[baudrunner]

The pub is hushed. For some seemingly unknown reason the music stops. The drinks creep slowly from the glasses resting on the table and surreptitiously into the minds of the the darkened denizens of this Many Worlds Pub. All eyes turn squintingly toward the doors as the sunlight of a thousand stars frames the Baudrunner as he enters, blinded by the darkness. The bartender already has his favorite beer in her hands as she simultaneously takes an order from the Chameleon changing color ensconced uncomfortably in his only stool behind the bar. The go-between-waitress intercepts the bottle as the eyes in paired groupings follow the Baudrunner to his favorite table where he sits himself down, gazing awkwardly to the empty stage and at the residual boa fluffs that breezes whisp about. It is always so, never changing, the music picks up once more as the go-between-waitress flops herself down on the Baudrunner's lap, waiting for the sage to manifest from the curdled fermentations of his smoke and drink addled mind. His is a changing face, now Dean Martin, then Jerry Lewis, then Tony Bennet, as he sings coolly nonchalantly, putting his arm around her and raising the bottle with the other, "Howsa, babe, let's talk - about the first thing that pops up!" The eyes return to their mystic attentions as he is again ignored, as he would have it here.

She says not a word, motions to the discourse at the table where Michelle and Robert are playing their minds around a missing Margarita. No concern of his, he raises the palm of his hand to cup the waitress on her nicely rounded shoulder stroking it, then pulls a silver dollar out of her ear, flipping it neatly into her waiting outstretched hand. All drinks cost a dollar here.

"Free will is a relative thing," he begins, "what I make of it."

[baudrunner]

"How free a will is it if we are granted it, as the story goes?"

The baudrunner draws a quantum of brew from the bottomless bottle. The go-between-waitress casts a wary glance at his eyes as she shifts deliberately from her perch on his thigh.

"You're not going to get all philosophical on me, are you?"

They have played this game before. But she and the others know that it is better not to wonder too quickly at the intent of what he says lest the wizened fool within his heart finds the vulnerable spot within theirs, but that it is better to read into the content and determine thereafter whether it be fit to laugh or toast the poet.

"Is the pop-up not a transgression against my will if I will it otherwise? Are not the spies and covert data snatchers in this cyber world a transgression against my will? For who would want their bandwidth hijacked if they are only permitted so much of it? Should I not have the free will to decide to revoke that permission that was so cleverly wheadled out of me when I was innocent?"

With that the go-between-waitress slides off the baudrunner's knee and lifts her tray away as she saunters off. "I really don't know what you're on about! Let me know if you need another." Indeed, another bottomless bottle in a bottomless world.

The baudrunner peers with curious bewilderment at the gnu exiting from the men's room. "How does he wash his hands," he muses, then back to the pattern on the carpet.

"Oh woe, I have a need for speed, and the pace of things does not satisfy me." Then, "..yet I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal labotamy."

[theunify]

theunify jumps to a rest at the weirdest bar on his journey.
He leaves the bar before anyone questions him. Leaves a note saying 'went to the shopping center'