…“They’re sending messages to us in code!”
The night manager looks up…
…just in time to see the rotund upperclass twit pull a shard of glass from his large torso. It had punctured his heart and he quickly bled to death with a most astonished look on his face.
The unremarkable looking man in the grey trenchcoat steps over the body, stomps through the massive puddle of blood, and approaches the night manager.
“Did you just shove that man into my window?” the manager asks, his voice cracking with terror.
“Yes,” says Loki, “I did.”
He then reaches out to the manager’s throat, clasping it firmly in his superhumanly strong hands. Tossing the now dead man aside, Loki ransacks the cash drawer.
26F is not there. Wildly flailing about the store, Loki dismantles everything therein.
26F is not there.
Bellowing in supernatural rage, Loki takes off at a run, looking for Tracy.
Tracy has just purchased a student priced ticket for the movie The Ring, having no idea she accidently pocketed 26F while closing out her shift.
Loki, out in the street, looks around, but can’t sense Tracy or 26F.
Fuming in rage, he terrorizes an elderly poodle and it’s even more elderly spinsterly old woman.
“Why, I never,” she complains and narrowly misses being dismissed into the nether world by the arrival of…
Team members Two through Seven. They back Loki into a dead-end alley, ready to exact vengence for his attacking their secretary, as well as for all the other trouble he’s caused. Five steps forward from the group. “It’s time for us to have some fun, Loki,” the being cackles, and it removes its robes. Loki can’t believe what is revealed.
Tentacles. Dozens of tentacles.
“Haven’t I seen you in Hentai pictures?” Loki asks.
“Yep.”
“Oh, shit.”
Meanwhile, Tracy buys some popcorn and a drink. The total comes to $47 (funny how this theater in London accepts U.S. dollars). She pays with two twenties, two ones, and 26F.
About an hour later, 26F is given out as change to…
… a snaggle-toothed, one-eyed, elderly appearing man with shockingly white hair and a regal manner belieing his peasent looks.
Peering closely at 26F with his one eye, Odin smiles and leaves the cinema, quite sure he can now buy back his eye with the other worldly bank note.
Stepping out into the street, his godly hearing hearing picks up the sounds of the ethereal struggle going on in the alley.
"My son," he utters in despair to no one but himself and hurries to the alley.
He passes the now blazing inferno that once was a nice little corner store.
From the corner of his vision, something in the store catches his attention…
He sees in one quick glance:
A bookish-looking kid dressed in English private-school clothes, with a zigzag mark on his forehead.
A huge, blue, bearlike creature, accompanied by a little green thing with one big blue eye.
A huge green thing with odd tubes jutting out like green klaxon horn bells on the sides of his head.
A ten-year-old boy with jaundiced skin and buggy eyes, and with a slingshot in his hip pocket.
A statuesque, young, guileless blonde, who looks like she has trouble keeping her clothes on.
A big, overweight, yellow tabby cat.
A tall man in a black suit, with black stovepipe hat and chin beard.
Odin, still clutching 26F in his mitt, realizes he has now stepped over into…
…Toledo, Ohio. Damn, Odin thought, I teleported myself to Ohio again. This never happened when I was younger. Maybe I have to stop taking Viagra.
As anyone who’s been in Ohio knows, there isn’t much to do there. After an hour or two of wandering aimlessly, Odin found a store that sold…
…Cajun Peanut M&M’s. They gots cayanne pepper in 'em, yessiree boy.
So, he bought some and a liter size RC Cola (it’s 30 cents cheaper than Coca-Cola) to satify his godly thirst.
Meanwhile, in a London alleyway, Loki and five are involved in an epic struggle.
Everyone seems to not have noticed that 26F is now…
…sitting in the cash drawer of a Kwik-E-Mart in Toledo, Ohio. It is soon given out in change to a little old lady from Etobicoke, who returns to her husband’s Ford Taurus with her purchases. They drive away, heading for the Interstate and the Canadian border. A fwe hours later, they cross the border (avoiding a work slowdown by Customs officials).
The couple reach Toronto, and head for Old Chinatown to buy a rattan table set. After parking the car, they realize that they’re thirsty, and 26F lands in the back of the till of the 7-11 at the corner of Spadina Avenue and College Street, there to wait until it’s bundled with other US currency that may arrive, and taken to the bank for deposit…
…which seems to run by feminazi crack whore lesbian pool cleaners. That’s the name of their band, not a description.
The lead singer/bank manger, Erin, notices that 26F is glowing slightly. She takes it out of the bundle to examine it more closely. But, first she wants lunch. She places a call to the local chinese food delivery cafe, which is run by expatriated Italians from Riverdale, CA, and orders her favorite, dim sum pizza rolls with fried rice and guacamole. Mmmmm, guacamole.
Getting up from her desk, Erin doesn’t notice for a few moments that 26F has been blown by a suspicious spurious air current towards the front door.
This being Canada, and winter, the front door is conveniently left open for rapid egress.
26F wafts out the door…
…where it blows for several blocks before an American picks it up. The American goes home to Detroit and spends it on Lions tickets. He walks back out of the stadium five minutes later, points a gun in the ticket sellers face and demands his money back. He gets 26f back, goes to a casino in Windsor, and spends it at the blackjack table. The unscrupulous blackjack dealer pockets 26f then…
…takes off on a holiday to Florida. When he arrives at Tampa airport, he buys a “soda” in the terminal. 26F ends up in the till of a hotdog-vendor. The next customer…
…receives 26F as change, of course, but doesn’t keep it very long. She gives it to the guy in the office collecting money for Gertie’s kidney.
Funny thing is, there is no Gertie. It’s a scam. Francois simply forgot his lunch and is hungry now! So, Francois goes out to the same hotdog vender and buys two footlongs with chili and cheese. 26F and 53 cents covers the cost.
The hotdog vendor next gives it as change to Gertrude Flamsteed, who doesn’t need a kidney. She uses 26F at a local magazine stand to pick up the latest People.
Alfred Yamtz, the magazine vendor takes a short break and buys a 22 oz cola from the hotdog vender, using 26F to pay for it.
The hotdog vendor, an unremarkable looking man in jeans, a pale blue tee shirt, hemp belt, and Miami University Hurricanes ball cap, grins inwardly. The ivory spurs on his boots spin slowly. He has been testing this bill, to see if it is the magical, ever so sought after, true 26F. It is! He hands over the entire hotdog/soda pop/BBQ chip vending operation to a passing FSU fan and makes haste back to Valhalla.
But, Loki has been fooled again! Instead of transfering through the ethereal spirit domain to his favorite warrior bar, he has materialized in a Houston shopping mall. Tiffany, or her latest replacement, has just finished a free concert and is walking to one of the many Gap stores to look for new song material.
Loki figures this might mean something important to him, so he follows her.
Someone else is following him…
…Loki’s attorney. Loki had been concerned in recent months about stalkers, ever since he found out he was to receive a whopping big inheritance. He had mixed feelings about it: The prospective decedent was a great-uncle who was closer to him than most others in the family; and the uncle’s unencumbered fortune was over $800 million. Anyway, the lawyer approaches Loki and points out: This is what you’ve been complaining about; practice what you preach.
The lawyer is in fact the FSU fan. He has 26F in his wallet; the next day he buys a snack in the courthouse. The lunch vendor is blind and a sheriff’s deputy assists her in sorting out bills her customers give her. The deputy replaces 26F with a new bill. Back at the sheriff’s station, the deputy, Mark Bradley…
…runs the banknote through a biological assay tester. An orange light flashes. It seems there was human DNA on the banknote. (There was also inhuman DNA on the banknote, but the machine wasn’t set up for that.) The assay tester automatically forwards its results as a query to the Police Distributed Genetic Matching Database (much of which is being run as a volunteer peer-to-peer service by people who think that they’re helping to cure cancer).
When the database returns a list of possible matches, red lights flash. One possible match is OJ Simpson. Deputy Bradley panics and contacts his superiors to arrange a press conference.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t read the rest of the report, which goes on to mention that other potential matches include Jeffrey Dahmer, Osama bin Laden, Jean Chretien, Connie Chung, Kenneth Starr, Elvis Stojko, Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Kuchma, Anders Grop, Natalja Gerlach, Jack Chick, Karen Kain, Karol Wojtila, Kevin Bacon, and/or Madonna. The report goes on to add that “no possibility named is above a 0.4% probability”.
Meanwhile, the banknote…
…sits untouched in a locked box in the crime lab. Bradley’s superior, Captain Wieczorek, instructs Bradley to remove the bill, given the other possibilities of the DNA’s origin, and it’s relegated to the petty-cash drawer at the station desk.
Now Deputy Bradley has a short visit from kin…his brother Joe and Joe’s buxom wife Jane, mentioned earlier here. Yes, the same Jane Bradley who had 26F stuck between her boobs! Joe speaks briefly to the desk sergeant, who allows Deputy Bradley to remove 26F and three other $5 bills in exchange for a $20. Jane wants to do some laundry the next day during her visit; they came with their eldest sone Mike, a linebacker on his high school’s varsity football team, and their daughters, 15-year-old Susan and 11-year-old Doris, both of whom are well on their way to becoming carbon-copies of their quite beautiful mother, if not already there.
Anyway, at the laundromat with her son and daughters, Jane duly pops 26F into the change machine, but it doesn’t register. She calls the attendant, who makes necessary repairs. She gets her change and continues without incident; but she and her kids are still at the laundromat when the unscrupulous attendant…
…trips the building circuit breaker, causing evrything inside to need resetting. While resetting the change machine, he slyly pockets several bills, including 26F.
Jane argues with him that the machines she was using were nearly finished, so he should advance them through the cycles so she and the girls can just finish up washing, dry what they will dry there, and take the ‘dry flat’ items home. They’ve been there long enough already, Jane feels, and can’t wait for her new washer/dryer combo to be delivered at their home next week.
The attendant, Joseph E. Potbottom, opens the office door so he can find the service manuals for the washing machines. He reaches for the light switch. Flipping it, he is annoyed when the lights fail to come on. “Maybe I didn’t turn all the circuits back on,” Joe thinks to himself.
So, he goes outside to check the breaker box. Night has fallen and the alleyway is rather poorly lit. All the breakers appear to be in the on position, so he starts back inside. But he finds that he accidently let the heavy metal shut, and now he must walk all the way around to the front of the strip center, because he knows no one will hear him rapping on the back door.
Approaching Joe from behind, an unremarkable looking man wearing faded black Levis, a green tartan plaid flannel shirt, black down vest, beat up straw goat roper type hat, and fancy ivory spurs on his black Nicona boots. With his left hand, Loki reaches to Joe’s shoulder to signal him to turn around, but slips on an almost invisible ice patch and falls on top of Joe in an ungainly heap.
The force of the impact caused the large screwdriver Joe was carrying to be thrust upward into his brain from below his jaw, causing instant death.
Loki, frazzled by the events of late which seem to show he is being manipulated by someone more powerful, rifles through the dead man’s pockets, looking for the well traveled bank note, but doesn’t find it.
Inside the washateria, Susan spies 26F on the dirty tile floor, where it had fallen from Joe’s pocket. Bending over, unladylike, to procure the bill, she exposes quite a bit of her already ample braless bosom from her mostly unbuttoned poly/cotton blouse. Jane had been arguing with her about her choices in fashion and modesty but, being a teenager, Susan didn’t care.
She smiles at the pleasantly shocked young man in front of her, pockets 26F, and leaves the laundrymat with her mother and sister.
Closing the doors of their SUV, none of them notice that Loki is walking their way. He reaches for the rear door latch just as Susan peels out and zooms away, her mother figuring she needed the driving practice.
“By all that is unholy and quircky!” Loki fumes to himself, “What is wrong with me?”
Disgusted and starting to get both mad and scared, Loki steals the first car that catches his eye, an early 80’s…
…Plymouth Sapporo. It is in bad shape, having spent a few winters as a ‘rust rat’ in Rochester, New York, before retiring to Florida. There is no ignition key; Loki starts it by shorting two wires, which seems to be the usual practice for this specific vehicle.
Loki peels out after the SUV. However, even with his divine powers, he is having trouble tracking it in the mass of SUVs that clog the roads. Traffic slows; Loki turns on the radio to hear that an accident ahead was the result of someone attempting to drive on the right-hand side of the road, as was done only in French-speaking countries. That someone had subsequently lost an argument with a semi-trailer freighter.
Loki loses sight of the SUV…
which has been suddenly transported to Kosciusco, Mississippi. Jane, her son the high school quarterback (who secretly wants to become a 7/11 clerk/prostitute) and her two daughters (who had been voted at school most likely to become 7/11 clerks/prostitutes) then check into the local Super8 Motel for the night, using 26F as part of the payment for the room. The night desk clerk at the Super8 pockets 26F and after his shift is over goes into the 7/11 to buy a breakfast burrito and a YooHoo chocolate drink. He hands 26f to the clerk/prostitute in training who drops 26f into the till. As it turns out, the night clerk is the clerk/prostitute in training’s last customer of the night. 26f languishes in the till until…
…the morning.
Meanwhile, Loki is becoming more and more perplexed. He has somehow found his way to Alligator Alley, the highway that crosses Florida west-to-east, and the SUV bearing Joe and Jane and their family is nowhere in sight. He passes a sign: Miami 64 leagues, and idly wonders why the US doesn’t use Base 12 and the British Metric System like almost every other country in the world.
Suddenly there is a crunch. A small plastic lawnchair has fallen off the truck in front of Loki’s car, and he runs over it at speed. The view ahead through the windscreen is briefly obscured by flying plastic fragments. Loki abruptly lifts the car into the air to avoid additional obstacles–but then an unexplained gust of wind blows the car to the left, off the road. It hits a tree and falls to the ground.
Loki swears fluently and bangs the dash in frustration. The car’s heater switches on, heating the passenger compartment alarmingly. Loki doesn’t notice this, however, because he is distracted by a woman who appears behind the car. She is tall, blonde, and statuesque, and she bears three golden apples.
“Eris? Is that you?”
“No, I’m Anna Nicole Smith. Haven’t you seen my show?” Well, Loki hadn’t seen her show, or else he would have run away screaming. Unaware of the danger he was in, Loki accepted a golden apple from Anna, and bit into it.
He immediately knew that he had made a mistake, because…