Vinlandian Krillionaire Tristram Mump sat glumly on an upturned fishbox, the legendary legend ‘Fraserburgh Box Pool’ stamped on one end barely visible through a glairy layer of the glistery guts of long-dead mackerel, clutching the tufted remnants of a comatose ginger tom to his hairless pate, moaning to himself in fragments of a fractured Ancient Assyrian dialect known only to a few fellow initiates and rubbing a calloused, broken-nailed, cigarette-tar-stained hairy hand over his contused and lacerated facial skin.
“Look here,” expostulated Achilles Parrot, whose hand it was, “Kindly get your physiognomie offa my hand, you maroon-visaged Yanqui frotteur-de-la-face!”
Across the narrow oily subterranean passageway from the VKTM, George Clooney and his inebriate reprobate colleague Dr. Moebius T. Flugelpik worked feverishly with spanners of their own devising on the Sardinian Engine, a device so astonishingly complex, so preternaturally arcane and so unutterably oleaginous that only a lifetime of severe training could prepare even the most talented engineer for what whirligigs, mechano-elastic gyres and senior thermo-zimbalistics – nay, what outré and extraordinary thingies that dis yon - lay under the silver-inlaid & cloisonneé-enamelled manifold and rocker cover.
With a gracile torrent of high-precision abuse directed in a high voice at Flugelpik’s glabella, Clooney threw down his spanner, wiping the sardine-oil off his girlish hands with an irregularly quadrilateral silk tie-dyed mouchoir.
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Will Tristram Mump and his band of reprobates succeed in using the Sardinian Engine to fracture Space Time into a million highly expensive bits? Will they then succeed in selling the pieces back to God at a tidy profit?
Is it called The Sardinian Engine because it originated in Archimedes’ franchise in Sardinia, or because it’s lubricated using Sardine Oil? Will the damned thing even start on a freezing morning?
To find out, watch this FLOOGLE Mystery space!
Copyright © Donnie Ross 2011
