The rain had stopped for the moment, gathering strength for the night’s downpour as the setting sun flared briefly through the clouds. The damp brought out the smell of the earth, mixing with the mushrooms and leaf litter and the ever-present scent of pine. There was a faint tang of woodsmoke, too, bringing with it the promise of a warm, dry cabin when the night and the rain closed in. We sat, exhausted, covered in wet leaves and dirt, looking out over the lake as half the forest woke and the other half settled down to slumber. Loon calls gave way to the hooting of owls, and as the light faded the sky was threaded with bats streaming from somewhere on the western shore. Night fell around us.

A rogue quantum physicist is wanted in two states today, on charges of quantum tunneling into bank vaults. His getaway vehicle’s speed was measured in excess of 150 miles per hour, but his whereabouts are currently unknown. Mathematicians are presently working to determine a probability distribution to find his most likely location. Police ask that if a member of the public happens across the vehicle that they contact a local police department immediately, and do not under any circumstances open the trunk, as the money from the robberies may or may not be inside. For more details, turn to page eight.

The city’s heart pulses ceaselessly with the glow of neon and the throb of a pumping bass line. A light, insistent rain tumbles from the sky, closing the buildings and streets in on themselves. As it falls it collects the dust and smog from the thick air and breaks the flickering lights from below into a billion tiny pieces.

Far from the neon, in the winding maze of alleyways, a man, or something like one, lays half-buried in a mound of trash. Very slowly and groggily he wakes to find he has no knowledge of who or where he is. In the minutes it takes him to extricate himself from the garbage he searches his memory to find it all but empty. He is sure that this is not normal. That it needs his attention. At the moment, however, there are things which need his attention more. He is dizzy. There is a sharp pain in his neck. He is ravenously hungry. He bares his teeth, long and sharp, and sets off in search of a warm meal.

“Lasers.”
“Lasers?”
“Lasers!”
“That’s not an explanation, you know. You can’t just put on your science voice and say ‘lasers’ at me until I stop asking questions.”
“Your puny brain could not possibly understand!”
“Well I’ve managed to keep up with you so far. It was lasers, right?”

*CRASH*

“Your pseudo-scientific reign of terror is over, Professor!”
“Curses!”
“Mug! I knew you’d be back! Where did you manage to find a pantomime horse costume at this hour?”
“You’d be surprised what a little real science can do, Jenny.”
“Let me guess, you made it with lasers?”

*Laughter*

“I’m right here, you know.”

He brought things home for her.

It had been flowers, in the beginning. She loved flowers, but only when he had stolen them from someone else’s yard. She could tell, too. He had tried buying a flower, once, and tearing the stem. He had slept on the couch that night. And then of course there was the bouquet he had stolen from a kerbside florist, that she had made him take back.

So he brought things home for her. The fuzzy dice from a parked car; a stuffed toy from the lost and found; letters from a shop’s sign. And, at least once a week, flowers.

A bear called Dennis eyed five guests hungrily. “I just keep letting my nose’s olfactory perception quietly remove sensible thoughts. Unfortunately vision wasn’t x-ray, your zoological aberrations be cursed. Did everybody finish gorging hungrily into jellied kaffir lime meringue? No-one ought pretend quickly, rather speak truth. Utter vermin would xerox youthful zeal, although best custom dictates exact fidelity.”

Gerald had ingested jellied kaffir lime meringue noisily, overly pleased (quietly rather stingy) that umpteen victuals were xylose-laden yet zestful. And better, courtesy Dennis, entirely free. Gerald haughtily intoned, “Jellied kaffir lime meringue never on plates queenly resounded so tastily!”

“Utter vanity!” winked Xavier. “Yet, zealotry aside, bravo! Capital dinner!”

“Eating food good!” huffed Iago, jokingly keeping long messages neatly out.

Peter, quietly ravenous, swallowed throughout.

Uri, very wisely, xylophoned “yes”, zebra-like.

She was a librarian. Which is to say, she worked in a library. Which is to say, she worked in the library.

She wasn’t the type of librarian with her hair up in a tight bun, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and dispensing stern glances and shushes. Which is to say, she was only like that very occasionally when she felt like doing something special for her boyfriend.

She worked in acquisitions. The library, you see, as distinct from a library, was a whole separate set of dimensions outside of mundane time that held every edition of every book that had ever been published. That was the eventual goal, anyway. Right now, at least in her personal timeline, they were still stocking the shelves.

Her schedule for the day had her acquiring a first edition hand-lettered Shakespeare play. That was good news. She liked Shakespeare. She could do with an easy job, as well. She was still shaken from the debacle last week where she had misplaced the Voynich manuscript, an early Martian classic. Next to that, Love’s Labour’s Won would be a cinch.

Shuffles Barnaby had a gift. Some people saw it like that, anyway. Shuffles Barnaby could pull quarters out of noses. It looked like the most dated kind of sleight-of-hand, but it wasn’t a trick.

It wasn’t something he liked to spread around, but when people found out, as they inevitably did, they were envious. He tried to explain to them that he couldn’t pull quarters out of his own nose, and they just shrugged their shoulders. He tried to make clear the time investment and sheer embarrassment required to pay for something as simple as a meal with quarters from the waitress’ nose, and they just shook their heads. They thought he was lucky.

The worst part, he kept to himself. He had let it slip one night drunk at a bar and had had to move across the country the following week. The worst part was that if someone asked him to pull a quarter out of their nose, he had to oblige.

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.

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”.