“You know what I am here for,” said Aiko.
The dragon blinked.
“I do not suppose you would understand the why,” Aiko continued. “In truth it does not matter, for it does not make this any less a betrayal. Still, I made a pledge long ago to wait here for someone and without your heart that pledge will be broken in days by my death. I must do what I must, you must do the same.”

The battle raged across the mountain-top. The trees danced, the ground shook, and the wind roared. The sturdy trunk of the ancient pine seemed the only constant as Aiko and the dragon circled and tore at each other, for the dragon was the forest and the mountain and the forest and the mountain were full of righteous fury at the interloper. The betrayer. The dragon’s sharp claws found purchase time and again, tearing strips of flesh, but Aiko held her own, for she was the priestess of the forest and the mountain and she knew them well. The ground was soon slick with the blood of the dragon and of the woman. The blood of forest and mountain and man. The battle raged on.

Hotaru had been in the caves behind the moss wall when the mountain had begun to shake. She made her way to the summit as quickly as she was able, following the clash of steel and scale and claw, but the way was not short and it was not easy. By the time she approached, the sounds of battle had faded and the fury of the forest was replaced once more with calm. At the peak, beneath the towering pine, she found the dragon of the forest and the mountain, torn and bloodied but alive. Nearby was the naked body of a woman she had never seen before, impaled through one eye by Aiko’s sword. Of Aiko there was no sign.

As dawn broke over the mountain, Hotaru returned to the village. The forest was full of secret places. Aiko knew them all. She stretched her new limbs, and settled down to wait.

The wind was howling down off the mountain, throwing up eddies on the surface of the lake and scattering the moon’s reflection. It pressed against the large glass door of the cabin, seeking but not finding a way in.

The cold could not be kept so easily at bay. I felt it at my back as I lay, propped on one arm, on the rug before the fire. With the heat from the flames on my front, the cool was welcome. Over the crackle of the flames and the whistle of the wind, I could hear another sound.
“It’s starting to rain,” I said.

In the eleven years that she had been in charge of the city’s engines, Miss Rebbecca Pannicot had not once set foot in the council chambers. She could hardly be faulted on it, of course, for neither had a councilor set foot in the engine room. Once they had determined that she was the only one who could look after the engines, the council had dealt with the embarrassment of the city’s reliance on an eight year old girl in a typically Victorian fashion: they had simply never spoken of it again. She inherited her father’s bank accounts, and so the wage was paid as always and nobody besides small children and the few people on Rebbecca’s crew ever spared much thought for how the city stayed in the air.

That morning, Rebbecca had scrubbed herself cleaner than she could ever remember having been, and had dressed in the finest clothes she had ever owned, bought just the day before. Even so, it had taken her three hours to convince someone to let her in to see Councilor Proom. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, Councilor Proom still remembered the day he had carried out the council’s wishes and told little Rebbecca Pannicot that she could take up her father’s job.
“Ah Miss Pannicot,” he looked up as she entered the room. “I trust all is well? We do not see you here often.”
“You do not see me here at all, sir,” she said. “This is the first time.”
“To what do we owe this honour, then, young lady?”
“I’m afraid there’s a problem, sir. We’re going to have to land the city.”

He was a scientist,
She was a journalist,
He got turned into a mug.

It’s Jenny and Mug!

So if the movie goes well, there’s talk of talk of syndicating it to a television series. They wanted to go the animation route, but I said to them “This has live-action written all over it. If you can’t do a convincingly realistic CGI mug I’ll hire someone who can.”

The idea is to go Star Wars on this sucker and just merchandise the hell out of it. Starting with mugs, of course, then t-shirts, action figures, lunch-boxes. The whole deal.

I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about who’s playing Jenny in the movie. Frankly I’m astonished that we’ve made it this close to release without anyone letting the cat out of the bag. The only thing I can say here is that the studio is making an announcement within the week and it’s going to be big.

He was a brilliant research scientist.

She was a plucky journalism student.

One night an experiment went wrong from too much science, and he was turned into a novelty mug.

For some inadequately explained reason, she was the only one who could still understand him.

They did the only thing they could: teamed up to solve crime despite a clear lack of any formal training in the field.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll get up halfway through to go to the bathroom, but it’s okay because you probably won’t miss anything.

This summer, get ready for a wild ride with “Jenny and Mug”.

This morning I threw together a quick site that, in mashing up well known sayings, really succeeds in mashing up my geekery with my love of non-sequitur. Thanks go to Tony for the inspiration. Sorry the html itself is a bit of a quick hack, once I got it not-ugly I figured it did well enough for the purpose.

Adding options to the generator is a very simple matter, so if there’s any sayings you think are conspicuous in their absence (which admittedly would be quite hard for you to verify given the random element) let me know and if I’ve got a second and I think they fit the bill I’ll add them.

Enjoy the Random Saying Generator

The city’s engines were old. Decrepit, most people would call them. Miss Rebbecca Pannicot called them vintage. The engine room was her domain, a job passed down to her by her father and his father before him. The council had expressed a concern when she, at a bright young eight years of age, had shown up to work the day after her father’s death. The problem was, nobody else knew the engines like she did. Much to the council’s dismay it turned out that nobody else knew the engines at all. So she was back the next day, solemnly ordering about boys twice her age.

There was a jungle outside my front door this morning. Sorry if I don’t sound adequately phased by that. Believe me, I’ve been through all the relevant emotions. Disbelief, astonishment, confusion, despair, fear, anger. Even swearing. After today I’ve decided that swearing can be an emotion. If you’d been here you’d understand.

I suppose I should point out that I’m not being metaphorical here: it’s literally a jungle out there, not figuratively. It’s not just that Sissy forgot to prune her geraniums, either. I went out a ways. Kept the door in sight. I heard some kind of big cat in the distance, though. Couldn’t tell you which, it’s not the kind of thing that’s come up before. Anyway, I came back and I threw the latch and I haven’t been out again.

Outside the kitchen window it looks more like woods. Not quite as wild. I didn’t notice that to begin with, but I’ve had a few hours to sit and look at it now and it’s definitely different to the front. The bedroom window looks like Antarctica. Lots of ice, not much else. Cold as hell, too. I think I’ll be sleeping down here tonight.

Sissy was banging on the wall, earlier. At least I think it was Sissy. These walls are thick, and I couldn’t hear well but from what I could tell it’s not just my apartment that’s… wrong. Not sure about the other two. No sound from the new couple on the other side of me, but they could just be curled up in a ball in a corner. I did that for a while. It helped some, but not much.

Anyway, this is like the third message I’ve left, in case you didn’t get the other two for some reason. I’m not sure what you’ll find when you show up for our date tonight. I get the feeling we might have to take a rain check. Call me back.

The forest was full of secret places. A small clearing known only to a family of deer. A track hidden beneath brush that had been a favourite hunting trail of foxes for many summers past. A shallow depression in a cliff face that held an ancient nest, neat and tidy and never used. Aiko knew them all. She was the only one who did. Hotaru had begun to learn the ways of the forest, but there were some things that could only come from ten years spent walking the trails.

There was no telling where the dragon would be. The past two nights she had stalked these ways, working her way to the summit, leaving no stone unturned. There was no guarantee, even, that it had not slipped past her and settled in some hollow she had already checked. The mountain was too large to cover in one night; too large even to cover properly in three. As she made her way up the slopes, senses on a knife edge, Aiko knew that tonight she would have to make some hard decisions. This was the last night she had, and there was not enough time to check everywhere she had not yet been. She checked only the powerful spots: the waterfall under the towering beeches; the caves behind the moss wall; the clearing filled with the bubbling of an underground stream. It was dangerous, of course. Hotaru was looking for her and the powerful places were the only ones she would think to look. Unfortunately, there was no other choice.

It was midnight when Aiko arrived at the summit. This was the spot upon which she had pinned her hopes. There, coiled about the trunk of the massive pine that crowned the peak, eyes fixed on her as she came, the dragon waited.

Nearing the ocean, the freeway rose above the surrounding streets on massive concrete pylons, splitting and spreading in off-ramps and on-ramps and fly-overs and fly-unders like some parody of a river delta. Traffic was a constant crawl on the streets below, and at this time of night it began to clog up the ramps and spread upwards. Falling Blossom didn’t even ease up on the accelerator. She shifted her weight back and up and under its black cowling the skeleton of the bike adjusted accordingly. The chassis sucked in its metal gut and the tires pulled up the edges of their thick contact patches, built for road-hugging speed, to give her more maneuverability.

She shot between cars that might as well have been parked, kicked back and forth across lanes and soon she was through the crush and climbing the slow rise of the bridge stretching out over the Pacific to the lights out across the water. Lemuria, the strip’s answer to the problem of overcrowding. Normally Falling Blossom loved watching the lights over the water at night, but tonight her attention was on the shore to the north, where the lights and barbed wire of the pirate compound were clearly visible.