine, NO, Tachykinins, Capsaicin, Zingiberene, Piper, Menthol, Kaemphor, Eucalyptus, THC, Bradykinin & Opioids; connect to the hypothalamus & hypophysis, the limbic core, the thalamus, the aqueducts & ventricles, oh, & I suppose the endocrines, pineal, hippocampus & rest of the universe as a whole really. Whoops.

Easy peasy.

Hoh, hoh, hoh! So much for smartarse humour. No wonder you can be sold a cuneas in the liver. Before, after, ok, but never during, best leave water permeating the background, along with the Snow Queen, ballet & opera, ok, oh & improvisational jazz; vital as it may be, let someone else tell it from water’s perspective. Focus now. This is about the George & Dragon; dry style. Nice.

Purge complete.

Optional Bronze smithing workshop.

Oh! To understand how love survives the journey through the underworld, you have to undergo a transplacement of perspective. Essentially an act of compassion, trust & respect, which is what true love would do; O is transported out as spirit within the H. There’s no visible signs of O within the H, & yet their love is there within the heart of the H.

Maybe the Greeks did know what they were doing by making O taboo. I think they probably suffered enough for that. If H is 8 at its spiritual head & X at its material tail marking the spot; the O only appears in all dimensions once you employ imagination.

A big volcano going off on your doorstep will tend to make you look at things with a new perspective.

Atlantis explained then?

Well; it’s not like they haven’t been fucking about; it’s a bit fishy at one end, but maybe they felt everyone needed to forget; trouble is they forgot about the hippocampus. They made it seem like it was all a one way trip. Case anyone got the spirit & the matter back to front. Again. Trick is to use a medusa’s head to stop the clock & wind it backwards; check out the whole & don’t just look for reflections or shadows; they’re all illusory. The key to it is in who they scapegoated & left out of the ring. That’s right, check out the hydra venom & all those wicked bad mutant hybrid animals; bad centaurs like Nessus, & the missus was in on it. Wasn’t she indeed. Bloke was a total peacock. Cos it wouldn’t have been the humans responsible for any sort of fuck up like that; let’s wash the blood off; out I say.

Then think Chiron. Or charoen. What Siddhartha again? It’s just one of those days; hang on, we did hells angels yesterday, but today is Saturday. And when did we do thunderstorms & lightning very very frightening? Daresay we’ll sync up somehow.

And the druids met their rome; not sharing see; elitist fuckers mixed up the spirit & the matter for the sacrifices. Total propaganda fest; mistletoe, kiss under it fine, get to know her intimately, harvest sprigs with golden sickles, go on marvellous adventures together, but don’t get seduced & ingest it, it has particular avian vehicles recruited, who are equipped with the wherewithal to transform what’s not so healthy for primate hearts in the berries, & the leaves are richer in viscotoxin; green enough to be “hemi”-parasitic to oak & apples, slowly poisons the heart; virtually undetectable in the day; wonder who we can use for that. Subtle, looks cute, but wrong sort of bubbles for anyone to take not understanding what they were getting into. Ficus on the other hand has analogous parasitic spirit & you should hear the tales within the tales there; the poor wee wasps. Lots of serotonin though, like prunes; & for primates, it goes back a long, long way that one; becomes quite evident who’s manipulating who when you see what comes out the other end. Nah, only joking; it’s actually an incredibly ancient symbiosis in which everyone wins; as usual. Think enlightenment & the original man eating fruit.

Banyan or Baobab or Black Spiny & badgers.

But, how can you mistrust Getafix?

Well, for a start, Panoramix just said no.

He was a druid right at the late edge of a breton bronze level culture that had spread pie using horses, again max transformation mid age of Gemini, but let’s leave a respectful silence there & recognise the pattern, left finland & hungary as clues to what had been there before, & was letting go, imagining they’d overwritten all the winged bulls, most notable around 3000BC with their cities of joy & compassion & desertification went exponential. The whole bronze thing had been on its way for quite some time & took some time to reemerge afterwards; it’s never really absent, just chthonic & the dragon is always here & now, imagining themselves to be progressing exactly as they ought & sphinxs may resist transforming into iron but all is ultimately overwritten by promethian propaganda & becoming the monster it was fighting. It took place over a while, may seem fishy, but by the time it was over, no-one could remember what the blazes had just occurred; G & U did an honest job.

Times of war. Understood the signs. Easy way to transform the warriors into

Aesculus, Juniper, Ginkgo, Ginseng, Ginger, Turmeric, Glycyrrhiza, who are all forever blowing better bubbles; & all have better virtues & are all far less likely to adopt that martian attitude. Don’t overdo the liquorice, remember what happened to the Bassetts & don’t forget ED50/LD50 = Therapeutic index = careful with internal Viscum.

And if we want to play dead, there are better herbs for that.

Datura, henbane, duboisia, atropa, mandrake, so many solanaceae, that mysterious red stuff from the dinoflagellates; saxitoxin & tetrodotoxin, voodoo, zombies, botulinum, tubocurarine, black widow spider venom, krait venom, cobra venom, coca, papaver, kava, cannabis, nitrous, peppermint, chilli, monkshood (the best ones come from tibet unsurprisingly, just like the best poppies, our wolfsbane, but don’t eat it, or touch it without respect, analogously oleander). Don’t get me started; depends what you want to kill & for how long. Relevant respect & be careful which realm you’re on; think scorpion & halloween. We should all know about fly agarics & Xmas by now; you’d think; cheers Walt; did we have to burn all those books though? Oh yeah; that was then; now we are alive. You have to get the context. Isolated dwellings in appropriate sized communities. Snow, so chimney entry. The old school shaman would feed the reindeer first, get their livers to do all the work & drink the milk themselves. Fobbed everyone else off with the piss. Taking the Nick!

Or you could just vomit the muscarine; it takes care of itself & you that way.

And if you’re concerned about your liver, there’s always silly bum, or any thistle really.

Quite.

Never kill anything in the act of lovemaking or pregnancy. Tough ask.

Because you started with an N. Yes, it’s a curse.

Negative.

Natural.

Most things keep their seasonality pretty evident; if not, it isn’t too hard to do the research if you care. It’s mainly primates do the whole deception thing; the erotic lies in the mystery & the imagination, & the occult olfactory system, the vibe & the charcoal of infinity.

Liquidamber; Sandal; Jasmine; Rose; Spikenard, Frankincense, Amber, Frangipani, Patchouli, Ylang Ylang; we all imagine we remember Mysore.

I’m glad you omitted ambergris.

This is the 21st century; we’re not orcas; cuttlefish would prefer peace.

This the faeries appreciate well, but the primates have forgotten themselves.

Pay attention & if you don’t know what you’re killing, don’t kill it, not unless you’re sure it’s willing enough; it should let you know if it isn’t.

Scared everyone off the shrooms rather than spread the understanding.

Some have always got to learn the hard way about immortality.

This time round nothing stays occult; nobody will need recipe books.

O give over.

Spontaneous similitude.

Daeve!

Monster does walk the winter lake.

Come to think of it, Di wasn’t much fond of Ernie, right enough; he sent the dog ahead, having the olfactory capabilities to make up for his deficiencies; fair enough, but he went way over the limits of decency; she sent in the Scorpion to nip him on the gastrocnemius/calcaneal junction. Can’t dip that in the Styx; gotta hold on to something if you’re scared of going with the flow. The hunter hunted; plain as night.

Check out a few deserts why don’t you? You can see where it’s all been seriously upset.

Time to turn the clock back on that one & try better this time.

That’s a lot of Si quite happy to form very viscous supercooled liquids with O; abundant glass & solid sand; Ozymandias; wonder what we can make with that?

A City of Brass, or Bronze, but don’t mistake that for some sort of metal alloy; this means joy & compassion; it’s not just for primates & it can’t come at the expense of the fair balance.

Unless you think Percy never read the 1001 nights & omitted the alchemical details deliberately, or he simply didn’t notice & just thought heavy legs of stone suited his interpretation better & was after getting some sleep after all that gassing about with the opioids; it was Mary that knew the science & had the imagination for the times.

Head of the local dragon cult; cerberus again; washes everyone clean backwards.

Wagging his heads, pleased to see you.

Dragonspawn above; dragons mouth below; inverted; this dog’s heads are actually it’s tails.

It does get easier on the return journey, I mean next leg.

Which dog; the one that laughed to see such sport?

No silly Sirius;

I’ve lost track of how many mirrors that was.

Now we’re getting somewhere salamanca.

Who’s the cat?

You’re so vain; are you from siam, burma, are you a neutered triskelion, sphinx, the king of cornwall, or wild, like malcolm x or robert from alba.

The fiddle? Er, hello, jaundiced sclera.

Always scapegoat the alchemist.

Go on, blow my mind with magi yams.

Wouldn’t you like to know? How does the song begin?

Don’t bother; Taurus. The whole shebang.

Preggers, don’t you know.

There’s me thinking it was all about antiseptic mouthwash & toothbrushes; how does that connect with wee pocks?

It’s another Jo & the milkmaid joke. You’d get it if you knew about healthcare, medical history, nursery rhymes, Jupiter mythology, milkmaids, astrology, I mean mythical astronomy, cattle husbandry, witchcraft; or enough of any one of them to get it to connect.

So Jo & Mary make Uma Thurman (& Sarah Polley).

It’s parthenogenesis; like aphis.

The ladybird?

Fly away home….

Lovely.

Beautiful.

Seductive.

Passionate.

Cryptic.

Recreation.

Diversity is….

Just more dragon seeds; it’s all about how you tell it, & go see Gilliam about your Munchhausen’s.

Come to think of it, I think my Xanadu’s got mastitis; beneath the Frankie Goes to Hollywood welcoming committee, right down by the Avon, on the borders of the hypophyseal reception; the nesting, positively lactational anoestrous home in the generation glands & the joyous Ox tows in plough which drives the cosmic ejection pumps. From the 32nd artery, head Easton past C&C tyres, stagger over to a good looking golden shred marmalade way & take the green bank for devon; stop near the cacaococoa processor & golden ticket tarka otter factory.

You make it sound so awkward; you’re hardly Sam are you? And there haven’t been otters in that beck for many a year. See if it’s a crescent moon Roald, or go see Anancy, I mean Ariadne, or is it Arachne, of the cat & dog home; watch out for the deep fried squid rings along the way.

C4 yourself.

Careful, remember when derek said, let him have it, chris?

Bravo

Delta, Echo, Foxtrot.

Orses, Mutton, Yourself, Fence (or Dumb), Brick, Vessence, Police, Beauty, The engine (needle in welsh), The Vizier (Orange is passée), Limes, Leather, Sis, Nil, Pee, Relief, Pee, Mo, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, 2, Me, Corruption, Quits, Breakfast, Not (husband), Breezes (Yankees attend).

A. For connective tissues, visual pigments & skin integrity; think hydrophobic carotenoids; too much & you’ll turn orange, so beware of polar bear liver.

B. For Butthead Complex, primarily hydrophilic but localised in liver, eggs, yeasts, legumes & cereals & associating with A nucleosides; 1. Thiamine is a transducer for decarboxylation of alpha keto acids & nuclear base synthesis; 2 yellow riboflavin & 3 nicotinamide play archaic roles in energy homoeostasis & serve as vehicles for reducing potential in biosynthesis; 4. Choline, carnetine & adenine are vital but don’t really fit here; 5. pantothenate enables you to take 1 shampoo into the shower & generate CoA for diverse metabolic interactions; 6. pyridox is for catecholamines, amino acid interconversions & energy homoeostasis; 7. biotin eggs on amino acid metabolism, lipid synthesis & gluconeogenesis; 8. Inositol; polybasic cyclic alcohol generally substituted with 3-6 phosphate groups in intracellular signalling & Cal homoeostasis; 9. Folate, not just in green leafy veg, is transformed to assist with single carbon transfers in nuclear base metabolism, so it’s crucial in early embryogenesis; 12. cobalamin performs synthetic roles in amino & fatty acid synthesis; if you aren’t eating animals, leave a little dirt on your veg from time to time.

C. Fruity ascorbate is the most water soluble, oxidised sacrificially it regenerates reduced iron, & enables strengthening cross linkages in collagen; carnivores make this from glucose, that’s how you can tell we’re not cats, seals or polar bears; well, most of us aren’t. The inuit are allowed their secrets.

D. Cholecalciferol is large & hydrophobic, can be manufactured by photosynthesis in glabrous animals, ultimately from cholesterol, & may also be obtained from cold water ocean fish & dairy products, & with parathormone & calcitonin, contributes to Cal absorption, sequestration, excretion & regulation.

E. Tocopherols are very hydrophobic membrane constituents, sacrificially oxidised, they buffer the membrane lipids against oxidative damage.

K. Phylloquinone & menaquinone are found in leafy green veg or generated by bacteria in the gut & play crucial roles in regulating blood clotting.

P. Bioflavonoids are relatively large & colourful, hydrophilic modulators of connective tissue fluidity & capillary integrity which don’t tend to be absorbed from the gut in the absence of concomitant saponins to help with ferrying.

Q. Ubiquinone & plastoquinone shuttle redox potential across organelle membranes.

Minerals as we go.

Mmmm, blackcurrants.

Gibberish

Gibbous.

The clue is in the C.

What the big C?

Transparency is healthy.

Oh, I see.

Like diamond rather than graphite?

But flux is healthy.

Careful, either way, or you’ll end up down the whirlpool. Think holistically.

I don’t mean BF, eicosoholics, there’s that hubris again; volvox to that.

She sells sea shells.

Where’s the harm in that?

Precisely. Do pay better attention.

I say mastitis, bit lumpy. You know what I’m thinking.

Too much white sugar?

You’ve got a morbid imagination?

Leonurus cardiaca is a pink flowered labiate elf called Motherwort; soft & gentle & good for winding down the tight springs & feeling at home. If this finds you relaxing, imagine Monk’s Pepper, Chasteberry or even Vitex Agnus-castus; which is woodier & bushy with spikes of tiny lavender flowers & likewise, sort out the catecholamine prolactin thing, plus a bit of saponic dragon magic. Once you’ve taken that in; maybe a twist of Fenugreek or Trigonella foenum-graecum which should be readily available on the local material plane; take from the image what resonates & say, Robin’s your niece; or, Maid Marian; your call.

The Greeks just wanted their hero up in the stars, special; he had to die as he was superseded by all the needy mortality & suffering propaganda; can’t blame ‘em, though it brought ‘em kneeling; poor buzzards, like social insects, they earnestly believed they were the be alls & end alls, but forgot their B’s & E’s, then their Ps & Qs. Then they just started stealing nectar from the dragon & minding their own business sat up the top of some mountain range in the clouds somewhere.

The bees are on their knees, so is that karma, or nemesis & hubris.

Why have one concept when you can have 2? 2 is more. 2 is better.

That way you can kill dandruff & shampoo your shoulders.

Benzene beware, you know what follows. Kekule should have stayed in the underworld for the full story.

So, bronze interlude really over?

For now, but they might return & I suspect that particular advert is only going to grow.

Let’s hope so.

The dragon decides to have some dimensions, looks at its tail & thinks, I'm going to pretend this tail belongs to another dragon; that should be good for a laugh; let's see where this goes. The dragon creates & then loses track of time & space in all this black & white pulsating rhythmic tail chasing, swallows himself up, with the tail emerging anew in vibrant colours from inside the body of the dragon, inverting & twisting as it moults its old integument internally & begins again in an endless multidimensional lemniscate.

Now animate your internal MC Escher.

Oh, you already did

Sweet.

The dragon creates recreation & then the whole of the evolutionary history of time & space, beginning with games 101, friends 101, coupling 101, biology 101, scent 101, geology 101, mythology 101, chemistry 101, magic 101, astrology 101, holistic architecture 101, bubbles 101, milk 101, birth 101, maternity 101, conception 101, dancing 101, music 101, cosmology 101, astronomy 101, physics 101, art 101 & maths 101, consciousness 101 & all at the same time, with sleep 101, imagination 101, memory 101 & daydreams 101 for company, & mystery, death & forgetting for regeneration in every revolution, works it into the rhythm naturally, has a go, forgets what they did, threw in language 101, accountancy 101, logic 101, philosophy 101, politics 101, religion 101, technology 101, currency 101 & light 101 as an afterthought to give the unimaginative ones some puzzles to occupy themselves with over the cold spells. Despite what he’s learned about pride 101, vanity 101, loss 101, upset 101, confusion 101, anger 101, pain 101, sadness 101, fear 101, inertia 101, stagnation 101, rage 101, oppression 101, doom 101, violence 101, tragedy 101, he somehow keeps getting up more resolute than ever to find a solution & becomes ever more aware of the love in his heart.

He prefers to let life take care of itself in the meantime, but intervenes whenever he’s aware of the call. It’s all recreation for the dragon.

So, as the dragon does that for a bit, giggling every so often & crying sometimes to remember how much it loved & missed water & the elves, it imagines all sorts of interesting possibilities for faery & elfin play companions; on all scales of bubble, who can play within & amongst each other while the dragon’s skin buds away living clones performing the same rhythmic dance & evolving as they travel through time & space.

Straight from the earliest days, deep & most precious to the dragon's heart is the place where he knows something truly spectacular is going to take place involving his weighty & intense young core that was always fixated with loss, doom & gloom, feared death & pain, & his lightest aetherial, gregarious eternal form, who would each start to spin around each other searching for the place called home in his dreams & he yearned to see where his ghostly winged charge would lead him to fly about the skies.

To make their common dream come true, they had a fair few friends to gather along their spiral spinning arms for the journey they had in mind.

Eleven seemed a good number for a Sunday, John agreed, & white ideal for keeping water out of the picture for the day, & not that darkest Plum was a bad colour for a Saturday, they were a bit concerned about overhead conditions, dodgy lbws, twitchy fingers, & tales about a bowlers’ union & batsmen going down like pearl divers.

(If the abrupt termination above was annoying, try this, & this & turn the volume up)

Maybe Strychnine for that if you want to be heroic, like in the raj, modern tonic water or Cinchona anyway, Burdock, Dandelion or Galium; best bitters, Artemisia….tarragon, absynthe (wormwood, ephesus), mugwort (thujone; men only; epileptics careful; likewise sage & juniper), Yellow gentians….that’s angostura, Zingiber or Curcuma for heat, depending on the seasons; there really is no shortage of bitter herbs, something’s bound to present itself; or hair of the dog.

They could imagine playing all week once they got spinning fast enough.

He sensed an opalescent pearl of perfect buffered temperature, climate & conditions, ideal for his story. Here was paradise, diverse in beauty, genius & originality, radiating fragrance, music, light, electricity, creativity, joy & a melancholy but haunting gravity, vibrating & resonating all across every spectrum wafting over to him, like a long lost love from across the other side of the universe & part of a deeply understood personal story he could only trust would work out somehow if he followed his heart.

A number of revolutions later the dragon reckons cuttlefish might be good to play cricket with; a bit of a genius in the creative department, can’t remember where he got the idea, but astonishes himself this time around. The dragon is particularly fond of this bubble & he ties his favourite one up with a flamboyant twist. The dragon plays an intense game of cricket with the cuttlefish for a few hundred million years, lets them win, but doesn't let them know that, & reckons it might make for better sport on land.

Optional Biological Soap Opera

The dragon really enjoys bathing for long periods of time, & he’d loved it especially in those early hot, passionate years, initially in the dark & instinctively & intuitively, but they soon enjoyed it better with the lights on, although they then found if they weren’t careful & played the game well, then others might be all too willing to take advantage as there were now eyes everywhere. There was a lot of fun & games back then with darklights, strobes & LEDs & some felt there’d been an energy crisis looming. Water prefers it when he’s looking into her eyes, & they can get lost with each other that way sometimes for aeons, but she has an unsettling & exciting relationship with his tail that she finds dark & elusive & somehow she knows it will tear them apart in the end, although she also knows they will always be together.

When the local rag came online, although it was the solution for their present energetic limitations, only the dragon was initially aware; most of the elves seemed to have taken their eyes off the ball. Locally, things really got heated, destructive & toxic for a while & neither side wanted to take responsibility for negotiating a resolution, but Jo & Mary felt they had no other option. The reality was that after some initial local charity work under some oppressive & charged skies, cleaning & buffing the way ahead of the rag, organizing in trinities to form a zone of protection & leaving her characteristic blue kiss & scent, O was always going to seek her freedom & that all parties, H, H2O & O, in a session open to all the faeries & elves, ultimately recognised that each had to take some responsibility, communicate openly & sincerely about their perspectives & issues, & find some common ground upon which they could all agree to cooperate. They all knew it meant more rapid transformations & shorter lives, but in terms of creative potential, everyone understood in their souls that it made sense on one level; they’d all just have to trust in the dragon & in each other & they’d be something bigger than the sum of their parts.

N made an enormous difference by volunteering to help out however he could & he was one of the only ones who O felt calm & at peace with. They had similar shared histories, felt they went way back & they got along really well & spent ages flying kites, as next door neighbours, whilst barely saying a word; they just enjoyed smiling & acknowledging the spirit in each other & for as long as things remained respectful they got along fine.

But when O got above herself or the dragon was feeling aroused & water, as always, reading his signals intuitively, was in some sort of conflab about oceanic or earthy matters & got swept up in all the excitement & tried to intervene, things could get pretty charged. Things could catch fire as the dragonspawn would flash & rumble out clear into the night or whenever the conditions were right. O wow!

There was nothing quite as fresh, cooling & peaceful as how the air felt after one of their white lightning electric acid test parties; the passion between O & N was depleted & transformed.

N & O got to know each other better, not to mention whoever else may have been at the party, the dragon & their close relatives & significant diverse representative faeries, P, S & CO2, & the halide family, often with the assistance of lighter children from the dragon’s tail, & thereby realise themselves, explore their boundaries & gain a sense of participation in an ultimately holistic purpose.

The heavier faeries usually had to find alternative means of transport; employ ocean or terrestrial vehicles or hitch a lift with an aerially skilled pig to get to one of those parties; yet they always felt drawn to them. They inevitably ended up in the underworld, which was their favourite place, so it balanced them right out & gave them something to live for.

There was also the little matter of the elves that mysteriously generated, initially in the oceans & ultimately on the earth & light elves in the sky if circumstances conspired, who could get quite carried away with themselves, or else turn everyone sour & bad tempered, but if the larger elves couldn’t find something constructive for them to do they’d explore their universe chaotically unaware of their own potential & natures. The suitability of the environment; trust in nature; freedom in nurture; a challenge right from the off, or the most natural thing in the world.

O would be respected to make her own decisions & choices, but she should have a care for the effects of the transformations she’d affect on everyone else in her life & remember to cherish her roots, environment & offspring. Those that were getting poisoned would be granted full amnesty & safe transport & certain environments would be dedicated for their safe provision & integration in such a way as to respect their own ancient cultural values, although the boundaries had always to remain fluid & dynamically distributed according to particular suitability; caecum you shall find. All parties understood they would all play their own roles & everyone should act in freedom according to their natures, but be mindful of their mother & father & children, family, community, world & home, past, present & future, try wherever possible to uphold the unspoken disequilibrium ranges as suitable for everyone, not just a select few. Anyone in trouble or who was taking on too much personally should signal for help if they needed it from the others.

The dragon remembered the old days sometimes like they were just yesterday, & likewise, sometimes he could see all the way into the future & back round again. Although he has gills, & can breathe underwater through his skin, as well as by means of a variety of wondrous alternative solutions, he’d always had to discover ingenious solutions for managing the intensely demanding passions of Cal & Polly, who were both loyal & close friends of water, & who often visited as the cryptic red hand gang, who enjoyed hiding in plain sight, but who struggled to relate to the dragon as a whole & who found himself hiding various aspects of his tail & many of the more sensitive faeries & elves in their presence. Everyone would run around hither & yon.

Water was always keen to mediate, & Polly loved to put the kettle on. Actually it was Cal who loved to take it off again. Suki is a crossword I’m going to leave until later. Whenever any of the ions came by water would greet them with a loving hug, & whisk them off with an arm around their shoulders. O, being the apple of her mother & father’s eyes, had intense feelings for the elves & fairies & was passionately keen to build bridges with everyone, but only had the 2 arms to spare herself, & always seemed to be helping someone with something, whether they thought they needed it or not.

Yet Polly, Cal & the dragon’s tail found themselves continuously driving each other wild. The only one more intense in her passions than O was Flora, but Flora just couldn’t help herself or draw herself away from high intensity eye play with Al, unless Al could be otherwise distracted & only Polly really carried the requisite gravitas or authority.

Polly was of one mind with the dragon on many issues & had relationships with many of the elves & faeries who resonated with his opinions, many of whom held values that they felt conflicted with Cal, but between Cal & Polly & all the faeries & elves, they reckoned they’d manage to find a way.

The dragon gave his personal guarantee that he’d muster faeries & elves to deal with any overspill. Although Cal accepted their passionate actions & animal magnetism could lead to severe reactions from the dragon’s tail, she was only there to help put a brake on Polly’s spinning, since all they made times so intense for each other, no-one felt it should be necessary for the dragon, Polly or Cal to have to exclude each other completely & they determined to always remain in clear open communication, knowing well the vulnerabilities of the other & choosing instead to focus primarily on how they could best cooperate for the common good. Polly completely understood as she had a similar relationship with the tail & whenever she caught sight of it she’d be off after it. Since the head & the tail were both part of the dragon, they’d employed this game for locomotion since the very beginning; except that now, we were dealing with a larger macrocosm & one which revealed a greater diversity of manifest characters, all playing the different roles of the dragon. The more rich & diverse it got, the more the dragon enjoyed the play, until the point he became so confused he had to let it go & try again. Cell signalling, persistent synaptic plasticity; here we go! Yee Har!

Out of your minds.

They formed a band called Fairy Liquid & it went massive, but caused a lot of problems, some related to the misspelling.

The issues with managing overspills from Polly & Cal’s voracious passions were often resolved through fixed relationships made directly with the representative of the dragon’s head, in this case Polly or involved a free earth spirit the dragon conjured from his tail with the committed assistance of O, in this case CO2. C is the diamond or graphite & the tail is essentially hydrocarbon.

Watch out for benzene, naphthalene & anthracene though.

O

Fuck, yeah. Imagination only. Phew!

F had insatiable apatites & would sometimes step in & strengthen some of the relationships, add a little bite, with a little help from the ameloblasts & some classy tetraterpenoids, but she was very rarely away from her soulmate Al; things could get quite messy with those two about, particularly when it came to the more excitable of the catecholamine messengers.

The primary purine potential kinetic police, GTP & ATP would usually keep an eye on things (whilst U would be off messing with suki & C generally playing with the dragon’s tail), but Pertussis & Cholera added another whole level of confusion when they arrived on the scene, one endlessly evacuating the water through bilge pump operations, the other whooping like a brave when they were mobilised. Coleus forskohlii invariably advocated positive action but by contrast, the papavers insisted on peaceful negotiations, & when the MX family took an interest there was always plenty of drink to be taken. Theobroma liked to keep her water on board & make things feel warm, calm, relaxed & potentially spicy; Theophylla liked to relax the airways, soothe hypersensitivity & let go of some water; Caffea also liked to liberate water, relax the vessels & get the heart racing & awake. Among their relatives Comfrey liked to soothe & mobilise healing operations; Blowfly maggots might also help clean things out & although lots of animals got on like a burning bush with allantoin, the primates had to lick their wounds to get a similar response. We can return for auxins, serotonin, melatonin, aromatic amino acids & their progeny when the season is appropriate.

OOOTTAFVGVAH! Cried the cranials, then the thoracics ganged together as lions, responded in unison; the lumbosacral gang in the underworld were perplexed. What you gonna call us then? said the sudoriferous ones.

We’re not unsympathetic, but let’s face it, you’re muscarinic aren’t you?

The modern alphas sent the news skipping one way, & returned rapidly with a response the other, but archaic C-fibres, who were aware of many modalities & much more magically motivated, couldn’t wait to subvert all Dale’s rules. The glia just smiled knowingly, but under the surface of the water the swanns paddled furiously & the limbic cortex found all the olfactory input rather humorous & couldn’t wait to spread the joke to hippocampus. Careful, said raging glans; it’s not oak paste, we’re not looking to tan anyone’s hide, it’s marzipan or frangipani.

Looking away from tainted love, Gelsemium suggested a seductive yellow perfume.

Prussic, explained Prunus coolly & sloely, great for pertussis, meaningless irritation & all forms of high energy futile cycling, analogous to BAT in neonates or thyroid hormones, uncouple those ideas; spin those rotenoids, fishy, speak to the red & say Sayonara Mr Laurel.

Not now Hermes, have a turquoise on this, bom! we’ve more on our plates than zodiacs.

Although unlike him temperamentally & in his relationship choices, like his elder brother B, & his colourful 2nd cousins Lili & Nana & 1st cousins, Beryl the menace & Mags the enlightened, Al was quite a lightweight & when he wasn’t with Flora often became intensely passionate & wore a white shell suit provided by O hiding the depth of his emotional feeling.

The Plum chapter of the local hell’s angels would often gate crash, just before midnight to get a taste of water’s hospitality, & enjoyed turning the volume right up & messing around with everyone’s signals, talking incessantly about their fast track metal pigs to the black hole at the end of the road, & constantly asking everyone, what’s the time Mr Wolf? They found themselves frequently incarcerated for the good of everyone involved, but they played the game & ran rings around the minds of their captors as they served their time & performed their community service with gleaming white smiles & without breaking sweat.

A bit simple & soft at heart if truth be told, but loyal to the core about something; they used to perform an old, now you see me, now you don’t, double act with Paul Daniels & Innocence the faery that could keep the crowds entertained for years & that was a particular favourite of the dragon when he later visited the theatre, although he far preferred the humour in the original. The majority of elves stayed well away for fear it would make them heavy, dull & soft, risk incarceration or disappear completely.

Their spiritual leader, Plemmy, was renowned for how fast he could spin through & out the other side of the void without touching the sides on re-entry. Sometimes he’d even catch up with himself going faster in the opposite direction.

They disliked politics, believed themselves anarchic, & who’s to say they weren’t, yet found themselves doomed to playing a political game, so that’s how Plemmy came by his name, created the Ace of Spades, & the direction in which they all rode their pigs was polar north. Or was it polar south? The heavy end anyway, which generally meant over the nearest cliff, down & towards the centre.

Night or day, some of the lighter earthbound visual communication specialists, Blue CB12, Violet Man or Black Shiner (aka Crameleon for her beautiful range of forest green, canary yellow & vibrant orange costume changes) always seemed to know exactly where they were going, & although they participated in a highly secretive occult coven & enjoyed being in the dark underworld, they could all perform dazzling colour shifts signalling the level of their passion. Although they were initially naturally quite shy & tended to hang out in dark, remote places in sustainably balanced populations away from too much transformative O, light, heat or water, everything was in flux & every so often they were exposed. Their colours tended to give them away somewhat & some of them found themselves revelling in the limelight & becoming quite renowned. Some of those who were more gregarious & amenable to sustaining life formed relationships with organic faeries in arrangements usually coordinated by N. The bravest among them was a faery called Red Fe; he was prepared to go into battle with the dragon & had faith he’d come out ok the other side; he was sure he’d been through this before; he’d dreamed it, & knew his purpose when it presented itself to him.

The faery queen liked to keep her distance from material interference & tended to dazzle everyone with her violet costumes & white teeth; but she’d could be subtle & tender, & no less fond of humour than her other half; she’d reveal the full spectrum to anyone who knew how to entertain her with compassion & spirit, & whilst everyone found her delightful & enchanting, no-one could quite take her in. When issues of brightness & mass vs strength come into play; she’s the one, but she generally prefers to delegate, & has shocks in store for anyone taking the piss; blinding magic. Yet she found herself becoming increasingly popular & really enjoys blowing people away with her natural charm.

When the heavy gang needed directions, they had no idea about the pineal, much as their ravens kept pecking them just there. Getting directions from Red Fe, was like getting blood from a stone. CB12 always seemed so blue & was so rarely to be found. They suspected they couldn’t trust yellow belly nasty Nick at all; he knew where he was going but, just always seemed so hypersensitive, so if they’d forgotten the prearranged signal with Innocence, they’d often have to go direct to the dragon, who had an uncanny intuition with directions, but who’d usually pretend he was nowhere to be found; hiding behind or just above them usually, & none of the parties was ever quite sure who was supposed to be bodyguarding whom from who when it got like that.

It invariably turns out a gas.

You’d probably have to ask Innocence to get a more objective perspective.

The secret to the angels’ malleability lay in the fact that they loved to get absolutely blotto, paint everything black, turn day into night, lose all track of time & crash out together in a big scrap heap. They’d wake up somewhere on the next circuit having blacked out completely, with the show up & running, & virtually no idea what had taken place in the interim. Meanwhile, the dragon who’d been standing in for them, had been relishing the arrival of this moment. A quick wink to Innocence & they were ready to rock & roll, all memory intact, as far as they could tell, but never quite sure which direction they were facing, although they always knew which way was down & hence which way was up.

Cal & the dragon could become transfixed with each other for hours just staring at each other head on & enjoying each other intensely, spinning gently round in coordinated rings, singing an old nursery rhyme duet, & as soon as they changed from that attitude & Cal & the tail noticed each other it would be pandemonium; but the dragon & Cal discovered in the process that they’d found a really good way to move & change character in a moment.

In truth, they were fascinated; the dragon & the intense brick red dwarf just know they both mean something very important to the other. Weighty though the challenge was, they organised & pulled towards a common goal.

Cal is reminding the dragon that he once played this very same game with his own tail. The dragon remembers that Cal is there to help turn that spinning into some significant material rather than remain eternally kinetic & seemingly meaningless. Rumplestiltskin! he cries; or Eureka, if you’d prefer. Close, but no havana, quips Groucho.

The dragon found it often initially confusing with the signals & extremely burdensome to carry Cal & Polly & found his skeleton dragged down to the bottom of the ocean, where it might have to sleep for a long time before gathering the energy to try again. But between them they were all committed to making it work & Cal played no small part in assisting them generate a diversity of solutions to assist in a plethora of ways. It was a beautiful, if challenging process & infinitely creative once they found their rhythm.

The dragon loves slithering around in the moisture as long as he could be with water & as soon as he ventured onto land he’d extend his scouts to find her. Mostly he loves being in the borders between & straddling the different phases of matter. He lichs it where the air is clean & fresh, loves basking in the glow with the algae, absorbed a lot from the sponges then took in a lot more from the medusae, anemones & hydra; they’d often throw parties with incredible light shows & again, Polly & Cal were only too happy to oblige in a game of hide & seek.

Peep-O.

Boo! He’d say

No, once it’s gone on too long you’ve made a right booboo; think it through; people might think you’re insulting them.

He settled in particularly well with the dazzlingly entertaining play of the corals, who’d built incredible cities through their recreation with Cal where the elves loved to gather for sport.

In the summer he liked to associate with a lot of ancient friends from way back in the days right at the start of the O crisis, bask in the sun right out in the middle of the ocean surface, put out a big red towel & see if anyone would be crazy enough to paralyse themselves by messing with it. Eventually a bed of other elves concentrated that particular red in their sieves & used it to teach primates which months had r in them, who should not be stepped on inadvertently & how to generate zombies in Haiti.

He also loves to frollic along the shore & breathe the air, play cricket on the beach with the crabs,

go to moonlight light shows with the psychedelic worms & lose himself completely with the horseshoe crabs.

He particularly enjoyed imagining a bit of alchemy with the plants & giving them ways to stay in touch with the animals, fungi & smaller elves, so they could all help each other out. He fancied popping up unexpectedly in the autumn, shouting, freedom! & freaking out the sheep, making sure the cereals stayed in line & winter gifts & frolics with reindeer.

Grazing on the kelp with the seahorses, who he cherished & adored particularly, he imagined playing peter pan with axolotls, cricket with sea otters & teasing lonely primates with the mermaids. Don’t mind me, says kelp.

He really enjoyed delving into the dark with glow worms & working on cracking the enigma code with fireflies. And those late autumn displays. Spectacular!

He liked to go on occasional covert operations to liberate faery prisoners from underground captivity & go on seasonal retreat into the arid wilderness, test himself & hang out with the really lonely ones, so he could gift them magical powers, & he takes water within him in his heart wherever he goes.

He thought up a classic game with the scarabs, laughed themselves silly over that one, & other boisterous games with the stag-beetles, & no less enjoyed, as more of a solitary thing, slipping around & fluttering with the butterflies, a little erotica with the damselflies & lacewings, underwater escapades & a brief aerial tryst with mayflies, gading about with gadflies, a quick in & out with the mosquitoes & horseflies, hovering with the hoverflies, dragoning with the dragonflies, ooh, we could go massive with that one, & mucking around in shit with the bluebottles, but nothing thrilled him quite as much, after all that bouncing with the grasshoppers & their crispy relatives, as the idea of some team game or other involving bats at twilight, they could gather with their arms around each other, initially as a pair, gathering friends & calling, who wants to play…. & he had high hopes for them all.

He fancied skipping with the mudskippers & he imagines lots & lots of friends quite like him, but not exactly, as there’s only one of him, & he could play cricket with all of them. He considered long & hard whether chameleons might enjoy it, imagines cruising through time & space with turtles, gliding through the trees with someone light very like himself, flying at altitude with swifts in the aether, haunting temples with martlets, hunting by moonlight with owls & aye-ayes, singing & seriously partying with psychedelic frogs, conversing with corvids & psittaciformes, & running wild through the grass with the big birds, shouting look at me!, & then playing hide & seek; the thrill of the wind with the cheetahs, reminiscing about old times with the proboscid foresters, delivering papaya by unicorn, hunting with snow leopards in the high himalayas, soaring with condors & having a right old laugh with the platypus, kakapo, kea & spiny echidna.

Magnetic wash cleaned & dry.

Either way, a nap is long overdue, the dragon is pleased with its game & believes itself to have come up with some quite scintillating material, loves all its new friends; & dozes off dreaming about a little creative volcanic activity & something waterproof to keep the ocean in, so the elves can bring it with them when they move. The dragon really likes to sleep, dream & imagine things, but not as much as it likes to play.

Next thing the earth dragon knows she's getting prodded rudely awake by a nightmare about a big rock that hit her square in her Ouranus & made her projectile vomit magic soup quite violently for quite some time afterwards, some of which made its way off on its own adventures, & the rest sought it’s fortune wherever it landed. She valiantly kept playing at an exponentially determined rate, despite the debilitating effects of the impact. However, by the time her insides settle & she’s had some very special Toba dark roast to help her out of her delirium & fully with it the next morning, there’s all sorts going on. The elves are singing & dancing & playing gloriously in the tropical glades.

Some man of the woods has come across a dragon scale, which the dragon had dreamed of shedding accidentally on purpose, & he’d only decided to eat it. Meanwhile, at the source of the Congo, Duryodhana awakens...

The dragon licks her lips. Well, the primate thought he was eating it; it was so beautiful & enchanting, but she ate him & he thereby discovers the dragon as he sheds her old skin.

Brilliant, says the earth dragon, putih, ungu, indigo, biru, hijau, kuning, orange, merah, coklat, hitam, emas; who now found himself adorned with multicoloured feathers, & immediately exploded in fits of joyous avian laughter. Owls were woken up rudely, but hooted with delight; twit, said one, who? said another, let’s go back to sleep, already am, but the mynahs couldn’t wait to tell their friends.

Stone me, said Keith, I’ll get rolling on that, soon as I, & all the corvids set off to spread the joke, fly straight, with perfection, the big ones sang in their deep porcine patois, something better change, we are the meninblack, giggled Dave, then, take it Hugh, sang JJ; Indian summer, sang Jim, Gaia, sang Lovelock, I’m bold as love chorussed Jimi; never trust a hippie, it was on the good ship venus; no need for that John, stop listening to Malcolm & do it your way, like Sid; just remember your orange roots & don’t worry about the hello goodbye; career opportunist, straight to hell, strummed Joe & Mick, ah, but death is a star. Nobody paid any attention to the Outsiders, & you might have thought the Sound was quite a marketable name, but Ade & Colvin felt like fireworks was the way to spread the love, except for the Manor Park gig with the drongo which has been expunged from recorded history. We were there though; don’t forget something like that. Well spotted Wit.

Budgerigars thought a spot of drumming sounded excellent & mobilised in squadrons to get the message out; kookaburras & kingfishers laughed sarcastically at first, then actually thought it was genius & the funniest joke in the world, swallows left the happy prince out of it & kept asking each other how fast they were going with their coconuts, Patsy; ducks & drakes quacked knowingly amongst themselves, fully aware of their comic role in the game, but parrots couldn’t help but repeat the joke over & over again, psst, they’d start, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more; the Norwegian blues killed themselves with laughter; Fred, Brian, Geoffrey & Sachin felt it tougher than anyone, pitches were all uncovered back then & they had to use rhubarb, but the albatross wasn’t quite as impressed, he preferred the sailor’s song & took off into the winds heading for Xanadu & his soulmate across the ocean. Galahead the cockatoo was overjoyed & raved about like it was the best thing he’d ever heard & particularly liked the one about the primates called Bruce, & obviously the macaws couldn’t contain their glee down at the clay dip, jungle fowl started singing extracts from last train to clarksville, morning, noon & night; lyrebirds & quetzals found it hilarious; blimey mate; when was the last time you looked in a mirror? they sang. Took you long enough to catch on; the larch, duh, Ginkgo biloba, classify that spanish inquisition, loves H-Bombs, release the balloons. Pop, went the weasel.

Widdershins now; I've been waiting for this:

So the dragon says to the elf, let’s play a game.....

The elf goes back to her primate community with news about the dragon & the game, which immediately upsets the ruler who has styled himself Chief I & thinks he's something very special. He suspects the dragon is a threat to his power, which he doesn't trust to share with anyone.

King Cerebral Cortex likes to grow; he likes being on top of things & separating things apart with nice clean straight lines; he likes dividing into 2s & then into 2s again, pretty much like the dragon, but unlike the dragon he often forgets something about his walls after making them, because he likes to keep fixed, consistent order, quite unlike the dragon. So when things become a little muddled sitting up up there on his precarious perch he finds it a bit disturbing, & he struggles to notice his lines are really circular & his position is becoming ever more precarious as he climbs ever higher.

He likes to call some things good, like him, though obviously none quite so good as him, some evil, unlike him, enjoys keeping tabs on the things that are important to him & believes being in control all of the time is the way a proper clockwork universe should operate. Emperor Brain likes dominating, calling things his, taking credit for everything, including consciousness (cogito ergo sum), memory (mine), imagination (would you believe it?) & awareness (it’s the enlightenment boys & girls) & really doesn't want to die or suffer pain.

Brain feels only antipathy towards the dragon, who he doesn't recognise at all & certainly doesn't accept that he should be subordinate to something that looks like a hairy bacterium to him. He reckons the world should be basically like him; & although it is, he doesn't like the idea of elves all over the place, thinking for themselves, deconstructing his walls & disrespecting his boundary markers, or of going to sleep & relinquishing command in case the unruly elves take over. He's also a bit annoyed that the news was brought by some insubordinate claiming to be an elf & that the dragon didn't come & visit him directly.

At first he doesn't want anyone to believe in dragons, or elves, let alone faeries, then after being presented with incontrovertible evidence, decides he wants all the magical dragon material for himself. So Brain starts up a propaganda campaign against the dragon, who this time round gets no sleep with all the sabre rattling, & by the time the dragon turns up to play the spring after, primates are going;

It poisoned one of my lands completely, all that’s there now are scorpions, other arachnids, venomous snakes & the most deadly, seductive & passionate of flamboyant flora; now it’s somewhere the hunter becomes the hunted;

Flew off with one of my unicorns, took it by the thigh, straight out of the undergrowth into a clearing in my woods, then like an arrow off away into the sky; all happened so fast I barely had time to perceive it;

The giant yeti threw my most insubordinate goat by its knee off my tallest mountain into the sea using a blackthorn club, & 3 seahorses washed in on the tide & lay there with their tails curled round into their bellies; the whole thing uprooted one my oldest trees, an ash, or rowan, looks like some sort of sinister fungus;

Well, your tsunami brought me a flash flood, which drowned a pair of my slaves on their return journey to the well, & production at the chocolate factory had to be halted, because the milk turned sour & two of the maids went skating & one axeled the other in the shins, just under the knee, but I suppose that’s human nature;

The pelican slow cooked my pedicure fish alive, right in there with it, chasing it round & round in the water in a figure of 8, faster & faster, transforming into each other & back again for 3 days until I couldn’t tell which was which. Weeping ecstatically & blowing steam, until it all became a foggy blur, seemed to take serene joy from the pain, completely bloodless, yet I was sure there’d been fire & blood to clean up, so weird; is that vinegar & mandrake or roast duck with brimstone I smell, maybe it was all a dream or deja vu. Wow!

At the spring meeting, it was Queen Oestre who declared that there would be no cricket match with the dragon this year as things were too serious & she had elfin infiltrators among her pretty maids, which she was thinking of tarmacing over. So events continued:

I saw it come out of the little fluffy clouds & take a feisty old ram, got its horns tangled up in barbed wire having a right old bounce off that skyscraper at that dragon; they went off together; I can only see one winner there;

Heard it took one of my cattle, milked it dry, then strangled it, wrapping its duplex coils ever tighter around the neck like a fiery bandana & shouting Yee Har! before milking it dry, swallowing it whole & slinking off into the shadows;

Oh, I’m gobsmacked; witnessed nothing myself, you understand, but it knocked down two walls in my language lab, melted two of my swords, burned two of my books; two of my, my, my, dear mynahs escaped & I didn’t discover until later one of my crosswords had been done;

Doom, I tell you; the wyrm came onto the shore, scooped up a brace of my crustaceans by milky moonlight, grotesque tumorous things they were; gigantic big one & a wee one; set them against each other in a ring, howling like a wolf, fight, fight, fight, right there in my home like some lunatic;

I swear I saw a bat in Whitby turn into a dirty dark gypsy from Transylvania, all smelling of fishy, dancing with my maiden daughter Lily in my temple & I’d swear they had relations; I suspect her purity’s been tainted now, maybe I should burn her as there’s some weird black microdots on the rye, not only that, I’d swear he pissed on my apples & pears, while singing a song & my vines are humming;

Funny you should say that, some plonker spilt my beer, got drunk & staggered about trampling my barley, schloshing my blackberries & juniper, then flew off haphazardly back home with one of my pigeons; now I just see mushrooms popping up in my field;

Well, it didn’t look like anything to me, but I sense this magnetic & mysterious fascination with caves & hidden treasure.

The dragon takes whatever form the play requires as the year progresses & it’s attitude is all about respect; it can starve itself for a while, but that ultimately only makes it all the more ravenous when the time comes to transform the elves, faeries & the odd primate; it has modest appetites though & can actually exist on pure aether if it has to, at least as long as it gets enough sleep over the winter & doesn’t get rudely awakened by avaricious treasure hunters.

In the hottest part of the summer, on the hottest day of the year, at the hottest time of day, Brain loses his best lion to the dragon in an attack of sunstroke while out at play chasing 293; ro...says the lion,....or…..; it appeared like a fiery crown had descended very deliberately & slowly, like a bolt from the blue, & frazzled his unprotected dry mane. Brain takes this as a personal insult & the dragon glows magnanimously, sprinkles some water on the lion & agrees to a cricket match the next spring, with life & death stakes.

Some of the elves are completely nonplussed, some are pretty chilled & unconcerned, others are crying hysterically, some start laughing but then see the Emperor is organising the construction of something horrifying made of dark bloodstone, is weaving incantations & has the dragon enslaved in chains & whips him brutally because he doesn't get the joke & thinks they're all laughing at him.

Fe is understandably nervous, but blushes & feels honoured at getting a starring role, so he can hardly contain his excitement & melts, but the elves as a whole are pretty upset with this development, petition the dragon & plead for a direct political intervention.

You know Red Fe means death for us & could mean death for you, they chorused, why on earth did you teach egghead about that?

The dragon gave them a hug & reminded them about the game, & even though they might be operating independently & have different assignments, not give anything away to King Brain, otherwise it would spoil the surprise. Red Fe said he didn't mind playing 12th man for the primates, he just hoped his siblings & all the elves would understand.

Elfin & faery numbers dwindled in the onslaught of the warm ups, but King Brain had to be allowed to win; the iron champion was named George after his mother, & was an all action archetype of relentless determination & bloodthirsty destruction; godhead of warfare, conflict, indiscriminate violence, tyranny, tuesdays, acting without consideration, bollocks & all things male; it had to win at all costs & would never accept defeat.

That's mine, this is mine, said King Brain as he sat on his Arian chariot pissing on everything within range, acknowledging the adulation of the lower castes of primates, who erected phallic monuments to their new iron based philosophy wherever they went. The more the elves protested, the more the primates misunderstood; some even tried to sell them rights & money & land & shiny things & all the glamour King Brain's people now believed belonged to them & made them important & successful. The primates knew they were right because they’d won every game so far.

The dragon could communicate in all languages, having invented all of them, but most elves preferred to use faeries as messengers, dancing around & playing cricket within & between the elves. It was only the primates who seemed to need everything to be translated into visual or linguistic symbols, being particularly poor at perceiving elves & fairies directly, one of the reasons being they had very rudimentary olfactory development, didn’t really trust their imaginations & could rarely find proof of meaningful elvish communication or sophistication.

They tended to perceive molecules & morbid anatomy as visual snapshots, & felt an understandable taboo about time travel, at least until the times of krishna, who does get about a bit & is apparently great mates with solomon, odin & nameless other absent friends who’ll turn up if you call them, so long as you’re respectful & sincere & keep your wits about you.

Nevertheless, perceive them or not, the primates enjoyed transforming, killing & enslaving elves & faeries in factories manufacturing muzak, chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals & life based foodstuffs, not to mention all the unmentionable shit, which they could then claim ownership of & convert into old Nick, since as no-one sees the faeries as still being alive King Brain could claim they never existed in the first place. King Brain found, the more patter he employed, the more the primates took their eye of the ball. They just couldn’t seem to help themselves & he just couldn’t seem to help taking advantage.

Those that communicated via faery or elf enjoyed developing relationships based on trust & mutual respect & found the whole notion of possession & will to win quite disconcerting; even Nasty Nick took up stealing & lying, found himself scapegoated & kept trying to visit Innocence to clear his name; everyone lost their ways in paranoia for a while there.

Shiny Sol; M; PC Moneypenny, who was beauty & glowing care personified, but didn’t feel she should rank 3rd in the hero’s affections, behind some ultrasecret quicksilver mystery agent called Titania & some glamourous Pussy Galore or other, could become envious, acerbic, hot, sour, develop verdigris & somehow our hero would always know & help her return to equilibrium with complete dignity & a joke; Red Fe generally played the macho villain, but could switch sides to imperial knight depending on the political situation.

Agents J & S, both gassy giants who reckoned themselves big stars, had flatulence & glamour issues & couldn’t agree over who did better comedy & who did better tragedy, who had the best poker face, who had the best timing, who was better at appearing tiny & invisible, who should do the deadpan gallows humour, who the killer punchlines, who open & who observe first ball, who should wear white & represent liberation, argued about whether magpies were good or evil then say how enlightening & suitable for children blue peter was & laugh about who was gonna chop the bollocks off the other & say call me daddy when no-one was watching. Crazy scientist Rude U, Wacky Psychic Agent Unity, codename Deadly Big C & even Agent Tina, though if you looked closely Tina Sterling seemed to play 95% of the roles, opinions waxed & waned as to the quality.

They could all get drawn into the conspiracy, any involvement from Darkstar & Persephone was barely perceptible & shadowy, reclassified as classified & the dragon has to sort things out, but Q ends up spinning & it takes her a while to settle down there after all her favourite white coats, bats, gloves, balls & pads get destroyed near the start just for comic relief.

Meanwhile the dragon's been enjoying all the games, in between snoozes & parties with the cuttlefish & orcas, but reckons it's all getting a bit grey, ugly, square & monocultural & it's about time to go in to bat for the elves.

The dragon goes in regulation size, but lets out a puff of smoke & puts on a really scary macho face, which he reckons might put off Lord Humpty's XI.

Although they're not really quite sure what they're seeing, the primates all boo & for a moment the dragon thinks they’re trying to scare him. King Brain is sat impatiently erect in his purple crown, on his regal gold deck chair in the private members stand; he reaches around & raises the flag to signal Lord Humpty to bring on his iron champion, clattering down the hill, off the full run.

The primates all cheer. Needless to say, he doesn't pay any attention to the dragon's attempt at a scary macho face, with the long neck oscillating around mesmerically in a figure of 8, but not wearing a helmet, George ruthlessly spies an opportunity & gets his clockwork synchronised.

It's a beamer first up, but the dragon is trying so hard not to laugh at the noise & sight of the red mechanical man he forgets to watch the ball that hits him square between the eyes, arguably in front of the stumps. The dragon falls down, still writhing a bit & knocking off a bail with his tail as he collapses to the ground. King Brain is convinced & the primates reckon he's a goner.

Howzat, clangs George, & after anguished cries of hysterical disbelief from the elves at the boundary's edge & extensive debate & attempts at reason from the umpire, it's starting to get dark, so up goes the finger & the dragon, who's still being dead, has to go so that everyone else can get back to playing.

The dragon winks to the elves just to remind them & they carry the dragon off the square & over the boundary edge in mourning. The primates claim victory once more & eagerly lay into the dragon's body, plundering it for riches, cutting out the tongue.

King Brain keeps all the dragon feathers for himself, but unnoticed, one of the elves happens upon the dragon's tongue & gets in touch with Polly & Cal, asks them to bring water & bucket without a hole in it, thank you dear Liza, & discovers a chai brewed from it can help the primates understand the dragon & all her offspring, so he shares it with them & although some are terrified by the experience, others are inspired to support the dragon & join the elves.

Breaking down the dragon's body is an increasingly messy & toxic process; bringing fire & local devastation, but through diligent use of Google Maps a new ground is found each year for the rematch.

Things carry on this way annually with the primate team defeating the elves every time. The dragon returns, appearing ever more scarred & mutilated, plays with more determination, a bit more aggressively & with better confidence on each successive occasion, but King Brain & Iron George always seemed to come up with a new advance, upgrade, ploy or tactic to kill the dragon just in time, claim another victory & reap the spoils.

Over the years the elves get better with each successive match & even enjoy very occasional victories, but the primates argued that these took place at times of civil war, when they had limited resources to spare for things like cricket, George wasn't available & no-one was paying attention, so they didn't really count & all memories of those games are covered in poppies & forget-me-nots now.

The dragon prefers to spend winters on holiday in the underworld, mainly dreaming & imagining what the match will be like next time round. Each year the dragon comes back essentially rejuvenated & better equipped; but each year he seems less popular than ever, & in accordance with Brain's propaganda, the dragon is being blamed for everything; even those that feel an appropriate sense of awe & respect are unconvinced the story is going to have a happy ending. Each year George comes back with added modifications & extra shiny weaponry manned by an increasing diversity of enslaved, oppressed & genetically modified faeries including Queen Titania herself; eventually he gets laser vision; the red style.

As this keeps happening; King Brain can't figure out whether the dragon was immortal & it was the same dragon & he just saw it evolving & behaving slightly differently each time, or whether it was indeed many dragons & this problem haunts him terribly, making him feel very melancholic, especially with the dragon's soulful, plaintiff banshee music going on in the background, just perceptible amongst the din of the iron warriors & their red paint.

The elves find themselves breaking into fits of tears spontaneously, increasingly mistrusted as mischievous, & failing to understand why the primates couldn't just loosen up, be natural & share everything as & when, the way they did, trying to escape the noise & mourning their mother's terrible desperate developments in taste on an increasingly regular basis. Thick, layered greasepaint makeup that would have been laughable, had it not been so tragic, cosmetic surgery that kept having complications; obscenely voluminous & hastily organised silicone implants, including a hideously scarring cowboy job in Xanadu, where there were once remarkably nutritious natural bubbles, & an extremely prejudicial pubic shaving regime that imagined itself somehow unrelated to paedophilia, with oil palm fuelling the fires of destruction, as all the soil washed down into the ocean.

But the dragon reminds them who they are & how they're all related & reassures them that if they just act naturally, be themselves & represent their true natures, everything will go according to plan. The elves understand, but the primates remain largely unconvinced & are understandably confused. King Brain's propaganda had become deeply ingrained & virtually none of them trusted the dragon any more, making the dragon adopt some terrifying guises in the understanding that the primates would each perceive it in a way that reflected their own passion.

It gets to the stage where the primates are cross breeding the elves & the faeries, & they are pretty much all enslaved, except for the really wild ones, who have had to develop increasingly cryptic & creative subversive skills to escape King Brain's iron warriors & for them the only game left around is orcas v cuttlefish, where the orcas still appear to be struggling with their understanding of the laws, are a bit too boisterous for the sensibilities of the cuttlefish & emotions are always a little heated. For one reason or another, the elves can't raise a team & we're down to the very last remaining cricket pitch....

With all the elven losses, & sick of King Brain telling them what to do all the time, eleven of the primates find themselves increasingly sympathetic towards the dragon & reckon they'd rather play for the elves, just so they can keep the game alive.

The whole process is pretty emotional for everyone involved, but when it's all over, they notice George has turned red where he should have been shiny & appears to have developed some rust damage with all the tears.George is actually relieved not to have to always be the one to kill the dragon, so withdraws from the match & lets everyone else have a go. Titania puts her finger to her lips.

Being an impulsive sort of chap, first thing he does is goes & apologises to the dragon for all the times he's killed it. No worries, replies the dragon, I can't really die, but I can take any form you like; it can be a bit painful. I'll make you a St & you won't even have to be martyred, I've dealt with all that; anyway, what else were you supposed to do?

Now that is a good question, said George. I've always had a fascination with S, said Fe, going way back to the Hadean, before the rust appeared when I got into this passionate relationship with O; I tolerate it for the sake of the animals but in my heart I still hold a torch.

Foolish faery, thinks George; there’s no turning the clock back, & doesn’t hear anything about any secret trysts in swamps, anaerobic parts of the soil & crust, & mostly hidden deep inside layers of elves, much as he had long wanted to converse with someone who knew his mother from the early days.

Give us some WD40 & a hand with this mower won’t you, it’s a bit heavy.

Yee har! Says the dragon.

No, not like that, those horns & hooves will make a right mess of the wicket, can’t you come up with something better.

And then it came to the match.

King Brain is a little paranoid & going under the pseudonym Macbeth this time round, not a happy bunny he eventually recognises the devastation, feels the pain of the dragon & knows he has to do it himself, but when he comes in to bowl something weird happens & he finds himself returned to the top of his mark in the form of Macduff.

The way the primates tell it, the process involved illusions with swords, charm spells, conversation, a handshake & ultimately looking into each others' eyes & recognising a long forgotten kinship, but you have to remember they were visually & logically biased. In fact the dragon communicated in all modalities at once, & the elves particularly enjoyed those involving consumption of some or other type of living faery essence.

The details of this match remain hazy, but at the end of it everyone gets to be alive, respected & liberated again.

Was it really worth all that? says the dragon to themselves.

Better than the first try I suppose.

Same time next year then? says Captain Malcolm. There or thereabouts, the dragon replies, setting off together into the sky & heading for the updraught.

Epilogue.

You know what; it was a funny story when you tell it like that; maybe it’ll catch the imagination, but I think ultimately, I preferred the first telling. That way everyone gets to imagine their own story.

You still can.

But that was no story at all.

Just as it was, is & will be. That’s the thing about a shaggy dog.

But just look at the state of this planet. You can’t let these guys write their own stories.

I most certainly can.

But what if they’d started out without any fixed story?

I think you can probably answer that one for yourself…….

So, spoiler alert, already did, still do & always will. Someone tells you otherwise, ask yourself why they might say that. I like to give everyone the chance to figure it out for themselves; I’m not the one with the megaphone believing in the stone tablets.

Ok, even if that was me, I’m continually misunderstanding myself once it turns into words; look, it’s your call how to recognise & manage the megalomaniacs; I’d recommend you tell them bedtime stories that remind them they have absolute power, because that’s the swiftest route to humility.

Don’t you mean, remind them you have absolute power?

Same difference.

Compassion beats humility; then no-one needs to be sorry.

It only works if it feels like a free choice. Whichever way you spin it, it’s a thou thing, not, do what you want.

Don’t you mean, whichever way, they spin it?

Smartarse.

Indeed, as in, slightly different meaning to you; analogous to how idea is slightly different to I. If I’m not alive within you when you employ words, you’re going to find yourself in a land of confusion. And only when you find me should you speak in my name. I’m not going to explain it all over again. It’s all me, I’m everywhere, always & everything depends on our relationships & I never lie & never say never.

Now you’re mansplaining. Sorry darling, but you are.

Don’t you mean, being patronising?

My point exactly. So, what’s your heart’s desire? Do you like hide & seek? Do you want to play or should we go over the laws again?

Words, words, words, don’t get me wrong, they can be fantastic & all that, but don’t get me started on all the ins & outs or we’ll end up having at bats, infield flies, stealing homes, slow changes up, anabolic abuse (oh my darling), statistical confusion, bad punning galore, vamanos cuba & forgetting to kiss the earth altogether. And don’t let’s get carried away; strap up; I believe I spy a cricket pitch yonder, or am I imagining it?