In his room once again, John was having fun making a tent from the various dowels littered about the room and a sheet from his bed. It was a huge waste of time, BUT SO MUCH FUN.
Rose on the other hand was not having so much fun watching this play out on her screen and picked up the whole thing and tossed it off the cliff.
Going over to the lathe, John put the punched card containing the pogo ride in the slot and carved a totem from one of the Cruxite Dowels.
He repeated this process with the card containing the code for the hammer as well as the one with the random code he had punched over the shaving cream card for the hell of it and carved the respective totems for the cards.
He also did the same thing with the captchalogued captchalogue card that he had, creating just a slightly thinner cylindrical totem.
Then he stowed all of the totems in his Atheneum, which displayed an image of what object the respective totems would make and how much it would cost to make them.
By the random totem only a red question mark appeared.
Rose decided to get to work creating captchalogue cards from the new totem, placing it on the Alchemiter.
It looked like the machine required one unit of any type of grist to produce one card. So Rose opted to use Shale since it seemed less generally useful than the blue grist, and proceeded to make a bunch of cards.
She then took the pile of newly made cards and presented them to John.
EB: whoa, did you just make all these?
TT: Yes.
EB: sweet, thanks!
EB: what did you do with all the blue wobbly vase-looking things?
TT: I brought the totems out to the alchemiter to test them.
TT: I'm taking some things into my own hands to save some time.
EB: ok.
Next Rose created a hammer at the expense of 2 units of Build Grist. She made a pogo ride too; minus 5 Build and 1 Shale.
An imp lurking nearby climbed on the ride and bounced around the balcony.
Rose then took the totem carved with the random code and created a…rocket pack?
A red rocket pack had appeared on the Alchemiter with some random crap sticking out of it. It looked like a cinder block, a violin, and a flower pot. The items had rendered the device completely inoperable.
Well, she figured she may as well put this piece of junk to work and used it to smash one of the other imps that had been creeping around.
Using a little strategy, John first grabbed Harry Anderson's "Wise Guy" by Mike Caveney, then the cards, then the ejected PDA, and then the book again to flush the cards into his deck. This gave him a total of twelve cards.
Feeling rather wise after this endeavor, John decided to be the wise guy and read a little of the book. He opened up to one of the first pages.
An Introduction: Who's This Wise Guy?
"Blood Loss in the Big Easy"
New Orleans, 1977. The close-up room at the Magic Castle was this mean little box that tended to fill up with so much smoke you'd swear someone was cremating a wet dog in there.
In walks Anderson. There isn't much that gets liquor to pause its journey from the table to my lips but I'll be the bastard lovechild of a listless octoroon if that kid wasn't the cat that swallowed the canary in a dapper little hat. It looked like he was testing the tensile strength of his suspenders to the damn near limit with a pair of cocky thumbs. I wasn't impressed.
But I was a fool.
Somehow in my motion for another beverage he'd already slipped into polite conversation at a table held down by some notoriously brusque regulars. He had them in no time flat. They were melting butter in his glass ramekins. Whatever tidy yarn he'd spun to win them over, I didn't catch a word of it. One of them laughed. I was angry. Envious? Maybe a little. Yeah, you bet I was.
Anderson had one of those little wooden finger choppers that Micky Hades used to sell. The kind where the blade could be removed and clearly shown. It was a very convincing guillotine that did not look like a novelty store toy. Harry would get a guy to examine the chopper and then cut a cigarette in half. Then he held the guy's hand up and told this silly story. The story of course was artiface, a distraction for the guy and the audience while he worked his stuff with the chopper.
Or it would become that, once his famous chopper trick was perfected, vaulting him into fame, fortune, and the crowning position in the television judiciary.
With what became his signature aplomb, Anderson was in moments a font of breast-pocket gauze, profuse apology, and redoubling determination. It's really amazing how hard it is to find a bloody sausage-sized piece of a guy on the floor of a room that dark and smoky. Impossible, I think we all proved. Just as impossible as Blind Willie Buttermilk Stubbs was going to find it to work his trumpet tomorrow night without his "twiddlin' fingers,"
John never really understood what Caveney's relation to Anderson was, or why he wrote this book about him. His ambivalent attitude toward his favorite magician in these anecdotes always struck John as a little weird, and to be honest, he tended not to read much of the text in this book. He mostly liked to look at the diagrams for all the cool tricks.
He continued to flip through the book some more until he got to a page that featured one of these said trick diagrams.
"A Hole in the Ace"
(a.k.a. The A-Hole Trick)
Here is a perfect example of how Harry could ruin several decks of cards, waste everyone's valuable time, and have you love him for it. He was good at that.
One day he noisily emptied his suit jacket pocket onto the hood of his car in search of change for the meter. A clunky metal thing slid from the pile and bounced on the sidewalk. As I retrieved it for him I asked what he was doing with a hole puncher in his pocket.
His face lit up at the question like he was an elf and I asked him how he felt about climbing into the hollow of a big tree to bake some cookies or something. (The two foot, six inch height differential between us causes these comparisons to enter my mind.)
A small crowd had already gathered around even before he produced the first pack of unmolested cards. How people seem to gather, and how they even know a street performance is about to take place, I'll never know. It's perhaps Anderson's greatest trick. Luring the marks like that.
I wanted to ask if he was sure about this, performing in broad daylight. He was used to working in dark rooms. It was usually the first thing out his mouth when he would queer a trick. "I'm really more accustomed to working in a darker room than this." But Harry was excited, and had already butchered the first deck of cards with the hole puncher, and issued the first round of apologies to the crowd. These were like the primer apologies, the sort that got the folks loosened up a bit before the seven course meal of ingratiation that would inevitably follow.
He asked me for a fresh deck of cards and I gave him one.
The principle behind the trick in theory, as he explained to me later, was to punch holes in what appeared to be one card but was in fact two or more together (hence the difficulty he often had in squeezing the puncher with his little elfish hands). Then using some coy maneuvers with his thumb, temporarily concealing the hole while he slid the card beneath it with his palm, the hole would seem to disappear, or move to another part of the card.
'Oh yeah, that's right.' John thought. The old Hole in the Ace trick, interestingly enough pertaining to punching holes in cards and making them "disappear" and stuff. His hands were never really strong enough to make this one work all that well either.
But actually…this gave him an idea.
He took the punched cards for the hammer and pogo ride and overlapped them, causing them to mask each other's hole pattern.
Then he put the overlapping cards into the Totem Lathe and carved another totem using the new combined hole pattern.
Picking up the totem, he went out to the Alchemiter and found that Rose had made like a million hammers for some reason and hadn't bothered to move them off the machine.
"Get all this shit out of the way, I'm about to make something sweet!" John cried as he kicked all the hammers aside.
When all the junk had been cleared, he put the totem in its designated spot on the Alchemiter and watched as it created a…pogo hammer?!
This was so totally sweet. The new creation was a bouncy double-sided hammer with a cool slime ghost decoration on the top.
John raised his new hammer triumphantly in the air.
He then proceeded to dance around the platform of the Alchemiter banging the pogo hammer on the surface as he went.
BOING! BOING! BOING!
The imps watched the spectacle concerned.
TT: What did you do?
EB: i combined the cards in the lathe thingy and made this!
EB: it is so sweet, man look at me go.
TT: I see.
TT: That was a really good idea, John. Nice work.
EB: thanks!
EB: i got the idea from harry anderson.
TT: Who?
EB: uh, you know the show night court?
TT: No.
EB: oh.
EB: well bottom line is...
EB: he's awesome
EB: that's really all there is to say on the matter!
John decided it was time to test the hammer's strength by attacking the nearest imp. He got a vicious rhythmic bouncing combo going and easily slayed the imp in one blow.
BOING ! !
However, this particular imp had been sitting on the pogo ride, and as the hammer and bouncy ride collided, both it and John were catapulted sky-high. The ride flew up high above the house and then came crashing back down into the tree, crushing an imp in the process.
John and his hammer flew the other direction and were about to crash land on one of the platforms Rose had built on top of the house, but luckily she was able to pull his bed up there and catch him with it before he hurt himself.
Meanwhile, downstairs something large and sinister had broken through the wall of the Egbert's home. And over by the tire swing, another of these creatures was making its way up the cliff.
EB: hey, that was a pretty, uh...
EB: nice...
EB: uh...
TT: Sweet catch?
EB: ... save.
EB: oh, yeah.
EB: that.
EB: this is pretty comfy.
EB: why don't you just like,
EB: carry the bed around with me on it?
EB: up to the gate up there!
TT: I can't interact with you directly, or anything that you are touching, if it will result in moving you.
TT: See?
Rose attempted to click on the bed but the game was not allowing her to select it.
EB: oh.
EB: lame!
TT: The game probably regards that as a kind of cheating.
TT: In a way, thieving you of your free will as an adventurer, and the need to advance by your own skill and ingenuity.
TT: The server player is just a facilitator.
EB: well, ok.
EB: all that scurrying around kind of wore me out, i think i'm going to rest here for a bit.
EB: rose, can you keep the imps at bay? like, drop some stuff on them if they sneak too close.
TT: No, you should pick up your hammer and defend yourself.
EB: what, come on!
TT: I have no idea what the hell Dave is up to, or if he's any closer to recovering the game.
TT: There's some stuff I'd like to try, in case he doesn't come through.
EB: oh alright.
EB: i'm just gonna rest my eyes here a second though.
John put down the PDA and looked up at the sky. Directly above him he saw the first gate, still a ways off, slowly rotating. It was giving off a soft, blue glow. As he watched it, John found himself slowly becoming more and more relaxed until his eyes began to close and he finally drifted off to sleep.