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「YO POON, BETTER GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE PRONTO BUDDY」 Gunther Gross said. Or rather, he shouted it. Gunther Gross didn't talk, he shouted. You could typically hear the guy from three blocks away. Paradoxically, when he really wanted to get your attention, he whispered. That's when you knew he was really pissed -- that or getting emotional. A connundrum of conflicting stereotypes and personality types was our boy Gross. It was impossible to categorise him.

The scene was the heaving deck of the USS WISCONCSIN aircraft carrier, somewhere in orbit around Antarctica. Haru Poon (aka Cassius Croon) scurried out of his bunk, all kind of bleary eyed and forlorn. 「Yo Poon, better get your ass into gear, the big guy wants to see you downstairs」 Gunther Gross said. When Gross spoke, even corpses flung themselves awake -- he was that loud. Talk about a bedside manner. They were heaving somewhere in the Great Southern Ocean -- Gross was a great southern whale, and he had somehow flung himself up on ot the deck. This is how it happened.

Mental note (courtesy of a Catheter mindgif): Gross's father Thorsten served as a general in the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War, collected wind data over the North Sea when the British falsified their weather broadcasts. According to rumour, his wind measuring device consisted of a machine gun and a stop watch to time the motions of salt spray raised by the bullets. After the war, Thorsten Gross (the grossest of them all) defected to the government of Argentina, where all good Nazi's fled, and reputedly assisted several revolutions in South America. The long hours of laboratory work, weather map analysis, porking Latino prostitutes, and endless gunfights led to a lifetime family interest in Southern Hemisphere meteorology, good cooking, and sado-masochism. This is, irreputedly, how it happened (I'm not faking it!)

「Yo Poon, get your fucking ass downstairs before I kick it.」 That was all there was to it. Croon (now in the form of Haru Poon -- "Spring Harpoon" as they would have said in Japan, where he had just come from) shuffled downstairs. He just shuffled on down. Ready to harpoon the man they called The Man.













the queen of sheen -- "The Warrior Magi".
special thanks to Neal Stephenson (I love your work.)
email alure@catcha.com for all your compliments and insults.