Patty Pille provides perspective on paradoxical Peepergate poop-heads

So depressed by the experience I don't even feel like dressing up

A few weeks back (and against Dad's explicit orders--boy am I grounded... and in the aviation sense, too--the Krakenator is locked in the hanger for two weeks!) I slipped through the Peepergate to see what was up on our echo world, "da Urth." The destination was an institution of higher learning out in the countryside not all that far from where--on our world--the Institute is located, way up in the nice north part of Narragansett. I figured it would be easy to blend in with students, my accent wouldn't be noticed (my Merkan was good but not that good), and any odd habits (by "Urther" standards) probably wouldn't be seen as all that odd. Students everywhere--even on distant Ishtar--tend to be pretty much the same (although I can't vouch for the students inside Ishtar, if there are any... and boy does that idea send a chill up my spine!).

I tagged along with Nivea Tangyeer's topological-geographic team (Topo-Geos we call them at the Institute, after the optical wireless animated mouse) that was going "Through the Looking-Gate" (as the techies refer to Peepergate travel to "Urth") to check out some oddball orgonic emissions far up a fairly large and familiar-looking river that's probably our Erlkönig--I forgot to look at a map before leaving home. They dropped me off at a school called Ham-shure near a quaint village named Ham-hurst which appeared to be an independent city-state rather than a part of Merka--they flew their own flag in front of their castle, a vile baby blue colored one decorated with a sniper's gun-site caught or carried in a soldier ant's serrated pincers. The symbolism--certainly martial and aggressive and reeking of global domination--was, fortunately, lost to me. Confusingly, it shared a flagpole with the stock whimsical Merkan starry pajamaflag. A colony perhaps? A defeated aggressor nation flaunting its former aspirations of conquest?

It was fairly early in the evening but dark as Helle. Beloved D'Anna wasn't up yet to light the evening, and the whole campus was more scruffy forest than dorm and classroom. It all seemed odd--this was hardly a Universität in the standard Erden mold, and as I strolled around looking for signs of life, listening to distant mechanical drumming (!) and primitive (and incredibly bad) scat-illogical shout-rhyming, it was coming across more like some nutty-arsed Autistic-Horrorist camp deep in the cedar forests of Puta Babylon. In the distance even was an awful yurt/dome thingie but made up of cheap metal tubing formed into triangles. Oh Creatrix! A Brushminster hemi-demi-sicle, and in the flesh! Leave it to the "Urthers" to actually build something purely theoretical we Erdens knew on sight would leak like tea strainer and be impossible to inhabit.

Finally, after stumbling around the lamest looking hodge-podge of run-down structures imaginable, I met up with a cluster of young-uns that must have been students although they lacked that bright eyed and bushy-tailed quality I naturally associate with their curious and eager brethren. More disturbingly, not a one of these kittens carried any books! A tall and sickly looking yet seemingly friendly one spoke to me.

(to be continued)