Layout of The Realm

We scheduled an election to take place within a few days for the post of Shop Steward. All the FC’s were eligible. Renfield, being the only Imaginary Friend, obviously represented herself. In the meantime I fleshed out the realm before the Union could make suggestions with the layout.

The word “Saragun” was invented by my Employer when she was nineteen, whilst under the influence of yellow-microdot acid and fortified “Bokay” apple wine. The name, of course, is psychedelic gibberish; but she liked it, and believed that it described her youthful hopes and dreams. So she founded a rock band and named it Saragun. Five years later my Employer was kicked out of the group by the other members as a result of a secret vote. Next to dying at twenty-seven, “artistic takeovers” due to personality conflicts is a rock and roll way to go–especially if you are fired by a band that you had created.

Saragun Springs is your typical make-believe inter-dimensional realm-world whose physical laws, as previously mentioned, are greatly affected by the limits of its creator’s education and knowledge of physics (here, not so high). Left and right, gravity, up and down are normal, but distance is something that is observed only when necessary. Thus nothing in the realm is farther than “‘boutta mile” away from anything else (usually much closer). For example, let’s say point A is boutta mile from point B, and to C is the same from B, yet even though you may have traveled in a straight line, C is still only boutta mile from A.

It is a round semi-flat world, and the spring itself lies smack in the middle. The zenith of our sky and the Nameless Hills that completely encircle our realm are the only places here that appear to be a bit more than boutta mile away. Hardly anyone visits the Nameless Hills, because if you do go there and climb and try to peek at what is on the other side, you are immediately transported to your house in the realm. This comes in handy if you get lost, but not so much if you are running away from home.

The Nameless Hills are consistent in shape and there are three hundred and sixty of them. Three hundred-and fifty-six are of equal height and four are half-again taller than the others. The big hills are evenly spaced from each other and mark direction and have names. One has a giant W etched on its side, another, directly across the realm from W. contains an equally immense E, plus there is both an N and S where you might expect to find them. We call them Will, Eill (pronounced “’Eel”), Nill and Sill.

All of this had been planned, but things began to get a bit slippery for me upon the realization that we had a sun in our sky named Pong. I recalled thinking about whipping up a little thinking sun for Saragun Springs named Pong while developing the FC roster, but blew the notion off, figuring that no one would care about what was in our sky. But I guess thinking about it was good enough to cause Pong to fire into being–a tiniest wisp of a notion who seized a heaping helping of Free Will.

So, unannounced, Pong showed up the day after I’d glancingly thought about creating him, and has been on the job ever since. Since nobody and no thing in Saragun Springs is obliged to follow the natural laws of the Universe, it should be no surprise that, mechanically speaking, Pong is a celestial scofflaw.

As an object, Pong is a fiercely radiant little orb, the color and relative size of an unripened blueberry held at arm’s length. Pong is either very small and close or huge and far away. Sadly, Saragun Springs lacks an Archimedes-type to study Pong in the scientific way. Nor has anyone dared to launch an Icarus inspired project. This is again due to a creator’s inability to beget someone who is smarter than she is. She can only make individuals who are certain they are smarter than she is on the basis of their own opinions alone; a circumstance, which, of course, leads to atheism and unhappy surprises in the end.

Pong’s first day began reasonably enough; he rose from behind Eill at 6 A.M. on the nose and set behind Will exactly twelve hours later. Adequate, when measured by the flexible standards of Saragun Springs normalcy. But the tone of the process changed when he rose again precisely at six the next morning, but this time from the exact same spot he’d gone down the evening before–from behind Will. Our little star tracked north that day and Pongset there, to the left of Nill, at six pm on the dot, then, of course, rose there the next morning.

The only constants with Pong are that he works from six to six, twelve hours, without as much as a millisecond of variance, dawns from where he goes down the night before, and never appears to change his relative distance. Everything else is up to Pong’s whims. I’ve seen him double back and set where he had risen; I’ve watched him do loops, feign heading one direction then go another, and zigzag across the sky. And that only touches the truly bizarre stuff he does. Once he emitted a long thread from his orb and spent the day going up and down over Sill like a yoyo on a string until quitting time. Pong can also stop without first slowing down and travel at various speeds. Sometimes, he will sit way high and wait until 5:59:59 P.M. then zoom toward his setting point at a rate of speed that should be impossible to achieve, yet make it on time. As you can imagine we have strange shadows in the realm. And yet equally strange is “Pongspotting,” which involves wagering on the exact place the next Pongset will happen.

Saragun Springs has several communities. The main ones are The Village which is founded on vice and whose main attractions are taverns, brothels, crack nip dens and Pongspotting gambling houses–and where the addresses stand for specific years. There’s also the Enchanted Wood, the Turkey Pen (where my rejected stories go to live and await editing), the Hoosegow (where no one ever goes for we have no laws to break) the Barnyard, which contains my office and Union headquarters and a studio city by the odd name of Ago-a-Go-Go, where all my productions are “shot.” There are many other little nooks, hellholes and crannies, which we will visit by and by.

Perhaps the oddest, certainly foulest spot in all of Saragun Springs is the spring itself. It sits precisely in the middle of the realm like the hole in a record album. There is only one spring, but the name is plural because it flows slightly more trippingly from the tongue than something that sounds like part of a bed.

The spring oozes to the surface from a crack in Hell and smells like boiled diarrhea and tiny black rainbows form when Ponglight passes through the spray.

A couple days after Pong first rose (which was also the eve of the Shop Steward election), I headed a party for a day trip to view the realm. Everything–if not as it should be–at least was. Which is pretty much the best you can hope for when new to the art of realm weaving. Due to its nasty reputation, we visited the spring last.