I decided to have tea with another while I was there, perhaps the brains of the operation. One Fern Stalin, not a redhead perhaps surprisingly but still eating at commissary kitchens with the commoners. I ask her about the operation.
“We created it all,” she was explaining. “This art town — we’ve taking over the whole island, actually. And we’ve just plain taken over, period. Your rule is at an end. You should have invested in the Toddles storyline more, gone all 200 meters worth on it.” Brains indeed.
“Toddles could come back.”
“Hmph,” she expressed and turned her head to the left, to the sea. “That island over there is as much toast as your wee yellow one. She’s stuck in the pavement, under the street actually. She has no more power.” She ends with finality.
“New Island?” I questioned, seeing the direction she indicated. I tried to decipher the meaning to this clue. Photo-novel 9 was all about New Island, but we move away from it in novel 10 to the present one, across that bridge just over there, the New Island bridge. But this was Fisher’s Island. *They* have taken over Fisher’s Island. What did this mean? A return to the Omega continent? I as Baker Bloch wasn’t sure this was a good idea. We had kind of wrapped all that up in novel 10, especially as extended to novel 11. Omega continent: covered.
“We move you where we desire.” Witch power she was on about again. I recall that a witch lived on New Island, and probably still does. The same or connected? I ask her this. She got up and ran across the bridge we just spoke about at an impossible speed for a normal person. The she ran back — the path was smoking where she sprinted so fast she was going. “Forgot my lipstick,” she offered as an excuse for leaving, then applied it to her lips. But then it became a piece of straw as she changed into the next (Lichen Roosevelt). We had a nice discussion as well but it was more oriented to comedy instead of gravity.
“And that’s why the French don’t wash,” she ended what I later understood was part of her monologue.
Sunklands 