|| -------- -- -----  A E R I E   O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- THE MILDRED CORK--CUP 11--"DENIM" <-------  ||  Severe Repair  ||  The Mildred Cork  ||  -------> (Cup SRmc011, Created v2 (6/7/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Walt was having a nightmare about terrible things. Monsters that rip you apart and eat you. Houses where you get lost and never find your way out. The pain of the masses of the dead. The process of regaining consciousness was slow. He was aware mostly of numbness. Then of height--he was way up in the air. His arms--above his head and bearing his weight. Below--hundreds of feet to the ground. One sneaker on and one foot bare and bloody. His belt undone, pants unbuttoned, zipper halfway down, pants starting to fall off. He couldn't believe it, and the jolt of adrenaline his waking up shot through him wracked him with pain. He couldn't believe it--he was hanging from a brick smokestack. A really, really tall brick smokestack. He looked up to see if there was any smoke coming of it the stack, but he couldn't really do it. He wanted to know, cuz he was concerned that if this was one of the abandoned factories of the area, there might not be anyone around to see him. What happened--THE MILDRED CORK!--he had tossed it into the ocean at Mav Saptax. Then... he was attacked by something... a massive dark shape... like a grim porter from mythology... with those burning light blue eyes... It had beaten the shit out of him. Now he felt lost. Crying as best he could, Walt faced the gaping void of air in front of him as if it were the first hill of a roller coaster, right after a long, slow, clickety-clack rise to the top. He didn't feel like himself--he felt like he was somewhere else, looking down at a miserable, wounded human being shackled to a smokestack. What was it that happened the other day? Everything went haywire. Walt thought it was him going crazy, so many little things turned blatantly different, everything feeling so... alien. He thought about this for a little while, and then realized it was helping him keep his mind off the pain. But of course, as soon as he realized this, the soothing effect was erased. He spent several minutes in extreme discomfort, trying fruitlessly to determine just what sort of bonds were holding him up. He couldn't really feel his wrists or upper arms--it felt like his arms were inanimate straps of leather holding him up. Also, the situation being as it was, he wasn't too keen on the idea of breaking free, being that he'd plummet to his death. After a little while more, Walt lost consciousness for an indeterminate period of time. Then he thought he woke up, and he couldn't tell if it was a dream or a hallucination, but he saw something really cool. It was on the horizon--a Devil and a God--each of them miles tall. The devil horned and red like you might think, the God white robed and bearded like you might think. The two were fairly near each other, limbering up and preparing, Walt knew, for their fight that would settle things once and for all, but also destroy the world in the process. And they were so sure. So confident. Taking their positions. But then, this hot girl dressed in denim bursts out of the sky like lightning, landing between the two, and ruining the plan of those primal forces. The Devil and the God looked at the landscape around them in horror--knowing what will happen if they can't destroy it. But as the bizarre future starts to take shape, the hot girl just keeps laughing her head off, and eventually, the God and the Devil shuffle off their separate ways, dejected. And the landscape kept turning weirder and weirder... Then Walt recovered his senses with a start. Damn. Still hanging from the smokestack and in excruciating pain. Why couldn't that have been part of the hallucination, too? Mildred. Would she come and save him? Was it... was it the next day, or the day after? If it was the day after, then Mildred should be fully-formed--should have the night before, at dusk... No. It was the next day. He hadn't been out for 36 hours, it felt more like 12. So Mildred wouldn't be born for another 12 hours or so. Walt closed his eyes. Okay. It wouldn't be so bad. Just think of having a Mildred--it's worth a day of torture. It'd be worth more than a day of torture--a lot more. So he'd wait. He'd wait for Mildred to come and save him. Hopefully, before whatever put him here came back. So Walt felt a little sense of relief that he'd put his near-future in order. It was a feeling that lasted about forty seconds. Cuz whatever it was that was holding him was failing was breaking loose. He moved down--just a little at first, but then more and more. Until... He broke free of his bonds and started his almost certainly fatal fall to the ground below. -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----