Insomnia & speculation

Started by SueC, August 18, 2021, 15:59:19

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SueC

The Aliens On Another Special Adventure

The aliens decide that Wednesday morning is a good time to visit Roger's house, since it coincides with his regular slot of life modelling for the community fine arts group. Besides, it's likely he will follow it up as usual with lunch out and then the weekly Wednesday afternoon meeting of the local branch of the International Society for Echinoderm Appreciation, which holds regular coastal excursions in good weather, and aquarium workshops in inclement weather. This gives our aliens plenty of time for another little field trip.

Beaming in, they find themselves in the living room: Sofas, coffee table, bookshelves, comfortable armchairs - one of them with a book on the armrest and an ottoman drawn up. On closer examination, the book turns out to be a heavily annotated copy of Lol Tolhurst's autobiography - lots of underlining, question marks, sets of multiple exclamation marks, additional information, cartoons of pigs with wings, and recurring doodles of an enigmatic figure with black spiky hair.

This is very interesting, but not the main thing they have come to see, for these aliens are music enthusiasts through and through, and have already had a great time with Reeves' guitar collection and Jason's drum kit. They look for and rapidly locate Roger's music room, ooohing and aaahing over the grand piano, the Medieval pipe organ and the quality range of electronic keyboards assembled.

Our aliens discover that keyboards suit their anatomical idiosyncrasies far better than guitars do (though not quite as well as drums). They find they can compensate fairly well for having two less tentacles than the average human has fingers, and that they can get the pipe organ to make fascinating sounds by having one of their number playing its keyboard, and another sticking their tentacles down the pipes.

The most extroverted of them is soon suckered to the underside of an electronic piano, while sticking out enough tentacle ends from below to enable him to play a rollicking tune. He's an ardent fan of the film Amadeus, which he saw on Alien TV many times, and he's always yearned to emulate a certain scene:


Our extroverted alien has a merry time with this undertaking, and after half an hour makes the bonus discovery that playing a certain combination of notes causes a secret door in the room to open. That's right, a bit of the wainscoting is actually on a hinge and reveals what looks like a small library behind it, with shelves all over the walls.

All the aliens now go through the secret doorway to investigate, making excited polyphonic hooting sounds. But on the shelving they don't find books; they find tambourines, hundreds and hundreds of them, different styles, colours, eras, histories, etc etc; and our aliens spend the rest of the morning thoroughly investigating and road testing this extensive collection.

Around noon, not wishing to be greedy, they decide to call it a day, and make sure everything is left exactly where and as they found it (for which their photographic alien memory is very helpful). Before teleporting back out, they leave three gifts for Roger, carefully arranging them on the top of his grand piano.

The most remarkable of their gifts is a packet of special Scandinavian bath salts called Furu Uppenbarelse, which is a special formulation with natural pine needle oil, highly effective for washing away other people's dirty thoughts. They imagine he might appreciate this when returning home after his Echinoderm Appreciation meeting, given his regular Wednesday morning engagement at the fine arts centre. With it, they leave a bottle of red wine and a generously sized box of those round Lindt chocolates that come in white, milk, hazelnut and dark.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

The Aliens Go Meta

Back at their spaceship, enjoying some home-brewed craft beer, the aliens have a collective think about their recent excursions to Cure households. There's nobody in the band left to visit, and they realise on reflection that the entire thing was mostly spontaneous and beer-lubricated rather than carefully considered and planned, beginning with making unauthorised social media posts on someone else's account. In retrospect they're not sure whether that was a good idea, but what's done is done, and they will let it be a lesson to them.

Our aliens are also grappling with asymmetries about their gift-giving, and general ethical issues around that. Their gift to Simon was first and foremost about compensation and distraction - it was ulterior rather than pure in intention. On the other hand, it was also the most expensive gift any of the band members got, and the only one that was lovingly home-made. They have noted from what their human companion heard from their local contacts that Simon is unsuccessfully looking for more beer from their label, and resolve to drop another four dozen crates over to his place soon, this time without ulterior motives. They are pleased he likes their product and happy to make amends for their ethical failings with a combination of fine craft beer and completely pure intentions.

The aliens furthermore discuss the fact that two of the band members weren't left any formal gifts. In the case of Reeves, the stories in the runes of their tentacle prints turned out to be an unintended gift that will keep on giving, perfectly suited to the personality and inclinations of the recipient. Still, they resolve to find a nice saxophone, gift-wrap it and drop it through his letterbox sometime. They've felt for a long time that someone in the band ought to take up saxophone so that the corresponding solos from old songs can be played live, and they were disappointed to find no evidence of saxophone adoption on any of their forays into the members' homes - despite the fact that the pandemic would have provided a perfect opportunity for doing so. They think Reeves, with his 30-metre radius aura of cool, will be the most naturally suited, and therefore the fastest learner and ultimately the best player of the saxophone, out of the five contenders.

Which leaves them with Robert. Although they made no formal gift, they did bring about a long-lasting improvement in mood and self-esteem for him, by giving him the feeling that he had successfully repaired his washing machine (even though he hadn't). Besides, because Robert has had so much unwanted and inappropriate attention from the public for the majority of his life, they think that one of the nicest things you can do for him is to leave him alone. He's had enough unwanted presents from fans to fill up several landfill sites, and wouldn't thank anybody for more, let alone welcome the feeling that his home had been invaded by crazy people. So what the aliens resolve is to do Robert anonymous good turns on future occasions - so anonymous he won't even realise a good turn has been done.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Well, I think we had the whole what's-happening-with-Simon-Gallup thing nailed on THIS thread!  :winking_tongue  :angel
SueC is time travelling