24th November, 1993
The sea was as calm as they had seen it since beginning their journey some four months earlier. The sails hung slack and lifeless and the midday sun beat down on them oppressively. Still there was no sight of land and they were trying not to succumb to the feeling that they were never going to make the distant shore. All they had left to eat was some octopus they had bought at Gizo in the Solomans, and some shark they caught off New Guinea. Ozalp sighed, again the blossoms distant. ``Where is my lovely tree now?''. His nose glistened moistly and Prunella knew at once why she had fallen in love with him. She pressed against him, her breathing becoming more and more like a crazed elephant. The shiny mucus globule ran slowly down the inner core of his nostril, gathering momentum. It bulbed into a silver ball and erupted in a sodden crescendo. Prunella screamed ecstatically.
Stuart laughed! Fortunately, the island that pierced the hull of the boat only tousled Anja's amber hair, which had no effect on the sudden sinking of the wooden hulk. As the survivors swam drunkenly towards their death, they died. The axe was raised, and her heart was pounding. She wondered if he could hear it. She shrank back further into the shadows striving to keep her breathing shallow and quiet. He continued laughing manically. Abruptly fed up with being laughed at, Prunella launched herself outward and upward, using the shadows as a launchpad. The axe clanged, biting deeply into the floor. The floor, resenting being bitten, somersaulted, leading Arthur to ask if this was the penultimate ocean.
Raising the samurai sword above her head, Prunella realised it was a no-sword, and sipped her tea. ``If only I'd met Basho, all this would exist.'' However, as it didn't she was forced to resume a life of tedium and ordinariness, watching Days of Our Dreary Doctors' Lives and knitting lime green sleeveless vests that were three sizes too small for the only love left in her life; herself. It's funny how quickly a life of tedium changes to a life of excitement however, so we rejoin a giggling, chorkling Prunella a scant 5 minutes later as she struggles to cope with the fact that `chorkling' isn't an English word. A minute passed, as did a flock of slugs and a student. Then another student passed. Must be an easy exam. She bit her lip anxiously, then bled to death. The vultures circled overhead, waiting for the packs of rabid street children to finish her off before they moved in for any scant leftovers.
Stuart laughed. His plan was coming along nicely. Little did he know that what he mistook for a perfectly good plan was actually a pipe to ~prunella/core - the shattered remains of Prunella's life. Whether he knew it or not, his fate was tied to Prunella's kneebrace (after removing the trailing dot). Her mistaken identity was as nothing compared to it, and therein lay the problem. Again they rallied around Australia - a most grueling test on cars and drivers. Dennis had the lead but Ozalp (driving a Goggo mobile) was only 1'23" behind at the last checkpoint. Now only a few hundred dry and dusty kilometres remained and Ozalp was determined to overcome the nausea which gripped him (he had a bad experience with a car once), and beat Dennis to the finish. Dennis, of course was keen to be beaten, although perhaps in a different way than expected. The nausea continued to grip him, which began as mildly annoying but which was now becoming quite pleasurable in a perverse kind of way. Finally his patience ran out and he beat the nausea over the head with a sprint that would have made Jesse Owen proud.
Watching these events from the beach, Aethelfrith realigned her countenance. Crashing through the trees came several blind dogs who ate her! She turned and ran emotionally through the undergrowth, breathless, terrified and completely confused, wondering how she could be running after she had been consumed. Wait a minute! This aint no party! This aint no disco. This aint no foolin' around. She decided that since they were just AI processes all she needed to do was hack the kernel and cut herself a higher priority in the scheduler. Using the local handy-bank she L1-A'd the universe. Within seconds she was able to bring the universe up in single-user mode. Unfortunately, it was now running SVR4 with the result that she didn't quite make it into singleuser mode because it prompted for the root password. After a moment she typed in the password on first try: 42. She then withdrew $100, leaving a floating point in her wake, amid other jetsam.
As the eerily warm sun beat down upon them, they began to explore the island. What caused the supermarket they found to be uninhabited, nobody could remember due to the severe plague of amnesia in the area. ``I thought so,'' mused Ozalp, punching buttons furiously on his calculator. ``According to my calculations, the end of the universe occurred four thousand years later''. He sank, a difficult feat when standing on concrete. The bout of amnesia passed; unfortunately they'd forgotten they had it. An espresso sat there, waiting to be drunk. To help it along, Patrick bought it several pints of Coopers Ale and before long they were singing Auld Lang Syne until the waitress tipped the espresso down the sink. Heartbroken, cupbroken and stained, Patrick expressed as profound a desire as he could. Dennis took the waitress while nobody was watching.
Later that hyena, chiming llamas left the elderberry fields. Dennis (dragging waitress) took control of the situation and guided it smoothly between the trees until he slipped on a pool of oil, spilt by a rotary mango picker, and came to grief and happiness in a sudden satori. A quiet moment, taken aback by an interesting haiku. This sentence wishes to apologise for the story so far. In actual fact, but in all probability, that was a completely impossible event to have occurred. Therefore, we apologise for the unlikeliness of all events portrayed in this story. In fact... aarrggghh. The author was strangled by a wad of packing tape that didn't exist, and so as he unstrangled himself from the tape, it was as if nothing had happened. In fact, as the liquid paper bore d n up n th m, n b dy kn w w t w s h pp n ng! A hand appeared, as if from nowhere, which again is so unlikely that rationalists have taken this to be a sign directing Japanese tourists to Ayers Rock, The Olgas, and the mens toilet.
All of this was just as unlikely as Prunella bursting into the room with a bloody knife and declaring that she had killed her lover, Ozalp, in a lustful romp gone wrong. Suddenly, Prunella burst into the room with a thud, followed by Warren and Callum. ``How did we get here?'' Callum asked. ``Damn teleport must be stuffed again''. As these words reverberated around, Ozalp plunged the samurai sword into his chest, right up to the hilt. He ceased to function properly. Callum quickly did a:
% sed -e 's/Callum/Fred/g' < story > story.new % mv story.new story
and thus couldn't be implicated at all in the alleged murder of anyone in this haiku. Smiling smugly, he had Prunella re-enter the room, this time in a floral outfit made entirely of small spotted llamas whose sole existence could be barely achieved given the scale of things to come. Likewise, amidst the nearby grove of elms stood a dark figure, dripping shiraz and playing a haunted tune on an Ethiopean nose-flute. David could not remember why he had suddenly entered the fray so he stayed in the shower for several days until he was finally washed down the plughole. Meanwhile, the dark figure laughed - it was a hollow evil sound. No, that was just the pipe he was standing in at the time. He slunk into the shadows and was getting into `Ghost Riders in the Sky' when the strings on his guitar broke. Realising that the chainsaw which was dissecting him had something to do with it, he ran off awkwardly over the sand dunes towards the fishing knoll which had three pointy points on it. These were probably used for pocking passers-by and causing amnesia. Several people were asleep on the way out, and again at an indeterminate point in the future. Despite the setting sun boiling the distant ocean, and occasionally given enough encouragement, Melinda rang through to base. ``I need my iguana with seven minutes to spare,'' she stated, cryptically, which was really not that unusual given the storyline so far. Nonetheless, she whipped out a pocket llama and set it on a course for Barbados where it would explode on impact. What would Patrick (who smelt quite off) do about the predicament? Eating was never a solution. But as the fragmentation bomb hit them. They panicked. Terrified, they. Ran quickly. Anja screamed. Again and again. And over again. Over and over. Over and Over. CONTINUOUSLY! In the process, several major trading centres were struck by severe earthquakes and the small hamlet of Westborough burnt to the ground. Charred people chased Anja down a small hole, previously owned by Lex the funnelweb. Currently it was owned by media magnate, Kerry Packer, who used it as a tax inspector in a nearby punnet of sunflowers. Needless to say, and it was.
Grabbing their surfboards, the now deranged party set back out across the turbulent (if not ebulent) sea. Passing a glue factory, they began to flow fluidly until they stopped. Using the glue and surfboards they built a monument to Nigel, patron saint of nerds, and then continued their pursuit of fame, fortune, and decent Friday night TV shows. They forgot to take Deidre with them, and soon passed the Statue of Liberty who was on holidays in Bermuda at the time. Nonethemore, over the next wave was a pirate ship. Cap'n Fishface and his filthy crew loaded their cannons and attacked! Only fate could kill them off as quickly as what was about to occur. Luckily, this story was about Prunella, primarily, and her Haiku had had quite enough terror for one day, so they were let off the hook.