Titans of Chaos

A man in purple pulled open the door of my little dressing room. Of course, the way this worldworks, it was just at the moment when I was wearing nothing but bra and panties, and I was bentover, pulling my toes out of a collapsed skirt.

I should explain how he sneaked up on me: I was not looking. Hyperspace in this area was dark,and I would have had to ring my sphere, sending not-light out in all directions, to keep an eye onwhat was happening around me, and I was wary of showing a light, not knowing if there wereeyes like my eye watching. So, surprise!

I kept a cool head. I straightened like a diver jumping, and jumped a direction at right angles ofall directions, neither right nor left, forward nor back, up nor down. My arm should have simplymoved "past" his fingers, but instead he kept his grip. He was like Colin, at least a bit, a creatureof passion.

But he did not shut off my powers; perhaps he could not. Instead I reared up into the fourthdimension, and he, keeping his grip, was lifted partway out of the "plane" of Earth's continuum.

His feet were still in Earthly space, but his upper body was curled into the fourth dimension. Tome his body looked like a streamer of bark peeling off a tree.

He had some thickness in the fourth dimension, not so much as Miss Daw and her body, whichlooked like a wheel of eyes within a wheel of eyes, but there was something feathered with strandsof music, serpentine, with scales of alternating gravity and levity rippling down the solids thatformed the surface of his snakelike body.

But he was not full, not like I was. I sensed his fourth dimensional extensions were of limitedutility; their internal nature was artificial rather than natural. I was looking at some sort of livingarmor: a thing he wore, not a thing he was.

I screamed then: a loud, sustained, ear-piercing scream. In theory, I should have merely shouted,or struggled in grim silence, as a boy would do. Well, this was no time for theory. I needed help,and it was automatic anyway. Think of this as Nature's siren.

"Hush, Princess!" came the sharp command, which he flicked to me on a strand carrying anessence of meaning.

"The boys are coming!"

"Not unless they can hear sound waves in a volume skewed to the continuum, they aren't. Now,hush, or I'll make your true love a man with a jackass's head."