There are days when I wake up and automatically slip into a well-practiced routine, and if my brain weren't numbed beyond self-analytical, cognitive thought, the sheer, utter predictability and drudgery of it would make me question not only my sanity, but also my whole existence. With a brain only half engaged, the world takes on an unreal, dream-like quality, which although superficially pleasant, soon envelops you in a cocoon of laziness, where all thoughts are fleeting and where procrastination begrudgingly wins an uneven battle against motivation. Denial sets in.

It was in this condition of mentality that the following events took me by surprise and unfolded on a sweltering summer day. (The following posts have been edited from actual rp and are being posted with the permission of the players: Cooper, Liza and Piper.)

There is no mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn"or worse, indifference"cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present. But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning"the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life"a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. For himself, he had always chosen meaning. Which, he supposed upon reflection, is how he came to be waiting in the sweltering heat in late July, for the arrival of the one man in the world he wanted most to throttle for an unwarranted accusation, in the unlikely company of a man he had only encountered once before, in a far off Eastern port. That they had established a fast camaraderie was a plus. Who could have foretold the dealings that would unfurl over the course of the coming weeks" "Bastard isn't coming." At 7 p.m. there was still no sign of the man on the docks or in the neighboring pubs. Cooper was waiting at the harbor for the same reason as Krane. He could hardly contain himself, fidgeting and smoking incessantly.

"The devil with this, lets be on our way. Get some stout drinks into our belly' The heat was murderous, the air thick with the reek of fish. An unnatural fog rose from the water, as if the sea were steaming. Horns sounded heavily out in the deeper water, their sources invisible. Even the keening gulls could be only heard, not seen. Twilight came, but the temperature did not abate. Cooper gave one last seething look around the quickly deserted docks before turning away in disgust.

As they walked, Reggie filled him on the developments he had learned so far. "Narbasser is definitely dead. Having succumbed to two rather nasty thrusts to his chest with a dagger of questionable origin. But dead nevertheless, although before dying he composed the twenty-page manuscript that has more or less screwed up my life, or killed me, I don't know which yet. Or maybe the little dockworker is more to blame, because he dropped the thing in my lap and then got himself murdered." Or the girl, the woman he should say, she has to carry some freight for this, because he seriously doubted he would have plunged as he had, into this mad chase if he had not spied her long smooth neck rising from her collar there in the court room where he was fighting for his life and freedom, and wanted to kiss it so much it made his jaw hurt.

Naturally, no mention of the kink in his thoughts were made to Cooper as they made a final circle around the square and headed toward the promise of drink and oblivion. Why bring up the woman and muddle the business at hand" Of that, there were no doubts. Women were notorious for being illogical and clouding up the facts.

"That manuscript." Still brooding over the subject that had been discussed as they paced the docks. "They say it is the rarest ever recorded, Krane. Seen only once, by Captain Reese's second expedition. A routine collecting party on a South Sea island known then as Thornton. A single specimen captured, of a species never seen before. Preserved by some chap named Forster and brought back to England. Nothing like it ever found again, on Thornton or anywhere else. Extinct before it was ever really discovered." He fell silent again, musing over the minute details.

There was a sidelong glance toward Cooper, his brooding walking companion, as the cigar was tossed out to die a slow death on the road. How did he manage it' He never hurried and appeared to never be late; he just loped about like a well-fed cat, giving off an air of slight distraction, as if his mind was always on higher things. "Cool drinks will take this heat off our intellect and allow us to think clearly."

Stepping through the small gate, he motioned toward the path leading around the house toward the garden where he knew the women preferred to gather and gossip like fishmongers wives. "I'll introduce you to the girls. Their incessant chatter should be enough to numb your mind to this current development.?

It had always been like this: people in trouble make the best parties. Piper was watching Mister Krane expectantly while he fidgeted under her scrutinizing gaze. Liza was trying to distract Cooper. Of the four, it was clear that it was the males in trouble. The source of danger was yet to be determined.

The two men moved through the room like gardeners inspecting the flowerbeds of English estates, like plantation owners on market day. Whatever it is like, Liza doesn't care. She will be the flower, the slave, the pretty thing or the despised and necessary thing, as long as she is the thing chosen from among the other things by Cooper. "Come with me, Coop. I have something to show you." A conspiratorial wink was carelessly applied on Krane before she was dragging Cooper out of the room.

Getting the man back into a forward motion before he could get good and settled was well planned. Luck had nothing to do with it. And Liza was lucky. Cooper had told her so; he told everyone after she fell in the Kalimore River, twice and didn't drown and didn't die of pneumonia. He had hoped she'd be lucky her whole life, he said, and she had been, at the time. "I refuse to gossip with you about the Culbreath's again." Fully aware that Liza was up to no go, Cooper delivered a meaningful look at Piper, full of alarm for Krane and admonition that she do something stupid before he was departing with Liza.

Piper turned her full charm and most engaging smile upon Mister Krane as the others left the room. Run, Mister Krane, run. "Care to sit, Mister Krane" You look a bit pale, if I may be so bold. A tad shocked perhaps?" This was no time for sipping upon the bourbon. She took a bracing drink before regarding him with a ghost of a smile.

"The sun is setting. Should be cooling off soon." He sounded like a moron. Reggie leaned forward with interest, but Piper apparently had no intention of talking about the weather, so he shrugged like a teenager, and then tried to think of some way to change the subject. What he did want to talk about, he realized, was Piper. I was trying to make a relationship work. But he couldn't say it. Not to this woman whose name he had only just attained after six months of useless research. That she was suddenly and without warning standing there before him was too much. He couldn't have kept quiet had his life been held in the balance. Again! "I saw you there, you know. Every day for a week."

Piper was circling him like a shark, ever closer, once Liza had expertly extracted Cooper and his meddlesome ways from the room. She had no doubt he would be kept lost and baffled with Liza's ceaseless chatter for some time. "Oh, I have no doubt whatsoever you saw me, Mister Krane. Indeed, it was my very intention that you should see me. And see me clearly this time. So there would be no mistakes."

"Mistakes" See you this time" What sort of mistakes?" Turning in a circle to follow her progress around the room, he set finally set himself into motion to cross the room until he stood near her side. "Where do you think I have made a mistake" Although we have seen each other before, we have only just met. And to the best of my recollection, I have not yet made any untoward mistakes with you."

Pausing by the window, she watched the departure of the oxen as they turned from the road, listened to the creak of the carts, observed merchants too exhausted to converse as they ambled homeward "At the docks, of course. Where you made your first mistake." When the last cart tumbled out of the market to progress across the bridge as the summer's day ends, bringing the last of the wine, the olives, the fruits, there is an almost suspenseful twinge in the house, even shared in it when she felt Reginald at her side and realized the man had her by a good half a foot. His jaw was block-shaped beneath coarse stubble, his lips, full and inviting in that smug grin. Body heat came off him in waves, mingled with a clean, soapy smell. Piper told herself to look at Reginald directly, to find his eyes before she spoke again, "Which is why I felt compelled to follow the progress of your trail. I take it since you are here in my living room, that you were acquitted?"

He felt his back stiffen, his jaw tightening at the mention of the docks, the murder trial and his concluding exoneration after what had seemed like months of affliction at the hands of a bungling legal system. His voice lowered to be shared between the two of them, "As you see, I am free man. So where exactly have I blundered" What mistake have I so grievously made?"

"I thought it was quite obvious, Mister Krane. It was the evening that I saw you kill that poor dockworker and take the manuscript.?

Her body ached. Her mind was throbbing with judgments and doubts. It was the first of what was promising to be many a dark, chilly night in September. Much like any other as the onset of autumn approached much faster than the annoyingly slow arrival of spring. On the contrary, she was feeling decidedly ill after Reginald's sudden departure.

A heavy gloom had descended over the streets, and was hanging like a black funeral-pall over the village. The greater number of its inhabitants, wearied by their long day's work, had hours before retired to stretch their tired limbs, and lay their aching heads upon their pillows. All was quiet in the large house; all was quiet in the deserted streets.

She too was lying in her bed: alas, not one of rest, but of pain and troublesome thoughts, to which she had been confined for some hours now. So still was everything in the house, that its stillness seemed almost audible. She could plainly hear the murmur of her blood, as it rushed through her vigilant form, producing that repetitive singing so familiar to one who lends a watchful ear to silence. She had listened to it until, in her nervous imagination, it had grown into the sound of a distant cascade, the fall of mighty waters" when, suddenly changing its character, the ever-growing 'singing" merged into other and far more welcome sounds. It was the low, and at first scarce audible, whisper of a human voice. It approached, and gradually strengthening seemed to speak in her very ear. Thus sounds a voice speaking across a blue dormant lake, in one of those wondrously acoustic gorges of the snowcapped mountains, where the air is so pure that a word pronounced half a mile off seems almost at the elbow. Yes; it was the voice of one whom to know is to respect; of one, to herself, owing to many mystic associations, most dear and holy; a voice familiar for long years and ever welcome; doubly so in hours of mental or physical suffering, for it always brings with it a ray of hope and consolation.

"Courage," it whispered in gentle, mellow tones. "Think of the days passed by you in sweet associations; of the great lessons received of Nature's truths; of the many errors of men concerning these truths; and try to add to them the experience of a night in this city. Consider a different truth of a strange life that will interest you and help to shorten the hours of doubt. . . Give your attention. Look yonder before you!"

"Yonder" apparently meant the clear, large windows of an empty house on the other side of the narrow street of the sullied little village. They faced her own in almost a straight line across the street, and her bed faced the windows of her sleeping chamber. Obedient to the suggestion, she directed her gaze toward them, and what she saw made her for the time being forget the agony of doubt that racked her mind.

Over the windows was creeping a mist; a dense, heavy, twisting, whitish mist, which looked like the huge shadow of a gigantic boa slowly uncoiling its body. Gradually it disappeared, to leave a lustrous light, soft and silvery, as though the window-panes behind reflected a thousand moonbeams, a tropical star-lit sky"first from outside, then from within the empty rooms.

Next she saw the mist stretch itself and throwing, as it were, a fairy bridge across the street from the bewitched windows to her own balcony, nay, to her very own bed. As she continued gazing, the wall and windows and the opposite house itself, suddenly vanished. The space occupied by the empty rooms had changed into the interior of another smaller room, in what she knew to be a familiar chalet from days long behind her"into a study, whose old, dark walls were covered from floor to ceiling with book shelves on which were many antiquated folios, as well as works of a more recent date. In the center stood a large old-fashioned table, littered over with manuscripts and writing materials. Before it, quill-pen in hand, sat an old man; a grim-looking, skeleton-like personage, with a face so thin, so pale, yellow and emaciated, that the light of the solitary little candle was reflected in two shining spots on his high cheek-bones, as though they were carved out of ivory.

As she tried to get a better view of him by slowly raising herself upon the pillows, the whole vision, chalet and study, desk, books and scribe, seemed to flicker and move. Once set in motion, they approached nearer and nearer, until, gliding noiselessly along the fleecy bridge of clouds across the street, they floated through the closed windows into her room and finally seemed to settle beside her bed.

"Listen to what he thinks and is going to write" said in soothing tones the same familiar, far off, and yet near voice. "Thus you will hear the turth, the telling of which may help to shorten the long sleepless hours, and even make you forget for a while your troubles"Try."

She tried, doing as she was bid. She centered all her attention on the solitary laborious figure that she saw before her, but which did not see her. At first, the noise of the quill-pen with which the old man was writing, suggested to her mind nothing more than a low whispered murmur of a nondescript nature. Then, gradually, her ear caught the indistinct words of a faint and distant voice, and she thought the figure before her, bending over its manuscript, was reading its tale aloud instead of writing it. But she soon found out her error. For casting her gaze at the old scribe's face, she saw at a glance that his lips were compressed and motionless, and the voice too thin and shrill to be his own. Stranger still, at every word traced by the feeble, aged hand, she noticed a light flashing from under his pen, a bright colored spark that became instantaneously a sound. It was indeed the small voice of the quill that she heard, though scribe and pen were at the time, perchance, hundreds of miles away from her sleeping chamber. Such things will happen occasionally, especially at night, beneath whose starry shade, as Byron tells us, we

?"learn the language of another world??

She awoke with a jerk, screaming into the dark, motionless room when those empty sockets that once held energetic eyes turned upon her suddenly and pointed condemningly with the quill pen that dripped with crimson ink upon an oddly familiar manuscript.