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This is the current, on-going story which is being written by the PFC community. This page includes all contributions up to the 19th of December 2004. The contributors to this section are: DrKev, Burbage, Tschanz, Gowator, Gorsebush Pixie, Frank and Cheria.

To see the contributions that follow this section go to the thread on the messageboard. Feel free to join up and join in!

The PCF on-going Story

"Where did they get that horrible music from?", he muttered to himself. The hangover was mild yet severe enough that the new Algarve tourist commercial on the telly was going straight through his skull. Reaching over he switched off the telly with one hand and grabbed his coat in the other. Time for the pub. Swinging the full-length gaberdine over his shoulders he headed for the door. "Check postbox, Métro, Line 5, RER C, fifteen minutes," he said to himself, as the lift deposited him in the lobby of the 150 year old apartment building. " Wallet, money and mobile phone" he said as the lift took him back up the 150 year old apartment building.

That done, his second visit to the lobby took him to the post boxes, he fitted the key and opened his box. A small, brown, padded envelope fell to his feet, it's contents spilling onto his newly polished Italian shoes. " Oh God," he said, "not again. That damned anthrax gets into all the little nooks and crannies in my fine Italian shoes." But then he noticed a tiny silver key hidden in the powder that turned out to just be harmless cocaine!

It could only be from Bob "crackhead" Kracklosky, his old college rommate who could never do anything without getting his cociaine on whatever he touched. "But why would he send me a key?" he wondered. As he pondered what, if anything, was going on in Kracklosky's brain nowadays his phone suddenly rang; well chirped may be a more accurate term. "Kracklosky here!" said a voice from the past, "I need you to do me a favour."

Johnson's mind flew back through the years, the fog, the darkness, the bridge, the body... the last time he had seen Kraklosky. It had been the worst night of his life. Kracklosky had a uncanny ability for getting into trouble and his addiction to hard drugs brought him into contact with very undesirable people. Johnson felt a chill run down his spine and a cold sweat constrict his breathing. He could almost feel the fog from that night and its cloying was almost palpable. For a second he had a flashback and he could have sworn he had blood back under his nails. Blood that he had been at pains to wash away after that night.

The voice in his ear continued, "I need to see you, where can we meet?"

" Well I don't know Krack, I've been real busy and..."

" You have to, you can't say no, you owe me one!"

Johnson sighed. "All right I'll see you. When?"

"At the carnival, tomorrow night. There is a dwarf that runs the booth at the house of mirrors. Tell him Fat Jake sent you, he'll tell you how to find me".

"Can we not just meet in the pub? There's a great place called Le Galway on the left bank. They haven't got a dwarf or a Fat Jake, but I'm sure we could find something to satisfy your taste for the bizarre."

"Oh all right then, I hear the Guinness is pretty good there" he said, as a cop car came screeming around the corner and echoed down the phone.

Johnson slammed down the phone, "Not again," he thought to himself, "not another night like the last night.." Having decided to leave this merry recollection to one side, he turned his mind to the Order of Business. "The Pub!" he thought to himself and thus, having returned to Point One on the agenda, he set out.

" Wallet, money, mobile phone", he thought as the lift deposited him in the lobby of the 150 year old apartment building, "....Krack, pub...key?" he thought as the lift took him back up the 150 year old apartment building.

It seemed to him that in the last few minutes he had overused the service of the 100 year old lift in the 150 year old apartment building. "I'd get awfully fit if I used the stairs," he thought, as he got out at the second floor. Stepping into the corridor, an icy cold breeze stung his face. As soon as this thought had registered in his exhausted mind, the lights in the hallway flashed once and then went out altogether. Darkness. No, not quite. Something was glowing. A yellowish glow, down near the floor. Indeed it was right on the floor as Johnson noticed the soles of his feet .

The soles of his shoes were dissolving. "Acid?" he asked himself. " Nah, couldn't be, the flashbacks stopped years ago", he thought. "Still, how very odd."

" I think I'd better take my shoes off and see if I can clean them", he thought, "though I'd better get inside, I don't fancy standing in this stuff in my socks." Searching through his pockets, he was even more surprised to find the keys replaced by something cold, wet, and slippery.
" What on earth is happening?" he wondered as he slipped the fish into the keyhole of his apartment door.

The door swung open, revealing not his apartment but a dark brooding landscape of the most incredible beauty, dark red mountains, purple leaved trees, golden lakes, and pristine white puffy clouds partially hiding the two crescent moons setting behind the mountains.

" Bugger!", he said, "I hate it when that happens." He took a step forward and suddenly realised that he was at the top of a steep shiny cliff. As he slid down the face of the cliff towards the golden lake below him he glanced back up at the doorway just in time to see the door slam shut and quite disappear in the face of the dark red rock.

With every passing second his speed increased and the top of the cliff receded faster and faster into the distance until he could not even make it out any more, yet bizzarely the lake below him seemed to grow little closer dispite the now worrying speeds with which he descended.

Meanwhile at Le Galway, Kraklowski had ordered his third vodka. He looked at his watch. This was too much, Johnson was late, and if he didn't arrive soon Kraklowski was going to go and Johnson could discover by himself that he had a temporal quarkised anomoly in his apartment.

" Of course he may not have time to even realise that", Kraklowski thought ruefully, not realising just how correct a prediction that was.

Meanwhile, Johnson was heading at truly ridiculous speeds toward the golden lake below, now growing in size at an alarming rate in his speed-blurred vision.
"AAARRRRGH," he screamed as he belly flopped into the water. He awoke some undetermined time later in a small white-tiled room. Through blurred vision he could make out two enormous penguins, aparrently laughing at the size of the red mark across his belly. In the background he heard what he thought was a familiar voice approaching. No, no! Not my French mother-in-law, he thought to himself, and tried to hide under the nearest chair.

Unfortunately for him, it turned out not to be a chair but a toilet bowl and the aforementioned penguins were actually a pair of nuns. Fortunately the familiar voice was not his mother-in-law but none other than Kraklowski himself. Yes, strange as it may seem, Johnson hit the surface of the golden lake and mysteriously ended up in the bathroom of the Galway.

" Well, well," said Kraklowski helping Johnson to feet. "That's temporal quarkised anomalies for you!"

Johnson looked up. "A what?"

Kraklowski looked at him sympathetically, "the anomaly in your apartment. Eddies in the space time continuum."

" Is he?", said Johnson.

" You remember I asked you to meet me by the dwarf at the hall of mirrors?" Johson nodded.

"Well that was Le Galway two hours ago. This thing is becoming too common. That's why I needed to see you. Something needs to done about it!"
"But there's nothing we can do... it's too late!" Johnson had a point. Nothing could really be done as long as...

"Look, Johnson, old cabbage, we've got to get as far away from this toilet as possible. It's ruining my thinking. I need to check the TQA map as well. We've got to avoid these things if we're going to figure out a way to stop them."

Johnson gingerly massaged his head, avoiding a rather painful bump that was just starting to assert itself in his consciousness. "I very much agree with you Kraklowski, old bean," he replied, somewhat annoyed with the cabbage quip, "Lets get out of here sharpish. Maybe if this turns out not to be the Galway at all, the bump on my head will vanish." Kraklowski lead the way out of the door and into the twilight zone.

" So where are we going?" asked Johnson.

" Istanbul," replied Karklowski. "Only Professor Perducci can help us!"

" Oh," said Johnson. "My passport's in my apartment."

" Don't worry about the passport, I have contacts that can help. Perducci is not just smart, he has friends in high AND low places".

Some time later Johnson and Kraklowski stood in front of a door near Montparnasse. "This door leads us to a section of the Catacombs that is unknown to alsmost everyone ." He smiled wryly, "I told you Perducci has friends in low places."

Through the door, they walked down a long passageway, ending in a set of stone steps that descended into the poorly lit belly of Paris. After a good five minutes, carefully picking their way down the uneven steps, they came a huge cavern, lit with burning torches around the walls. Johnson looked around. In the flickering light of the torches he could see the vast cavern disappearing off into the distance. The farthest walls were invisible except for the pin-points of flickering light. "What is this place?" he asked.

" ace ace ace"... answered the cavern

"It' a kind of transport system," said Kraklowski. "Follow me."

Johnson turned to see Kraklowski dissapearing into a side exit he hadn't previously noticed. A musty draught seemed to be lazily wafting out of the passageway with an odour reminicent of old running shoes mixed with some fungus. A dim glow issued from the walls and Kraklowski led the way into a small room with no other exits. Kraklowski opened a cupboard and handed something to Johnson. It just seemed to be a small piece of plastic. "Can't travel without that," Kraklowski said. "Now let's get back to the main cavern. We have a long way to go. They returned to the giant cavern and began to walk out toward the centre.

As Johnson followed Kraklowski through thew main cavern the torches behind them started to extinguish themselves one by one. Each torch made an audible whoosh as its light first blazed slighly brighter then faded into nothing. Looking back Johnson could no longer make out the stairs where they had entered and the side passage glowed with a barely dicernable dim green luminescence. And when he looked back, again, a few moments later, he could see no sign of the entrance. Torches continued to flare as they passed them, fading into a darkness behind as complete as the darkness ahead. He had the impression of walking on a treadmill in a little pool of light, with torches that moved past on either side.

Eventually Johnson discerned a glow in the distance and they approached another passageway similar to the one where Kraklowski had found the strange piece of plastic. Behind this, stairs led upwards into a black void.

Johnson couldn't help the feeling of deja vu. He could swear they had walked consistently away from the stairs but these appeared identical to the ones they had decended not 15 minutes previously. Kraklowski took the small piece of plastic and deposited it in a slot labelled 'buono'.

"Buono?" said Johnson.

" It's a kind of code," said Kraklowski, "This is Venice. The Euro has been very useful to us, but we're going to Istanbul. We need to change some money."

" Venice? But we've only been walking for an hour or so, since we left the pub in Paris."

" I told you it was a kind of transport system. We have further to go."

" How do you find your way around? It's just a big black hole."

" Did you not look at the map I gave you? Come on." Kraklowski led the way upstairs.

'"'Buono" is also Italian for a voucher," said Johnson as they climbed the stairs "so it makes sense we are in Venice... but we only walked for 15 minutes?"

"Ah, well in this temporal zone yes, but in the FK domain we actually walked for 18,000 cycles."

"Cycles?"

"Now hurry we're 300hz behind already," and with that Kraklowski opened the last door at the top of the stairs they stepped out into the Piazzale Roma.

" Follow me," said Kraklowski, and he headed for a small alley near the canal. Johnson turned around, but he could see no trace of the door that they had just come through. "What the hell is going on," he said to himself. He followed the Russian.
The alley was dark, and there were no doors leading off it. But Kraklowski was nowhere to be seen. Johnson started to panic, he had lost his guide, and he had a sweet wrapper stuck to his sole. Try as he might he couldn't scrape it off with normal walk-drag-walk manoevers and trying to step on it with his other shoe just caused him to stumble. He reluctantly bent over to pull it away and was surprised to see it was actually a tiny map on the back of an opal fruit wrapper.
" Well I'll be!" he exclaimed. The map showed his current position with an X.

" Where the hell did that come from?" He couldn't remember Kraklowski giving him an opal fruit. Still, the map showed where he was, which, as he already knew, was a back street in Venice. He was just about to pull out the plastic card to see if it held any further information when a door appeared in the wall at the end of the alley. Kraklowski stepped out of it.

" Where have you been?" Kraklowski said, slightly unfairly thought Johnson, "Okay, I have the Lire. Let's go."

"Where?" asked Johnson, still confused by the sudden reappearance of Kraklowski which had compounded rather than eased his consternation over his equally sudden dissapearance. He had stilll to come to terms with the Paris to Venice walk in 15 minutes.

"Here" indicated Kraklowski impatiently pointng to a vague area on the Opal Fruit wrapper. "Don't you listen to anything? Why else would I have Lire."

" Ah yes, Istanbul. So how do we get there? Back though that hole in the ground?"

"Naturally. Don't forget that you don't have a passport. I strongly recommend that you do not lose that blue card, or the opal fruit wrapper. Particularly in Istanbul. Turkish beaurocracy is not something you want to get involved with. Come, we have to hurry, Perducci's waiting for us."

Johnson followed Kraklowski who seemed intent on walking at an ever increasing speed through the increasingly densely packed Venetian streets. He recognised the Piazza della Scala as they proceded to cut through the crowds on the crowded Gallerio Vittorio Emanuelle until Kraklowski reached the bustling Piazza del Duomo. He could see the Church but Kraklowski headed straight into the subway.

" Wait I need a ticket" shouted Johnson over the clamourt of the crowds.

"Use the blue token - thats why I gave it you!" shouted Kraklowski as he disappeared into a side passage marked 'Impiegati soltanto'

The turnstile had a separate slot marked '"Buono" which swallowed his token and allowed him through... concerned over losing it he shouted, " Where did the card go?"

Kraklowski, who was a few yards ahead down the staircase, looked back over his shoulder. "You pick it up at the bottom of the stairs. I'll show you."They reached the foot of the stairs and in the room next to them was a locker which delivered them back their vouchers.

"I'd better show you how to use the map," said Kraklowski. He opened his hand to reveal another version of the sweet wrapper that Johnson had. "Now, we want to go to Istanbul." He gripped two corners of the wrapper and pulled. The wrapper expanded to the size of a large newspaper.

"You can see here that the entrance that we took from the streets gets us into the passage that leads to Istanbul, Baghdad and Delhi. Think of it a bit like an underground railway system. You need to find the right station in the city above to get to the right line, as it were. When you are above ground the map shows the 'stations', when underground, it shows the route you have to take through the passages."

"But this cavern looks exactly the same as the last one we were in," said Johnson, "How do I know which way to go?"

" You just walk between the torches. The last passage we were in only had two stops, Paris and Venice. This one has four, here, Istanbul, Baghad, and Delhi. You have to know when to turn. The map shows you where you are at any one time."

Johnson pulled his own map open and looked at it.