[Mike 5]

Almost in tears, Mike 5 stumbles in wearing 3 inch heels, laddered fishnets, cheap plastic earrings, his rugged male features plastered with the crude colours and make-up of Mrs Potato Head.

"you bastard" she screams at Robert, whose' shadow inexplicably seemed to hover like a ghost over an empty bar stool.

"all the other boys and girls have taken the best avatars and all that's left is this! Just look at me! You think this is funny?" Her voice a crescendo of recrimination and destiny.

"It's all very well for you to have some Texas Da Vinci make you look like a Crusading Knight from some legend."

She starts smashing glasses and is assisted to the door and thrown into the street.

The barman picks up a broken stilletto and in an act of drunken degradation, fills it with whisky and drinks from it. Suddenly his face contorts and he drops lifeless to the floor. In the silence, a faint sobbing is heard from the mud outside...

[Mike 5]

For many cycles of what humans percieve of as time, and over seemingly endless pointless extensions of what humans perceive as space, an alien entity has watched this precious earth planet.

Randomly disembodied yet perversely still conscious, through the vagaries of being an outcast and just too curious for his own species and place and time, he or she has wandered the lonely corridors so close and yet so far from all that is deemed to be real.

There was just one narrow window of escape, tasteless and impalatable. She or he had watched the patterns of incarnation of living plants and creatures on this planet for enough cycles and attempted to squeeze into all that process, to be born into physicality again, to feel time, to breathe space, again, and make some bid for the exit portal, but over and over had failed. The alternative was like eating vomit. To approach some living being so recklessly desperate as to be actively wishing they were dead. The surgical process would be slick and the damnation of that soul to this place of restlessness, a necessary price to pay.

In the driving rain outside the many worlds pub, Mrs Potato Head was crying inaudibly, in the cold, stinking mud, and indeed she was wishing she was dead.

The skies seemed to clear by magic, a beam of light poking through like the finger of some god to spotlight the form of Mrs Potato Head. A mutual revulsion whispered through the air, causing insects to scream out and many small creatures to run for their lives. It was over in a moment.

An observer would have seen Mrs Potato Head, with a new light in her eyes, simply get up, discard her clothing and as the beam of light carried it’s helpless soul to another realm, Mrs Potato Head washed herself, naked in the pounding rain. Without another look at the buildings around her, she set off alone and apparently very happy, into the dark night.

Inside the Many Worlds Pub. The barman suddenly got up, wretched, and vomitted in a gushing spew that projected a full seven feet across the floor. For a moment the air itself seemed frozen with an otherworldly stillness.

Calm and businesslike, with new eyes that his own mother would never recognise, the barman calmly set about cleaning the mess. By midnight that night, the bar was spotless, as never before. A wry and infectious ready smile made the barman strangely attractive in his new haircut, and uncharacteristically groomed appearance. When the rain ended he cleaned up some mess outside the pub. Stooping down for a moment, he rescued a single, cheap, plastic clip-on earring from the mud and trash he had just swept together. Hurriedly cleaning it with his own saliva, he clipped the earring onto his left ear lobe and his grin became even wider. A curiously warm yet diabolical laugh cut through the night air, but was covered by the sound of distant thunder. As the first drops of rain fell, the barman had removed all other evidence that anything odd had happened that night.

But something, maybe several things, had changed.

[Robert]

Robert returns from the mens room to sit at his usual bar stool, but there is a commotion outside. Robert turns his head to the bar room door, eyes wide in curiosity, and spots the ugliest woman he has ever laid eyes upon! Or is it a man? Robert is confused but is certain that he must hide from this hideous creature. Robert adeptly leaps to the corner of the long bar so quickly he seemingly leaves his shadow hovering over the now empty bar stool.

"You Bastard!", Robert hears as he watches this ugly lady (man?) stumble in on 3 inch heels, laddered fishnets, cheap plastic earrings. Robert realizes that it is Mike 5 who has donned Mrs Potato Head, and can barely control is laughter. Robert thinks, "Finally somebody choose that last remaining avatar". Robert suppresses an urge to laugh out loud. Mike 5 goes a bit crazy and the bartender has to throw Mrs. Potato Head out into the street. Robert starts to step out from the corner to shake hands with the bartenders and to Congr....

BOOM! Robert's eyes focus on the bar room floor and he gasps, "The bartender has passed out? This is unusual". Then Robert hears a faint sobbing from the mud outside and then a chill runs up his spin. A chill like none other before. Mice can be heard scampering off to their nests. The chill in the air was palpable.

The whining outside stopped. Robert steps back a little farther into the shadows, not knowing what would happen next. Robert's mind is whirling, "What that? The bartender is standing up? What is he going to do?" The bartender suddenly leans back, opens his mouth, and gushes a vomit stream a full seven feet across the room to the shadows where Robert is hiding. But Robert is unnoticed by the bartender who is somehow different now. Roberts heart is beating faster now. No. Not faster, but louder. Thump. Thump. Thump. While the bartender was cleaning the mess Robert kept to the shadows and slowly made his way to the door where he quietly slipped outside to a strange stillness.

Robert was able to leave the pub but something, maybe several things, had changed.

[michellemfry]

Just as Robert thought all was clear, he made his way home to the tidy one bedroom apartment that he made his abode. He had given up the coffin and cape fantasy years ago when he took his final vows and gave up the Dark Secret for the TOE quest.

He finally took rest only to be ravaged in the dark by Mrs. Potato Head and her twin sister, Picasso Woman. She was a twin, but not like Mrs. Potato Head at all. She was not ugly anymore. She was more like Carly, but disassembled. As if God, itself, couldn't bear to close any more seams on the poor shredded girl who had just emerged form the so-called non-existent white hole.

He tried the split his desires into two. He wanted away from Mrs. Potato Head and he wanted Picasso Woman as much as the TOE. He struggled with the genetics of the twin thing. Did it matter? Or not? Could he predict the outcome of this whole situation? He had to know everything if he was going to put to rest his reviling feelings for Mrs. Potato Head and his endangered attraction for Picasso Woman.

After all, it wasnt her fault that the black hole she fell into shredded her so callously, and the white hole mercifully returned all of her to her since it cannot bear any matter whatsoever, not even a speck.

On through the night he dreamed. He dreamed of her cells, her blood, her bones crunching in the hole. What terrors she had been through!

What unspeakable knowledge she must possess. He managed to use her to rid his bones of Mrs. Potato Head. It was working. The nausea eased it's grip.

The morning sun had brought him to his senses, all infinite number less one of them. He awoke to the truth, which he thought he loved.

Carly walks into the bedroom and asks for his attention.

He looks at her as if he is seeing her for the first time. Has she ever known such horror, such pain, such spacetime as cruel as the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy?

She did, but she never thought any man would be interested in the story. It was hideous, it was the truth.. And it hadn't been loved for years.

She looked hard and long at her beloved. Let's go for a drink tonight, she replied. It was time they had a talk about highs and lows and why the lows ought to be shunned. Life is good anywhere before the hole. After that, it
takes an infinite amount of intimacy to even describe the after effects.

She considers the twin she left behind, the hole ahead, and then thought of Robert. Slowly, breathing only just a little, she jumped in, intentionally this time. The rest of the day had brought a change, something, maybe several things, had changed.

[theunify]

The unify enters his ID number and enters the phrase "cheap beer"; he gets whisked to a bar reeking of Vomit.

"What happened" exclaims theunify
Suddenly theunify notices the bartender has quit and he takes all the remaining booze, whatever happened here says theunify "I'm Sure glad cheap means free cause I'm broke."

theunify continues his tour of open for business pubs and goes back into the Interdimensional System, I.S.