text: [Themes: A Folly, kissing, midnight, nudity, surreal]
  
  > look at your surroundings
  Splintered glasses, paper streamers, confetti, and cigarette butts litter the floor. You cannot step anywhere without crunching something underfoot. The banquet-table has been thoroughly demolished, cracked into two halves that lean inward toward a sunken middle.
  
  Everyone else is gone, but Dmitri is sitting at the table as though nothing has happened, reading a book and nursing a martini.
  
  Moving counter-clockwise would return you to the banquet hall when it was slightly more intact. Slightly.
  
  > examine table
  Apparently the cherubs succeeded in smashing the banquet-table, although you don't know where they've gone now. Probably sucked back into another rift.
  
  > Cc
  Somehow a rift must have opened, because obese cherubs are pouring through the air onto the banquet-table; or at least, they would be pouring if they were in motion. There are several hundred, faces grimacing and feathered wings shedding blue pinions, and in their conglomerate they have impacted the table at one end, sending the other end skyward like a see-saw. Some even appear to be crawling upward along the table as rats would a mast aboard a sinking ship.
  
  This arrangement has naturally relocated the banquet itself into midair, where roasts and cakes and goblets and plates hang with their glazes and their silver sparkling.
  
  When it comes to the diners, most have already departed, although a few remain watching the cherubs with mild interest from seats pushed back against the walls. One lady dressed as a swan is eating angels on horseback, with a champagne flute daintily suspended in her other hand.
  
  A clockwise inclination would direct you into the aftermath, while moving counter-clockwise would steer you toward the cloak room, and in the future yawns the black salon.
  
  > Cc
  You find yourself lost in a forest. The trees are coat-stands draped with cloaks. Among the cloaks someone has hung a butchered pig carcass. Clockwise, the banquet awaits.
  
  In the past you can see the palace doors opened wide to the night. Guests are thronging through them to the masquerade, their stream bordered by footmen holding lanterns high, and foremost in this crowd is the countess.
  
  She is the jewel set in the evening's crown. Onegin has her hand, but she is not looking at him; she is looking at everybody, enchanting them with her smile. Her domino mask is lowered and you can see her face. She is more beautiful than anyone.
  
  > look at the pig
  This pig carcass has been expertly butchered, with the belly slit wide enough for a person to easily slip inside. As a costume, you must admit that the idea is genius.
  
  > examine countess
  You are in love with the countess. There, you can admit it. When you look at her like this, you cannot help but be in love. Even though she loathes you and you've come to loathe her too. Even though she wants to fly your flayed hide for a flag. You are in love. It is horrible news. But you aren't alone, because everyone loves the
  countess. That's what makes her the countess.
  
  > take the pig
  You lift the pig carcass down. It's a bit unwieldy, but you'd rather leave a baby behind on a sinking ship than allow this opportunity to pass.
  
  > look at the script
  Scene:
  cloak room, evening
  
  than human words can put into language.
  
  Stage directions:
  inventory (i), examine (x), take, drop, talk to
  
  future (f), past (p), clockwise (c),
  counter-clockwise (cc)
  wear, undress, wake up
  kiss (when wearing motley)
  
  > Undress
  You disrobe from your jester's motley and feel decidedly less tricksterish. You won't be stealing any kisses now.
  
  > wear the pig
  You hunch your shoulders together and crawl into the pig carcass. Now the sky is no longer a limit.
  
  > look at the script
  Scene:
  cloak room, evening
  
  than human words can put into language.
  
  Stage directions:
  inventory (i), examine (x), take, drop, talk to
  
  future (f), past (p), clockwise (c),
  counter-clockwise (cc)
  wear, undress, wake up
  fly, oink (when wearing the butchered pig)
  
  > fly
  You fly upward but the trees close overhead: their branches form a ceiling, and you're still inside the palace. You thump your head and flutter back down to the floor.
  
  > Oink
  You oink with meaning.
  
  > examine Onegin
  Onegin, that bastard. He's strutting and puffing his chest, skin painted red from head to toe, wearing horns and bat-wings with his cock hanging out like some archfiend with nothing to hide. What an obnoxious exhibitionist. You'd think that the guests were all gazing at him from the grin on his face, but he's nothing next to the countess. He's just her pawn. He won't confess it to himself, but it's the truth.
  
  > P.
  The palace doors stand open, but no one has arrived yet.
  
  A landscape garden stretches away into the past.
  
  In the future, guests will deposit their cloaks in the cloak room.
  
  > examine the doors
  Whenever you are standing at a doorway, you never know if you are stepping in or stepping out. Divergent possibilities tug at you. You wonder whether you've made the right choice. But then you're stepping through the door and into whatever you're stepping into.
  
  > examine the garden
  This garden is where you will duel the countess at midnight.
  
  > P.
  You are standing alone on a long manicured lawn bordered by cypress trees, whose moon-cast shadows divide the grass into neat quadrants as though it were a rugby field.
  
  Below the lawn, further into the past, there is a great and gurgling fountain, and in the future you can see the palace windows alive with candlelight and merriment.
  
  > look at the trees
  Columns in a colonnade -- that's what these cypress trees seem like. This garden is a temple and they gird its sacred space. That's what the landscape architect must have been thinking.
  
  > examine the moon
  There's a blue moon in the sky tonight. It looks just like a skull. You've known visions more reassuring.
  
  > examine the fountain
  Disaster seems to dog these masquerade parties. Last time it was Matilda that they found drowned in the fountain with her hair streaming around the water-lilies. Nobody could discover how it happened. This time it will be you that they find dead on the lawn, and everyone will know how it happened.
  
  > P.
  You gaze into the fountain's murky depths. Its water is stagnant and green from many years without cleaning, and unchecked lilies spill over its rim. Below its surface floats a drowned body.
  
  In the future you will stand alone in a landscape garden.
  
  > examine the body
  Before your eyes she rises from the fountain's sludge. Her skin is slick and green and semi-transparent like gelatin. You can see her dead organs inside, rotten, black, and her black veins running through her green body. Her hair drips down over her face. When she looks at you, her gaze is blank; she does not have pupils or irises, only whites as slimy as a dead frog's underbelly.
  
  She settles herself on the fountain's stone rim, dripping and drooping, her shoulders slouched.
  
  She waits.
  
  > talk to the body
  She cannot talk to you, although her tongue is swollen with unspoken words. Only the dead can commune with the dead.
  
  > Oink
  You oink with bravado.
  
  The drowned girl draws one finger across her throat. Well, she can just go join the club with everyone else who wants you dead tonight.
  
  > fly
  You rise into the night sky and the garden and the palace and the world diminish underneath your hooves until they appear small enough to step on, but you don't step on them. You fly higher and higher until the atmosphere thins into nothing. Shooting stars are brushing past your cheeks. You can see little planets in the distance hanging like humid nightblue fruit dependent from the heaventree.
  
  But your goal is not that far away. You fly upward toward the moon until you are flying downward toward the moon, and then you alight on its lunar surface.
  Moon
  A cratered wasteland. Soft cheese squishes underneath your weight and smoke rises from foreboding chasms cleft into the glowing camembert.
  
  Before you a great beast is sprawled, slaughtered. It has been dead for eons and its form has decomposed to the bare bone. It is larger than any other animal, some colossus from legend, its death-grip encapsulating a lunar mountain over which it has collapsed.
  
  Into its forehead, in the exact spot at which a bindi would be applied, is plunged a gleaming vorpal blade.
  
  > take the camembert
  Acquiring cheese from the moon would not help you against the countess, would it? Unless perhaps she suffers from lactose intolerance, in which case you might slip the cheese... no, no, that's much too indirect.
  
  > take the blade
  You begin to climb the beast beginning at a nearby talon sunk into the moonscape. It is rather a large talon, perhaps one thousand meters (give or take), but luckily the talon is sloped, and soon enough you are standing atop a knuckle from which you can survey a considerable metacarpus extending toward an even more considerable radius and ulna.
  
  metacarpus extending toward an even more considerable radius and ulna.How awkward, mountaineering on a giant skeleton! Any footholds you find are porous holes in the bone. You have no gear to help. It is all desperate scrambling and split-second decisions. At one point you come across a crack in the humerus large enough to swallow a house. Thankfully you can flutter over it.
  
  At last you arrive at a wide scapula. Many hours have elapsed, and your own bones ache from the ascent. You determine to rest for the night.
  
  Well, it is not really a night. There aren't normal nights when you are on the moon, and besides, space/time is still bent into a pretzel. But the constellations turn and fireflies twinkle in the gloom.
  
  But the constellations turn and fireflies twinkle in the gloom.It is at this juncture that you notice a strange lowing. You peer over the scapula toward a crater in the mountainside below. Inside this crater are numerous creatures like cows, but they are larvae. They are embedded in the lunar cheese, which is dripping from some petrified organ still attached to the giant skeleton's pelvis.
  
  In the morning you begin to descend again along the cervical vertebrae attached to the skull. It is a descent, because the skeleton is slouched over the mountain with its head downward. That is how it must have fallen when it was slain.
  
  It was indeed slain. You can make no mistake about that.
  
  It was indeed slain. You can make no mistake about that.Finally you are scrambling over its cranium, and there in the bone is stuck the vorpal blade. Everything is eerie and quiet, and somehow it seems as though you have come to this spot by appointment. That you are not alone. That the vorpal blade is studying you as you are studying it.
  
  It occurs to you that the blade might be some keystone holding the situation together, and that by drawing it out you might reawaken the monster or trigger another unforeseen calamity. But you have determined to take it, and therefore you are going to take
  it.
  
  You grip the handle and you pull. The vorpal blade slides free as easily as a knife from butter -- or in this case, a sword from camembert.
  
  camembert.Nothing terrible happens. You have drawn the blade and it is yours, and without delay you return to the moon's surface.
  
  A cratered wasteland. Soft cheese squishes underneath your weight and smoke rises from foreboding chasms cleft into the glowing camembert.
  
  Before you a great beast is sprawled, slaughtered. It has been dead for eons and its form has decomposed to the bare bone. It is larger than any other animal, some colossus from legend, its death-grip encapsulating a lunar mountain over which it has collapsed.
  
  > look at the blade
  Nothing is more dangerous than a vorpal blade. Even glancing at its edge threatens to slice your eyeballs open.
  
  > look at the beast
  Monsters like this should not exist. They are the fever dreams that hermits have in the desert. They dwell under the floorboards in the mind, and you can hear them scratching if you listen close enough. But somehow this one must have gotten out. It must have grown. You're glad that something killed it long ago.