Easy Rider

Imagine a turtle, with on its back four elephants. And on their backs a world, as round as a pancake. And if we zoom in, we see a city. A rather large city. Zoom in even more, and we see a workshop. And in that workshop we see a girl, or perhaps more correctly, a young woman. With a pale green dress, and a large, black, pointy hat. And next to her, we see a dwarf, with a huge beard, and steel clad boots. If we zoom in even more, perhaps we can listen in on their conversation...

'What do you mean "Easy Rider"?' Tiffany asked with a frown on her face, while looking down at (but not down on, which is always an important distinction) the dwarf standing next to her. The dwarf next to Tiffany didn't meet her stare. He kept looking straight ahead, his grin frozen on his face. Tiffany saw a pearl of sweat roll down his forehead. She also noticed a tiny pink ribbon in his beard.

'I distinctly remember asking for a repairjob on my broom. Maybe a new stick, or perhaps some new bristles. I don't remember asking for that,' Tiffany said while pointing at it.

'It' was her flying broom, the one she had for years. But it was more than just her broom now. A lot more actually. A curved piece of metal had been added, sticking out at worrying angles. A long leather cushion covering the stick itself had been added. There were also stirrups, which on a broom, was rather puzzling.

'What are all those bits that look like a mirror?' she asked.

'Chrome,' the dwarf said and nodded, still avoiding eye contact. 'Good metal that is. Very shiny.'

'Shiny?' Tiffany scoffed. 'It's a witches' broom. Why should a broom be shiny?'

The dwarf shrugged. 'Why not?'

Tiffany sighed. When she came to Ankh-Morpork a week earlier to visit Preston, she had brought her broom to "Hard Lee Davis & Sons, Dwarven Workshop" (We Canneth Repair Anythyn). Her broom hadn't been running smooth lately, and she had asked them to fix it. She should have known better.

'But I can't afford this!', Tiffany said. 'I only have enough money for the agreed upon repairs.'

'It's Free', the dwarf said. The entire workshop grinded to a halt, causing a sudden deafening silence. Tiffany's mouth almost* dropped open. A dwarf giving something away for free?

(*Almost, because she was a witch after all, and a witch could not be seen with her mouth hanging open. She owed it to witches everywhere to keep her mouth closed at all times).

The dwarf coughed. 'I mean the extra's are free, normal charge for the repairs.'

Tiffany saw some of the other dwarfs giving each other stealthy looks, but after a few moments they resumed their work, and soon the noise level was rising again.

'Just... why?' Tiffany asked with a resigned sigh.

Now the dwarf turned his head, and looked at Tiffany.

'It... uh.. came to me in a dream', he said with a slightly worried expression.

'A dream? Sure it wasn't a nightmare?'

'Actually, it was quite a nice dream. I dreamt I was riding.. uh.. something like a broom, but with two wheels behind each other.. ', the dwarf said with a far away look in his eyes.

'Wouldn't you fall over, with just two wheels...', Tiffany interrupted, but then stopped.

She thought of the annual cheese rolling down on the Chalk. Put a wheel of cheese on its side and it falls over*, but give it a little push, and it stays upright. Roll it down a steep hill, and it would pick up enough speed to break the bones of anyone standing in its way once it reached the bottom. Tiffany knew this, because she was usually the one responsible for setting fore-mentioned broken bones.

(*the exception being Horace, her sentient Blue Lancre Cheese, who could right itself and roll uphill)

The dwarf took her silence for approval, and he continued. 'The handlebar gives you good leverage to lean into corners, the saddle is for added comfort and the stirrups stop your feet from flopping in the wind. Trust me, it's a massive improvement, just try it', the dwarf finished his story.

Tiffany resigned. She still had a long flight back, and she didn't have the time nor energy to argue with a dwarf, as they had a reputation for being very stubborn. So she paid her bill, and then received instructions on how to operate her new and improved broom. This took some time.

'So I just roll my right wrist backwards?' she asked the Dwarf again, while sitting on the saddle, her feet in the stirrups, her safety belt securely attached.

He nodded. 'But make sure you use the clutch lever on the left. It ensures you get a smooth start when you are starting from a stationary hover. Once your moving, you can let go of the clutch and just use the 'go-faster-grip' on the right to control your speed.'

Tiffany grabbed the clutch lever and pulled it all the way in. Then she rolled the 'go-faster-grip' all the way back. The broom didn't move an inch, but it started trembling and shaking, as if great forces were acting upon it.

'It's not moving' she said.

The Dwarf had a panicked look on his face. 'Don't turn the go-faster-grip all the way back! And to move you have to slowly, very slowly, let go of the clutch, to easy the power on.'

'Like this?' Tiffany asked, and unhindered by any knowledge concerning clutches, she dropped the clutch in one go. And as soon as she did that, a lot of things happened all at once.

Now as most people know, flying brooms are completely silent. So it was rather unusual that several eye witnesses later described hearing a loud noise to the reporter from the Ankh-Morpork Daily Bugle who came to investigate the rumors. When asked to describe it, most of them started making weird noises, in order to reproduce the sounds they had heard.

'First there was this loud 'SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH' sound that went on for a few seconds and then it changed into this deep, roaring 'VROOOOOAAAAARRRRRRRRR!' sound', one witness recounted. 'And then everything went silent again... well except for all the screaming and shouting', the man concluded with a glint in his eye. 'I don't know what it was, but it was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard in my life.'

Right after the noise had stopped (but not the screaming and shouting), the two dwarfs that had been talking to Tiffany clambered to their feet and looked at a hole in the ground. It was filled with red hot molten rock. A glowing bubble formed, then burst with a soft 'glooop'.

'Was it supposed to do that? Her broom didn't move an inch, but there was this loud screeching sound...'

The dwarf with the pink ribbon in his beard nodded, a dreamy look on his bearded face. 'I saw this in my dream as well. I believe it is called a 'burn in'.

'Burn in?'

'Or perhaps it was a 'burn out'...', he said looking at the puddle of molten rock. 'Anyhow, something got burned'.

'And what do you call that?', the other dwarf asked, pointing at a very clean strip of road, running all the way from the molten rock puddle, all across the square and partway up the building across from their workshop.

'I mean, her broom was pointing up vertically, but she kept moving horizontally, while dragging the bristles of her broom across the ground', the other dwarf continued, replaying the whole event before his minds eye.

'That was a wheelie', the first dwarf said.

'A wheelie? But a broom doesn't have any wheels!'

'Nevertheless, that's what it's called!', the pink ribboned dwarf said with a definitive tone in his voice

'And how she rode up the face of that tall building across the street, while dodging and weaving around all them washing lines and narrowly avoiding that flag pole halfway, and giving that poor gargoyle the biggest scare of its life. What was that called?', the other dwarf asked.

'That... I would call that witchcraft', said the dwarf with the pink ribbon in his beard.

Hard Lee wasn't a particularly religious dwarf, but for the first time since his dream, he wondered if maybe he had let something loose in this world that it wasn't ready for. Or maybe it was never intended for this world. It was like a rogue spark of inspiration whizzing through space and time had hit him by accident. At that point he snapped out of his trance. He looked at the clean strip of road, and realized it started in his workshop. People* were sure to come asking questions, so he started barking orders.

(*usually of the Watch kind. And they would ask all these intrusive questions, like 'Did you do this?' and 'Why don't you just confess, everybody knows you did it')

'Fill up this hole, and make sure that clean strip gets filled with the usual Ankh-Morpork street muck before someone follows it in here! And not a word to anybody about this! It's no use giving people all kinds of ideas about flying around town, or we would need traffic cops in the skies'.

High above Ankh-Morpork, Tiffany more or less regained control of her broom. After her harrowing ride across the square and even more nerve wracking slalom up the side of a building, her Second and Third Thoughts yelled in unison: 'Let go of the go-faster-thingy!'

She did, and the broom gradually leveled out, and finally came to a complete stop. She blinked a few times and looked down. She gasped when she saw how high up she was. Her broom definitely had a lot more oompf then she remembered. She checked her safety belt, and was relieved to see it was still securely attached.

Okay, let's try this again she thought. She gripped the handlebars, and ever so gently rolled her wrist back while slowly(!) letting go of the clutch. The go-faster-thingy was a little sensitive, so she had a few bumpy starts, but she was high up in the sky, so she could experiment without too much danger to herself and others (including gargoyles). Tiffany soon came to grips with the controls of her improved broom. By the time she reached the Chalk, she was grinning from ear to ear, making long, smooth turns from left to right. Easy Rider indeed. She felt more in control of her broom than she had ever felt.

Preston has a need

Over the next few weeks, the new riding position surprised her the most. The soft saddle, sitting up straight, her hands now resting comfortably on the handlebars (compared to her usual death grip) and her feet securely in the stirrups, made for a much more comfortable and enjoyable ride. But to her surprise, none of the other witches seemed to warm up to the idea of upgrading their brooms, not even after demonstrating the new and improved handling and comfort.

Preston however, took a more than fleeting interest. He sometimes hitched a broom ride to or from Ankh-Morpork. It saved him an expensive and boring coach ride, but he was never a big fan of flying "higher than a man could jump". And then he saw the new and improved broom, and he got this strange look in his eye, and he asked her in a soft voice if maybe he could try it for a bit. She said yes after only a short hesitation.

To Tiffany's slight chagrin, Preston turned out to be a natural. From the moment he sat down, he was in complete control of the broom. And to her own astonishment, she enjoyed being a passenger for once. Her arms wrapped tightly around Preston, their bodies pressed together, moving as one as they leaned into the turns. And there were more than enough turns to enjoy. Tiffany noticed Preston didn't like to fly high, but he had no problem with speed at all. So he kept low to the ground and followed the roads, which meandered their way through the landscape. And he did so at increasingly higher speeds, sometimes leaning so far over to make a turn, they nearly scraped their knees on the ground. She even saw him stick out his knee a few times to try and make this happen, until she reminded him of what would happen to a knee if it hit the ground at a speed several times faster than a galloping horse.

But after complaints from farmers in the area who swore their chickens were laying square eggs, and a herd of sheep who decided to spontaneously do a twenty mile jog, right after Preston had done a rather spectacular low level fly-by, she had to sit him down and have a stern Talk about 'Road Safety and Avoiding Certain Death'.

He listened to her explanation ('sheep aren't really built to run twenty miles in one go' and 'imagine what would happen if you hit a tree at those speeds') and then he sighed and nodded in defeat.

'I understand Tiff, I really do, it's just when I get on that broom, I just get a Craving for Going Fast' he said.

'You mean you have a need? A Need for Speed?' she asked.

He face lit up when she said that.

'You think maybe I should have that tattooed on my arm..?' he started, but quickly shut his mouth when he saw Tiffany's face.

And so they agreed (i.e. Tiffany told him) he would not exceed the speed of a galloping horse. Not only was it fast enough, but it was also a speed people (and sheep) were used to.

And this is were our story ends. A random particle of inspiration had struck the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And all Tiffany got out of it, was the joy of feeling the wind in her hair and Prestons warm body against hers, as they flew into the sunset.

The End