Frances the Snark (or the Tower of Deafening Daredevilry)

[stretch old dusty limbs]

In the town of Ocanonda in the north-northwest part of Pitzmiel, on the coast of the Glaylish plain across from the Buntish Ocean -- where water bubbles of its own accord -- lay a snark den full of snarks. One snark in particular is the subject of this tale. Not just any snark. The snark was four-legged, hairy and tough, with an aardvark's disposition and a man's grasp of physics. Not just any man, but something like Niels Bohr's or Richard Feynman's grasp of phyics. Not just any physics, but quantum physics.

Now the town of Ocanonda was not of this Earth, but thanks to transdimensional teleportation and fibre optic spacetime-shifting the men of Ocanonda -- even ones who would mate with a snark -- had access to iTunes. This would mean nothing, of course, without an iPad. For Feynman in this universe was known only through the digital medium. Books of course, meant nothing along the coast of the Buntish Ocean. And all the better for the trees, particularly the knobblish and the punter trees, which heavily populated the Glaylish crescent, planted by colonial thrompets centuries before, during the Golden Age of Slag, the wanton trade of which conspiracy theorists believed made the Buntish waters boil. Of course, not many worried about such theories five furlongs deep in the lagoons near where our snark did spend his middle decades - at the edge of the waters that touched Ocanonda and made her snark-maidens (fully snark and in no way human) moist-eyed with romance and other rubbish rot. A rather picturesque place - worthy of a postcard, if punter trees indeed had ever been felled for such an industry.

The snark we will come to know -- though only those inside his mind could say so -- was nicknamed Franny and realnamed Frances. He was a solid Glaylish plain-snark who moved to the seaside for opportunity, to work part-time in the Slag mines, and be low-level PR flak for the sub-prefect #4 of Ocanonda, aka His Honour, Commodius Flatus, who was appointed to the post for no other reason than his seaside land holdings which yielded 5% of income (much less than the usual 15%) to the Ocanonda-Pitzmiel SupraRegional Treasury. Commodius Flatus' vast and wind-stubbled homestead included forty hectare fruit-groves of wannabi-dates, but was in no other way extraordinary except for its peculiar road-side construction works that included a tall thin tower of frozen mud which housed a wizened black-nosed Slag-monk who was nicknamed One-Eyed Cecil and realnamed Snert Cecilius.

[unfinished of course]