Parasol was so close to the man with the answers (Patriotic Soup Restaurant cook) but yet so far. The bearded lady’s answer to the location of Kuckoo’s or Palace Hotel was: “Ask the fish butcher at the flea market. He knows everything and everybody.” Another dead end, then, for, as we know, the underwater butcher knows nothing. She decided just to wander a bit more before totally giving up, and stumbles (and bumbles) upon a passageway she didn’t think she’d explored before in her many travels through the city now. She touches something and then finds herself here…
…. confronting a white rabbit on the sky object’s edge. Dr. Rabbid Baumbeer, murdered in “Collagesity Photo-Novel 16.”
Parasol didn’t know this fact, but quickly gathered she was talking to a ghost. “Your plan would not have worked,” he called over in earnest after introducing himself. “The whiteyes would not implant correctly over your own eyes and you would have been found out immediately and killed. Just like myself.” He faded from view with this, but the brief encounter provided Parasol with more valuable information than she had hitherto received from anyone in Kowloon. My plot would not have work! she said, spinning the possibility, nay *actuality* around in her mind. Because she knew it was true as soon as it spilled out of the dead doctor’s mouth. White rabbits are true guides. They do not seek to mislead in and of themselves.
Parasol looked up. Another mass of black and white color directly above her head. She flew up…
… to confront *another* white rabbit at the same position on the taijitu symbol’s edge. The symbol was smaller, brighter, and with a more irregularly shaped edge (with a good number of rounded protrusions) than the otherwise duplicate one immediately below. Another 2-n-1.
This white rabbit, taller and appearing feminine in the dim light to Parasol, introduced herself as Charlie in about an octave higher register than the doctor before her. Feminine indeed, although possessing a uni-sex name. “I am the continuation of the doctor,” she spoke, and then Parasol was in a very different location again. Very low instead of very high.
She stared up. The spinning, red fabricy doctor had just finished fixing the first red eye and was about to start on the second. A beam shot up from the “unfixed” eye, destroying the aberrant being in one poof of smoke. She stood up. Was she alive or dead? She couldn’t tell as she walked down the trench toward the surface again…
(to be continued)
Sunklands 