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”.

The city’s engines were old. Decrepit, most people would call them. Miss Rebbecca Pannicot called them vintage. The engine room was her domain, a job passed down to her by her father and his father before him. The council had expressed a concern when she, at a bright young eight years of age, had shown up to work the day after her father’s death. The problem was, nobody else knew the engines like she did. Much to the council’s dismay it turned out that nobody else knew the engines at all. So she was back the next day, solemnly ordering about boys twice her age.

There was a jungle outside my front door this morning. Sorry if I don’t sound adequately phased by that. Believe me, I’ve been through all the relevant emotions. Disbelief, astonishment, confusion, despair, fear, anger. Even swearing. After today I’ve decided that swearing can be an emotion. If you’d been here you’d understand.

I suppose I should point out that I’m not being metaphorical here: it’s literally a jungle out there, not figuratively. It’s not just that Sissy forgot to prune her geraniums, either. I went out a ways. Kept the door in sight. I heard some kind of big cat in the distance, though. Couldn’t tell you which, it’s not the kind of thing that’s come up before. Anyway, I came back and I threw the latch and I haven’t been out again.

Outside the kitchen window it looks more like woods. Not quite as wild. I didn’t notice that to begin with, but I’ve had a few hours to sit and look at it now and it’s definitely different to the front. The bedroom window looks like Antarctica. Lots of ice, not much else. Cold as hell, too. I think I’ll be sleeping down here tonight.

Sissy was banging on the wall, earlier. At least I think it was Sissy. These walls are thick, and I couldn’t hear well but from what I could tell it’s not just my apartment that’s… wrong. Not sure about the other two. No sound from the new couple on the other side of me, but they could just be curled up in a ball in a corner. I did that for a while. It helped some, but not much.

Anyway, this is like the third message I’ve left, in case you didn’t get the other two for some reason. I’m not sure what you’ll find when you show up for our date tonight. I get the feeling we might have to take a rain check. Call me back.

The forest was full of secret places. A small clearing known only to a family of deer. A track hidden beneath brush that had been a favourite hunting trail of foxes for many summers past. A shallow depression in a cliff face that held an ancient nest, neat and tidy and never used. Aiko knew them all. She was the only one who did. Hotaru had begun to learn the ways of the forest, but there were some things that could only come from ten years spent walking the trails.

There was no telling where the dragon would be. The past two nights she had stalked these ways, working her way to the summit, leaving no stone unturned. There was no guarantee, even, that it had not slipped past her and settled in some hollow she had already checked. The mountain was too large to cover in one night; too large even to cover properly in three. As she made her way up the slopes, senses on a knife edge, Aiko knew that tonight she would have to make some hard decisions. This was the last night she had, and there was not enough time to check everywhere she had not yet been. She checked only the powerful spots: the waterfall under the towering beeches; the caves behind the moss wall; the clearing filled with the bubbling of an underground stream. It was dangerous, of course. Hotaru was looking for her and the powerful places were the only ones she would think to look. Unfortunately, there was no other choice.

It was midnight when Aiko arrived at the summit. This was the spot upon which she had pinned her hopes. There, coiled about the trunk of the massive pine that crowned the peak, eyes fixed on her as she came, the dragon waited.

Nearing the ocean, the freeway rose above the surrounding streets on massive concrete pylons, splitting and spreading in off-ramps and on-ramps and fly-overs and fly-unders like some parody of a river delta. Traffic was a constant crawl on the streets below, and at this time of night it began to clog up the ramps and spread upwards. Falling Blossom didn’t even ease up on the accelerator. She shifted her weight back and up and under its black cowling the skeleton of the bike adjusted accordingly. The chassis sucked in its metal gut and the tires pulled up the edges of their thick contact patches, built for road-hugging speed, to give her more maneuverability.

She shot between cars that might as well have been parked, kicked back and forth across lanes and soon she was through the crush and climbing the slow rise of the bridge stretching out over the Pacific to the lights out across the water. Lemuria, the strip’s answer to the problem of overcrowding. Normally Falling Blossom loved watching the lights over the water at night, but tonight her attention was on the shore to the north, where the lights and barbed wire of the pirate compound were clearly visible.

The trees breathed deep of the night air as Aiko flitted from shadow to shadow. The stealth made her feel safer, but she knew it was no doubt pointless. The forest knew she was here, which meant the dragon knew she was here. The unsheathed steel in her hand could leave little doubt as to why.

“You cannot do this, Aiko.” Hotaru, her pupil, stood on the path ahead. “You of all people know why.”
Stealth really was pointless now, thought Aiko. She had taught her pupil well. Stepping from the shadows, she narrowed her eyes. “I sent you to the next village to help in their hospice,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“You know why I’m here,” said Hotaru. As she spoke, she dropped a hand to the hilt of the sword strapped to her waist.
“I will not kill you, Hotaru, but I will not be stopped. Do not be so foolish as to draw that blade.”
“The spirit of this forest, of this mountain, protects our village. Without it we are lost.”

“My illness is worse than you suppose,” Aiko snarled. “Without the dragon’s heart I will be dead in days. By tomorrow night I will be too weak to do what I must.”
“Hundreds of people will die!”
“Nobody will die. Life may become harsher here, but to the West the villages grow into towns. Our people will find new lives there if they must.”
“All this to save your own life,” Hotaru shook her head. “Your life is pledged to the village. You should give your life in its protection, not the other way around.”
“I owe another pledge. One much older. Saving my own life is not my concern. I must survive to save another.”
Hotaru’s grip tightened and twisted on her sword hilt. Aiko sighed. This was time she could not afford.
“I am truly sorry, Hotaru,” she said. “My position is yours now. Take care of them as you must.”
This seemed to make Hotaru’s mind up, but before her sword was fully drawn Aiko had melted back into the forest.

“By the dust! What happened to you?”
Clara’s feet had only just hit the ground. She slipped the shard of mirror from her belt and palmed it as she straightened and turned toward the voice. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness. There was a shape crouched there in the shadows. Before she could identify it, it stood and spoke again.

“Are you hurt?” it asked.
It was her client. The nice one, not the dead one.
Clara glanced down at her hands. “Not really,” she said. “What are you doing here? I thought you left.”
“One of Marcus’ lieutenants was at the bar when I went out. I’ve been keeping an eye on the place.”
“Lieutenant. hey? Not anymore,” she waved the makeshift blade in her hand in explanation, then tucked it back into her belt.
“That explains the blood, then,” he sounded impressed. “Dale could find him any minute, we should get you out of sight. Come on, I know somewhere nearby.”

Moros stood atop the rocky outcrop, his hair spiking in the charged air. He clutched his sword with both hands, leaning his weight on it just a little. A thin trickle of blood came down his right arm from somewhere beneath his sleeve. The onlookers were slowly recovering, and one started towards him from the tree line.
“Stay back!” he called. “Stay amongst the trees! This isn’t over yet.”
Without moving his eyes from their constant scan of the surroundings he hooked one foot under the body, hooded and masked, that lay beside him, and with a heave sent it tumbling to the waves below. More room to move now; that was important.

The charge in the air grew suddenly, and Moros shifted his grip slightly. As the lightning forked down from the sky he was already moving, his blade scraping along the rock then coming up in a wide arc. His opponent was there suddenly, cast in stark relief as the lightning struck the ground between them in a crash that drowned the clash of blades. The battle was joined.

There was an impression he had in her presence. Something he couldn’t quite place. Sometimes it seemed like a quality of the light; sometimes it was almost a sound. Sometimes, she seemed to fill the room.

He took to watching how other people interacted with her, when he could — stall-holders, bus-drivers, children on the street. As far as he could tell nobody else could sense whatever it was.

He had always loved watching her. Loved looking at her. Every inch of her fascinated every inch of him. This puzzle was no exception, and sometimes he wondered whether it wasn’t an excuse he made himself to revel in her all the more.

It wasn’t until the night that she held him as they fell asleep that the mystery was finally solved, and he felt her wings fold around him.

They were trying to open a portal into an alternate universe, you see. The idea was to use quantum entanglement events as the branch points in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to form an entangled link across parallel universes. It didn’t work as planned, but the surprising thing was that it did in fact work. There were two problems: the first was that they came up with a way to send information across the link, but not matter or energy. The second was that the link only held while the parallel universe was close to our own.

It seemed a shame to throw out the technology just because it didn’t do what they had wanted it to, so they tried plugging a voice transmission system into it. Since the parallel universe on the other end was very close to this one, the scientists there did too, and suddenly the scientists were talking to themselves. Now, of course, they sell the things in those fancy online gadget stores. It turns out, being able to talk to a slightly different version of themselves is a great help to a lot of people in crises or times of indecision. Some people, of course, come very quickly to the realisation that they are prats.