Yeah, I’m here, she says to the Star Trek teleporter crew in her mind. Still walking.
Oh look, there’s Star Wars’ Rutti-tutti robot in a space age mish-mash. What next? Lost in Space?
… Lost in Space, yeah. But maybe I saw it out of the corner of my eye, heh.
She stops walking. She turns to the second robot she’s encountered in this here pyramid dominated area. “Can you tell me where *Marilyn* is? The president’s concubine, in your time. Just kidding. It’s Roosevelt, Marilyn Roosevelt. But not the same president (in the joke). Or… maybe it is.” She ponders how Lichen got the last name in the first place, and, by association, her own. What a wit!
No answer from the robot. He seems to have lost his powers of function.
Still in the pyramid: “I’ll check with Howard on that,” a pill shaped robot (robot?) squeakily and waveringly answered Fern Stalin’s rephrasing of her original question, which went: “How do I find The Void?” Because Marilyn/Lichen was most likely there, or as close as possible to the despicable, object-less Abyss. She’s trying so hard, Fern though here. If only she had my brains.
“We’ve met before, BTW,” the thing said to Fern while texting this Howard, perhaps a workmate. They could be maintenance mechanoids because of the overalls, Fern rationalizes. Had she not heard of minions? But perhaps she is toying with us, the reader and also the writer, in this case. Probably (again). There are toys after all; a play on words.
The minion kept typing and typing but never got back to Fern. No answer from Howard apparently, or nothing the creature wanted to share, if Howard is even real. Fern moves on, down the stairs to the other side of this, er, space platform…
… to a game that should *definitely* not be played because this was actually a representation of The Void again, the power behind the powers.
It eats thoughts like it’s breakfast lunch and dinner all at once. Maybe the Tilists were onto something with the switching around of meals.
Back to the teleporter, and quickly. Marilyn/Lichen’s presence lies elsewhere in Gemini retconned from Mercury. We’ll get to that aspect in a moment.
Sunklands 