Oh! Excuse Moi? Oh, wait, you are right...I was being held up by King Agrippa and kittens...no problem, here, have some Mingostone:
Chapter Fifteen - Summing Up
Miss Mingostone packed her handbag with a can of mashed potato, four lemons, and a handful of lollipops and left the Moppet house. She couldn't shake the sense of oppression in that place which had once been alive with activity, a bee-hive of laughter and stings.
She walked away along the street and hoped the twins would be safe with their Father who she feared was loosing his sanity. He had begun speaking to walls, thinking they were his son, or his wife, or the Coles. She paused at the bus stop and bit the top off the can of mashed potato. Sitting down, she slipped her slender feet out of sandals and squeezed a lemon into the mashed potato with her toes as she pulled a pair of chopsticks out of her wild red hair.
A white haired woman shifted further down the bench away from her. Miss Mingostone stared at her, then her eyebrows creased and she looked back at her lunch.
The world was confusing. First Mairin and Jack had kinda disappeared, and now Father was acting strange, in fact, the only person who wasn't acting out of character and insanely was Aunt Dandan, and she-he was already insane.
Mingostone licked her fingers, crumpled the can, and climbed onto a bus. She knew where she was going.
Wilson's was a strange workplace, built with angles and corners and architecture that was almost as curious as the products they produced there. Father worked here with Mr Harvey and a secretary named Suzan. Mingostone hoped they could help. She pressed the doorbell.
When there was no reply, she pushed the door open and stepped inside. The first hall seemed perfectly normal, framed certificates of health and sanity for all employees, a pinboard dotted with Notes from Management, and a clear bowl of marbles on a stand. Mingostone reached the end of the hall and went through a half-glass door into the main office.
Across the room, behind a desk, a man with dark-brown hair and thick-rimmed glasses looked up from a microscope and grinned. "Welcome, we are just getting started on an assignment to create an alternate to microchips. I was just studying the menu, microfish or microsousage?"
Miss Mingostone's eyebrows formed into a small triangle as she frowned and smiled at once. "I'm here about Father Moppet," she said simply. "He's started talking to walls, does he do that often?"
"Wall's? That's icecream, wouldn't go with chips at all."
"I…see. And there's my brother, Jack, and Mairin. They are missing."
"We might be able to help you find them? Drink?"
She shook her head.
Mr Harvey slid open a drawer and shifted through a bunch of papers. He pulled out either a map of the North Pole or a blank page. Not what he was looking for at all. He found another, either a map of the Sahara or simply colored in with yellow crayon. "Last year we tried a Single-Upsidedown-Map-System, also known as Sums. We divide the work between us, creating a system based on Multi-Pli paper, but we couldn't quite get it to add up, so management subtracted our percentage and pulled the product line."
Miss Mingostone raised one eyebrow. "That's a bad thing?"
"Sums was built to work simply. What happens with a map? A person reads it, and drives. Hopefully the person reading it, is the driver, or you just get dreadful backseat drivers. Actually, I've never seen anyone drive a back seat well myself."
Mingostone blinked.
"After the map is read, a route is chosen and the driving commences, after a short period, the map-reader arrives at said location."
"I know how maps work," Miss Mingostone said. "I have eaten them with mayonnaise before."
"Micromayonnaise for microchips? Hmm…no. Anyway, reverse engineering, which is not just driving backwards, meant that if we could start with a person at the location, we could extrapolate back to the map."
"What?"
"It's confusing. SuZAN!!! Can you bring the Sums' Files from storage plus the machine pieces. Yes, no, yes. They should be marked, 'Sums' but that's ok, we can clean them later."
Suzan started to say something but Mr Harvey interrupted again. "Upside-down Maps. Back-to-front. Instead of a person looking at a map and following to the location, we look at the person and the map follows it to the location."
"How-?"
"-now brown cow. Don't ask questions, it only complicates things. Do you have a photograph of your brother?"
Miss Mingostone reached into her bag and lifted a man's wallet. She flipped it open, and showed a criminal's profile pic of Jack. "Will this do the trick?"
"Indeed. Now watch me pull a bunny out of a hat."
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