Today Mercury came in to work extremely hung-over. (Her makeup was nonetheless perfect.) She told me this in between moaning and carefully sipping tea in a way that didn’t require her to move her head much, and asked me not to tell Supervisor 009 – but Guy Whose Last Name Is Sexual Slang For Something* had already told her somehow.

I guess he just came onto his shift, saw who was working later on, and then the conversation went something like this:

GWLNISSFS: Oh, man, Mercury consumed considerable quantities of alcohol last night! She is probably going to be extremely hung-over when she comes in to work. Ha ha!

009: (all quiet-like) Oh, really? Ha ha.

* I don’t have blog-nicknames worked out for everyone I know, you know.

So when she saw Mercury, 009 just smiled and said, all quiet-like, “So, are you a little bit hung-over today?” And in between moaning and drinking, Mercury desultorily cursed GWLNISSFS as a base traitor.

009 sent me on the walking-around jobs so Mercury could sit at the desk, and then, apparently when the moaning did not abate, sent Mercury home. I can’t complain since she did the same thing for me the time I’d stayed up most of the night trying to game the market value of a certain item in a certain MMO, which I imagine is a slightly darker shade of moral gray. 009 is probably way too nice.

–

“Anachronism is when you have technology being used before it was invented! It happens whenever Shakespeare listens to his MP3s.”

As we all know, I am a sort of AI that constructs its methodology for communicating with others by manipulating apparently-significant phrases found in blocks of text. (I forget the term for this because it is not, apparently, significant.) If anyone ever asks me to define “anachronism,” Dinosaur Comics has given me the data necessary to proceed.

“So what’s he doing in space?”

“Character development!”

And this is what I’m going to say when someone patiently asks me to explain my brilliant literary projects.

“What’s she doing in a volcano behind enemy lines?”

“Character development!”

It’s even true! For values of “character development” equal to “losing an eye”!

bool isCharDevelopment()
{
if ( whatsshedoing == “losing an eye” && A == “CLAMP” )
{
return TRUE; // we assume
}
}

(I accidentally posted this before completely typing out the incomplete test routine the first time. Then I rewrote it again a minute later. I apologize to those of you who were shocked and dismayed by all that.)