usive” he said like a boy talking about a tree fort.

“So that’s why I’m dressed up like a mascot for a really non-aggressive junior high table tennis team and we’re trudging through the marshlands next to a freeway on the edge of nowhere?”

“They don’t let in just anybody!” Roderick yelled whisperedly, “We’re both at risk. They take their oddity sacredly. And these marshlands are well respected and contain a plethora of interesting wildlife.”

Honking wildly, some dude hoots and shouts something ungainly encouraging to the two men on their hobbled trek.

“So, where’s the club?” Gad huffed.

Rod squeaked to a stop swiftly enough that the ears on his suit flopped out and tongue swung bobbing. “It is not a ‘club.’ It’s a cosplay cafe and pub. It’s classy and upscale establishment for the members of this community. And, to answer your question the Trog door is up ahead.” With a squeak in his step, Rod tuggled around swiftly causing his cotton stuffed tale to wag into the weeds and continued guiding on in a sure manner while leaving his lemming befuddled in the mud before continuing after, curiously, trying to catch up.

Out-of-breathedly, Gad queried, “Did you say Trogdor?”

“They are an interesting community with a different sense of humour. The place already has a front door and a back door and a freight entrance, all of which are no less strange. They needed a name for this door, and that was a name. This one is just easiest; that’s why we’re takin’ it.”

Shaking his head, Gad continued to follow now distracted again by the flopping of ears, this time his own.

“You see” Roderick continued, “Dennis is the only one who guards this entrance, he’s also the only one that uses this entrance. I hope he hasn’t gone out for Pop-Tartstm or else we might not be able to get in for a couple minutes.”

“Here we go.” Rod interjected himself as a wooden shack with a half-moon cutout on the door came within sight.

Gad wished his guide could see the pouted WTF beseeching look on his brow instead of the painted smile of his bunny suit. The shack couldn’t have been more than three feet on a side and smelled worse than the marsh. It did have a nice rustic look to it, though.

Like a dance, Roderick patted himself with his paws searching for something, and with a grunt of remembrance he pulled primary-coloured ring of plastic keys from behind Gad’s fuzzy, floppy bunny ear. He then proceeded to stick the blue key into a crack in the wood, completely missing the keyhole. He didn’t even bother turning it, and when they entered, didn’t bother to take it out. After Roderick and Gad had stepped inside, each knocking their ears on the doorframe, they continued to sally forth further than conventional physicists would have believed they should have been able to. The way was dark and smelled of old nuts. They opened another door and stepped out of the closet and into a room lit merely by a digital clock and a computer monitor. A thin pale man sat at the computer with a bag of chips (close enough to explain the old nuts smell) who greeted them with a humble, disinterested “Yo.”

“Hey Dennis.”

Dennis remained un-phased from his computing and munching of chips.

Exiting the small dormitory, the duo proceeded through a corridor lit dimly with buzzing florescent lights that cast a cool blue tint on the cold cement floor and metal pipes above that ran down the wall up ahead. The two turned the corner, and the corridor sloped upward out of sight. Gad stopped; Rod continued ushering him to continue lemming along. Gad followed doggedly the dog-suited man.

Gad shut off his mind and tried simply to focus on the writings tagged about instead of on the voices of the enraged conventional physicists yelling in his head, lecturing him not to walk on walls. “FF8 is way better then FF7!” the wall said. “It’s ‘then’ not ‘than,’ stupid! It’s comparative not sequential!” retorted higher on the wall. It worked well enough that he couldn’t tell anymore if where he was should’ve been considered a wall or a ceiling, well enough he thought the tags were on the wall. What he was walking on was labeled “FLOOR” in big, bubbly, non-threatening letters. Next to that was a cartoon drawing of a panther in a sundress. It seemed friendly so Gad decided he could trust it. As the hallway turned a corner then a corkscrew counter-clockwise, Gad was lovingly reminded that he was still walking on the “FLOOR” about every twenty feet or so. The random writings also reminded him that the current governmental system was corrupt and that he could call Jackie’s number “for a good time.”

“So how did they manage to hide the Foxhole so… well…?” Gad asked walking downward and leftwise up the hall.

“They’re a subculture so they figured they’d make up for it exceptionally. It’s better than a normal hideout; it’s abnormal. Paranormal. Supernatural…”
They came to a dead end and across something looking like a double helix. It was painted bright red, yellow, green, and blue with thick rubber like the chains on swing sets and was disconnected from the ground.

“After you.” Ushered Roderick.

“What am I getting myself into?”

“Something completely different.”

The air smelled like warm gummy bears. They couldn’t be too far off.

Climbing curling ladders isn’t easy, especially not in a padded rabbit suit.

When he climbed to the end of it he dropped down like monkey bars onto thickly shaggy carpet. Dance music came from afar and double doors lay ahead. Gad walked towards the entrance but was stopped by the seating hostess.

“How many?” asked the squid-in-a-crotchless-bear-suit.

“Just the two of us, Susan,” coughed Roderick as he scuttled up squeakedly. “Actually we’re meeting with the Dukes.”

“Well, in that case, I’m sure you’ll find your own way.” With all the awkwardness only a woman dressed in a squid-in-a-crotchless-bear-suit suit could muster, Susan gestured the two to enter.

They stepped through the doors into a land of joy and wonder, or at least a lot of people dressed as furry animals and a disregard for the general use of gravity. The cafe was on the ground. The pub was on the other ground, disguised from this angle as the ceiling. Gad watched a cat at a bar ask a wolf at a booth to please pass the salt. The wolf calmly turned it over and dropped it up to the cat.

The lecturing conventional physicists in Gad’s head finally decided to give up and have a drink. But, before he could ask for one he heard a throat clearing from above him. The proper foxy bartender on the ceiling uppedly looked down at Gad, turned the drink she had just made right-side-up, and dropped it down into his big, lucky rabbits’ feet, or are they paws, well they were actually his hands, but why didn’t the drink spill?

Gad shut up, popped up his mask, and downed his drink.

“Shall we find the Dukes now, Roderick?”

“I think we better had.”

-------An excerpt from an unwritten saga by Christopher Anders Goodwin.