SKY LIGHT II

I woke up feeling like someone had been testing bombs deep within the softer parts of my brain. My passage from unconsiousness to something approximating wakefulness was accompanied by a gradual awareness of the pain which was emanating from, not just my head, but most of my body. I gingerly sat up, the movement causing the sepia coloured room to shift horribly around me. My teeth felt like lumps of bakerlite and my tongue a twisted piece of beef jerky. I was slumped on my bed, still dressed (though I noticed my best trousers now had a long blood crusted tear across the left knee) and missing one boot. It was, without doubt, one of the worst hangovers of my life. As my gaze floated around the small bedsit I realised I was not alone. In the corner, beside the oven and dirty white cupboards, sat the massive brooding shape of a fully mature silver back gorilla. He was wearing a small black bowler hat, and smoking a fat cigar; the smoke from which he was watching as it drifted up to the ceiling. He studiously ignored me, and I was on the point of doing the same when I remembered why I had been drinking so hard and freaked out for short while.

I came back to the real, alcohol poisoned world, to find myself sitting opposite the gorilla beside the one dirty window of the room. A filthy rain had been blown in from the sea sometime in the day and the oily traces it had left gave the setting sun a foul piss coloured taint. Far away, past the megascrapers which marked the edge of the city, the cargo ships which moved up the colossal shape of the space elevator at super sonic speed were stitching white lines across the sick, tired sunset. The solar bombs which the Stort Hanth had detonated 12 years ago were still working, the suns surface marred by a black cancer as the electromagnetic forces within it started to slowly tear out its nuclear heart. The gorilla had been sursprisingly gentle, putting the cleanest, which was'nt saying much, towel it could find around my cold shoulders and making me a cup of blueberry tea. It apologised profusely for having drank the last of my coffee, the herbal tea only serving to make my headache worse.

"Your employees offer their deepest condolences" it finally said, its voice gruff, with a slight Lancashire accent. Of course, the Naked Monks would be quick to make sure that Leleths death would not stop me in my tracks, losing them all the months of my work, and their money, which had gone into the 'project'. I bitterly realised, through a shroud of numbed shock and grief which was only hours old that now the project was all the more important to me. Now it was personal.

.......aaah fuck, I don't know...it just falls out of my head, the writing equiv. of a doodle-you don't have to read it do you? Just finished watching equilibrium, with Christian Bale, bloody excellent. Bodes well for the new Batman movie. doodle pip.