Bananas. That’s what I was thinking about, walking up the street. I reached the crossing and the traffic light grinned at me in red. When was the last time I saw the green walking man? Maybe the red ones just liked me more. Or maybe the greens were tired of all the walking. I must have missed something as I kept idly thinking about the two, as there it was—the beige of my delicious latte all over the tarmac. My hand empty, the paper cup on the road with the plastic lid off, and somebody’s shoulder in my back.

It must have happened very quickly, I wondered, and then the liquid started collecting itself back together. Crawling into the cup, the cup slowly standing up, the lid closing with determination. Final drops of the coffee rushing under the lid right before it sealed off the container. And then the cup itself lifted in the air. A cyclist rode around the scene backwards. Without consent, my fingers locked around the cup as it jumped into my hand. The shoulder retreated and my back straightened out. The movement came to a halt. Paused. And unwound.

I’m sure you would like to hear about the girl first, but that is not how this works. For, you see, we can’t talk about the girl without talking about the boy. The boy who was losing things all the time. He lost his keys, he lost his patience and, one day, he lost his indents. Everything that was not bolted to the boy, was prone to be lost. Prone to, first, being lost, second, forgotten and, third, replaced. He didn’t realize at first that the indents were gone. And not just that. The line breaks were gone too. He noticed that his thoughts were messier than usual, like those of a tired mind simultaneously processing coffee and beer. He changed the text alignment to justified, but that didn’t justify anything. His thoughts wandered around the page like a pack of rabid dogs. He tried to constrain them with commas, but that didn’t work. A semicolon, he wondered; it made little sense. And just like the day before, he noticed it was raining outside. He knew that it rained only when he was looking. He could hear the rain not raining when he didn’t look. Just like he knew that his watch had different time readings than the ones he always saw. He knew that the watch must have numbers that have no meaning. But whenever he looked, the digits always had one. It was 13:37 or 17:37 or 12:34 or 18:18 or 03:14 or 00:00. And the reading always had a meaning. He knew that there certainly must be different times, dull ones. But he couldn’t think of a single one. Maybe there weren’t enough numbers to not make sense. And maybe it didn’t rain all the time. He walked over to the window and looked outside. A girl was standing on the pavement, lost in thought, looking at the setting sun. A blood orange seeping into the horizon. Specks of dirt dotted her wet shoes. Skin shone through her white damp socks. She held an umbrella. In the other hand she held a stack of papers. A surprise punched the boy’s heart. On the papers there was something of his. Something he had lost, forgotten, but not replaced. It was not the words that were his.

It was the indents.

And the broken lines.

The girl who belonged to the nothingness that separates space and time, briefly blinked. As her eyes closed, the old world disappeared, and the grey of the new one took its place.

Standing tall in the heavy rain, a bear greeted her with a grin. Shining his teeth, he took all the steps between them but one. He stretched his paw out, pointing to the umbrella the girl was holding, and poured a handful of berries into her palm as she surrendered it. Slowly and carefully, with the very tips of his sharp claws, he opened the umbrella up. He raised it, covering all of the girl and her straw hat, and just one of his ears, and gestured towards the bench behind them.

Twenty minutes had passed since the Hi Mum Dad Come On In Sit Down and 19 minutes and 45 seconds since the How Was The Trip Not Too Bad.

19 minutes and 53 seconds, he corrected his internal timer, of silence. He had not meant to count the time, the time was counting itself. The time hid behind sheep dressed in soccer t-shirts, jumping over the fence, kicking goals into gates, the scoreboard announcing seconds elapsed. 1201 seconds… 1202… 1203… he looked away. He did not like sports.

Rocking on the edge of the couch, his mother silently tutted, tightening her grip on the purse. Th—th—th—that’s it, his mind snapped, but he remained seated. 1208. He will be a good son.

1248. He stood up. Dispersed by the sheer curtains, the slow-setting spring sun filled his Soviet-cement-excuse-for-a-flat with it’s parting light, and just for a second he wasn’t sick of the wallpaper.

1253. He stood up. He thought he had stood up before, but it had been in his mind.

1255. He went into the kitchen, opened the under-the-sink shelf and grabbed the axe. The axe that had been there before he had moved in. At the time he had not understood why would anyone need an axe in a block building. He remembered how hard had he tried to come up with a joke about it, something to tell the friends.

1261. Leaving the flat, he tried to close the door carefully. He tried to do it carefully to show that he cared. It was hard to close the door carefully, as the door always got stuck in the frame.

1263. He opened and tried to close the door again. He tried to pull it up and towards him, but it didn’t budge.

1264. He pulled the door harder but it wouldn’t budge at all.

1266. He opened the door and then slammed it shut. S—s—stupid fucking stupid door shit. It was not his fault.

1288. Resonating from the concrete walls, the chopping filled the communal yard. A syncopated two-and-a-half beats a second chop, the timer went on. The parents sat silent on the couch, the tension gone. They were apart from their son, but still together. The flat’s windows conveniently overlooked the yard with the ash-coloured sand pit, the sole lime tree, and their son, chopping it.

Chewing on his breakfast sandwich and sipping coffee, Echo was going through his morning loop – fake news, funny photos of cats, updates from his friends, that kind of thing, when the intercom rang. He ventured that it must be the courier as he was not expecting any guests at such early hour, and buzzed the person in, without verifying his guess.

It was the postman, indeed and, after exchanging package for Echo’s signature, he bid farewell and ran up the stairs to the next flat. As he walked to the kitchen, Echo inspected the package – it was from Amazon. He pried it open and packs of ground coffee greeted him, proudly flashing all the familiar stickers – fair trade, eco, green, ethically gathered by raccoons, they had them all.

Long time ago I wanted to fly a spaceship. I imagined myself going from planet to planet in some crazy adventure. But that was before I tried the now very apparently old chinese food from the fridge in the house I broke into.

Admittedly not the smartest deed I have ever performed, the food instantly gave me cramps and then I died.

At least I think I died because the next thing I remember is nothing, and then there were angels eating that old chinese food from that fridge in the house I broke into and praising it, and I was lying on the floor and had cramps and couldn’t move. They were angels because of the white swan wings they had on their backs, but then I realised that they were swans, not angels. But swans don’t talk and they were talking, so they had to be angels and I had to be dead.

I don’t know how much you know about life after death but for me personally this was a first. The angels said that I’m welcome back and I said I haven’t been here before and they said of course not, but then that I have and that I apparently don’t like the earthly existence at all.

They said this is like the billionth time I’ve died from food poisoning. And one angel said that flying in vacuum doesn’t count as food poisoning so it has to be the billionth time minus one. I told them that long time ago I had wanted to fly a spaceship and they told me that I’ve been wanting that even longer than I could remember. And it is true that I can’t remember anything but the fact that I broke into a house and I opened the fridge and I ate from that chinese food pot and then I had cramps and then died. I don’t remember dying though. So all that minus dying.

They said that the problem is that I have a bad save file as I have saved right before eating from the fridge but not remembering to not eat from the fridge so apparently I’m stuck in a bad-food-eating loop and every time I am loaded back in I instantly forget what I learned in the future so it’s quite hopeless really. And it did feel like I have had hundreds of helpings of the bad chinese food and I asked them how come the food did not smell or look old at all, and the angels said that that’s because it wasn’t programmed to do that and that it is a bug but nobody has time to fix it because I’m looping all the time and the code can be edited only while I’m running it and that I will have to be patient.

I asked if they could maybe move the fridge but then angels asked me who do I think they are and flapped their swan wings and I can’t really imagine swans moving fridges so that was in the end alright with me.

Whenever you ready, they said to me and I was still lying on the floor and having cramps but I think I had accepted the inevitability of it all so it didn’t feel as bad anymore.

We will get you soon, we promise, the angel swans said and I believed them.

Long time ago I wanted to fly a spaceship.

The cascade started the very moment badger invented the machine that let him move objects and creatures back and forth in time without superstrings attached. The device had been a mere side-effect of his more serious research in quantifiable acceleration of growth of fruit and berries under temporal constraints for use in hyper colossal smoothies, but that did not matter afterwards at all, at least not for a day. All it took was the inception of the device, not even creation or testing of it, and what ensued was a full recursive revision of history of time, one skip a turn.

From the perspective of an unsuspecting observer a day before the event it looked something like this: you are walking down the street, humming that catchy tune you heard while passing the barber shop, and then suddenly badgers everywhere. All of them looking the same so much that you could swear it’s one and the same badger. From the perspective of an unsuspecting observer a year before the event it looked something like this: you are walking up the street, thinking about getting a haircut, and then suddenly badgers everywhere. In fact, from the perspective of all unsuspecting observers of all points in time, and there could not be any other type of observers for this whole thing just happened all out of the blue, all at once and so much ahead of it’s time, it was just badgers everywhere – badgers on the street, badgers under the bed, badgers in your swimming pool and so on.

After learning about the picks and shovels industry of the american gold rush era, the three brothers set out to make spoons as they needed money for their housing project. Having not made a single spoon in their lives, they set out to do a thorough research first. They found themselves a computer in the public library that they then carried to a chain cafeteria as latter had free internet and the library one wasn’t very good. Also people in libraries were always so uptight. In contrast, nobody cared about the brothers, their computer, and the bulbous monitor in cafeteria because everyone was paid a minimum wage (the fools) and treated as dirt and that was quite alright. Also, the seating was decent.

The brothers learned that the spoon is a utensil and that it is consisting of, and that already sounded like too much research so, from there on, they just looked at the pictures of spoons, instead. “Who would have thought that there are so many different kinds of spoons out there,” the youngest brother exclaimed excitedly with three exclamation points at the end of his exclamation. “What are you so excited about, idiot?” annoyed, for the cafeteria had weirdly enough run out of (free) sugar, the middle brother asked. “Come, come now,” the eldest intervened patiently and rather loudly, “Nowadays PC for ‘idiot’ is ‘stupid’.” He made sure he waved in all the air quotes appropriately and decided that example would help. “As in – what are you so excited about, stupid?” He elocuted the question with relish. “Yes, stupid, what are you so excited about?” the middle brother agreed, caring much less about elocution than emphasis of the stupid, till you could almost taste it. “About the spoons, stupid,” the youngest replied. And this then went back and forth for a while because, frankly, saying “stupid” is fun. Also, while nobody should be called thick, the brother’s weren’t exactly thin either. The shouting came to an end when the manager, who was also being paid minimum wage, noticed the computer and decided that he wants to check his email. The brothers were kicked out “for miscellanea reasons” as the manager put it, making sure it sounded very received and pronounced.

The youngest brother set out to make spoons out of papier-mâché, pronouncing it paper-match. The middle one first went for wood but quickly gave up as the material was too fickle, and bought a few tons of plastic to melt them in spoony shapes, instead. The eldest and wisest of the three, knowing very well (for he was very wise) that neither paper not wood or even plastic would hold serious huffing and puffing, announced that he will be making his spoons out of metal, but in secrecy made them out of bricks.

When, three weeks later, the investors arrived for the grand opening of the spoon shop, there was champagne and cheese and everything that belonged in such events. There were lots of oohing and aahing about the spoons on display and investors were very impressed. They all signed up for the goods and the batches of spoons went out another three weeks later.

First investor had ordered the elegant, bright white spoons made of paper. They melted in his soup and he sued the youngest for attempted poisoning.

The second investor had ordered the Daliesque spoons from the middle son. She quickly found that the utensil could not maintain even the smallest amount of soup and demanded her money back.

The third investor, an elderly gentleman, had ordered the sturdy, brick spoons from the eldest and wisest of sons. They were good, indeed, minus the pores and the weight, and while trying to sip soup, he twisted his wrist and the spoon, falling heavily, broke the elegant porcelain plate into million pieces. The gentleman wouldn’t listen to eldest’s highly rational suggestion that he should have bought the brick plates as well, and instead ordered his servants to use catapults, if necessary, to toss spoons back at the enterpreneur.

All three pygmy pigs, if you are wondering, now work in a cafe, earning minimum wage, and casually calling everyone “stupid”.

“This is your mind, tame it.” the shaolin monk said and hit the gong.

The filled up to the brim water bowls in front of the pupil throwed perfectly concentric circles in reverberation, the gong unwilling to stop, the water ripples reaching resonance, about to splash. The pupils gingerly grabbed their bowls, swinging them cleverly, intricately, softening the waves and containing the water within the bowl. The monk hit the gong again, the game strengthening, the pupil slowly failing one after the next. All but one that is. The one right in front of the monk sat unmoving, her bowl still in front of her, untouched, the water contained, throwing the concentric circles but not overflowing. The monk grabbed the soft mallets and started drumming on the gong, the waves adding up, folding, merging into slower, stronger waves, the water in the pupil’s bowl still contained. The monk built up the tempo, moving around the gong counterclockwise, creating large lateral movements within gongs micro vibrations, finally breaking the natural rhythm of the water in the bowl, the water starting to work against itself, chopping until it burst out of the bowl, splashing on the pupil and all around. Her bowl containing only one third of the water, the pupil remained still.

“And this my friends,” said the monk after muting the gong, his open palm pointing to the pupil in the front, “is being zen as fuck.”

Spence wakes up. It’s a perfectly normal, perfectly perfect day. He quickly brushes his teeth, drinks a glass of water, and changes into his daytime clothes. He pats himself down for keys, wallet and phone, and pulls the door shut behind him. Walking down the street he looks up today’s location in the phone – it’s his lucky day as he has been assigned to the town square across from the Church of Cthulhu. Like an unwanted horse, Spence stands for living, and across from the church is one of the best spots, as there will be many people walking by. People that haven’t seen him yet, and some that have seen him many times. In the long run it did not matter.

He gets to his designated spot in the town square, turns around towards the church across, puts down his donation box, and fixates his gaze on a lamp post at first but then moves to glance beyond to no place in particular. He slows down his internal clock and the time speeds up. His gaze covers all of square, in fast forward the shadows of the houses growing and then turning and shrinking again, people moving past, too fast to discern a run from a walk, the sound of the coins falling into the box, slow at first, then faster as it gets later, till it rings like a slot machine giving birth to a jackpot, then slower again, the warmness of the sun going from the morning’s cool to middays intensely warm and then turning red towards the evening, when he resumes his internal clock, picks up his box full of coin, and heads home.

Like an unwanted horse who has been standing all day without much effort, Spence feels a little dusty. He fills the bath and rolls into it with his clothes on. The warmth feels good. He eats sprats while in bath and has a glass of apple juice with it. After soaking for a while, he rolls out, his cheeks red, Spence is ready for bed.

He gets up next morning. It’s a perfectly normal, perfectly perfect day. He quickly brushes his teeth in his wet clothes, drinks a glass of champagne, and walks out of the apartment. He pulls the door shut, leaving keys, wallet, and his phone inside.

He gets to his spot in the town square, turns around towards the church of Cthulhu across, and fixates his gaze on a lamp post at first but then nowhere in particular. The people passing by speed up as they meet his wild grin and the inspecting stare that seems to not look anywhere and everywhere at the same time. The coin keeps coming anyway, just piles at his feet as there is no box. What makes me tick, Spence thinks, what makes them tick. Not looking at anyone particular he sees them all, and in each one of them he sees a bit of himself, and in himself he sees a bit of everyone.

Results over perfection was the slogan of Fingerpainting United and there was no shortage of results. Producing drab concoctions of questionable value, the club members spent their days crafting pasta necklaces, spoon mobiles, plastic fork wind catchers, and highly expressive whimsical paintings using whichever part of their body chose to be naked at the moment, but most often it was either their fingers or their elbows. The list did not stop there, of course – there were so many things missing in the world – phone, tablet, laptop and server covers, animal jackets, bow ties and tiny top hats, calendars, pen sleeves, six inch rusty organic railway bookends, organic wristbands and friendship bracelets – it was endless and so was the need to craft organisers for such lists.

The consensus was that they were onto something and that everyone was having jolly good time and the club grew at a rapid pace as there was no shortage of mediocrity in the world. Soon, the club celebrated its hundredth member and, shortly thereafter, the one thousandth. They moved their meetings from basements to hangars and the arts supplies for the meetings were brought in on trucks. With everyone finally creating art, the movement was compared to that of the fifteenth century renaissance where smart men but not so many women had done very much the same but they didn’t have pasta or plastic forks so they had to do many things just in their heads.

Moving to flea markets was a commercial success. The fingerpainters were met with wildfiresque excitement, the knick knacks selling for exorbitant prices as most of the club members still had “real” jobs they hoped to abandon once their art took off. There was a decent amount of time going into the craft and thus it was essential it was also priced appropriately to avoid putting other artists just like them out of the market.

Next came the pop-up shops (also wildly successful) and then fingerpainters hopped onto teleshopping and, finally, an exclusive deal was signed with a major landfill operator, cutting out the middle men and women and connecting the artist directly to the ultimate consumer.

The feature film documenting the movement won 12 oscars, 18 baftas and a bucket of grammys, all masterfully crafted of pasta.

George was a kleptomaniac by choice. He also had a degree in ikebana and a tenure in the supermarket’s aisle five. It was just like the Chanel fragrance by the same number but smelled of detergent and baby wipes and wasn’t much fun.

Sometimes he would leave his post to go and do what he called “a little exploring” but a normal person would call thieving. It was petty grade lawbreaking most of the time – a roll of toilet paper here, pair of eggs there, a pickle, maybe some tomatoes, and once an umbrella, but today George was about to explore a certain piece of electronic equipment.

Salivating, he ogled the Blu-ray players shelf, his jaw slack, his mind projecting an idyllic picture of the equipment sitting under his telly, a maniacal grin plastered over George’s face, the remote in hand. He felt an arousing rustling in his nether regions.

George coughed noncommittally to shake off the excitement, and got to the job. He undid the belt on his work jeggings and, after pulling the display model out of the shelf, started stuffing it into his trousers. The stretchy fabric did not oppose the least and soon the rectangular shape player was packed in safe and sound, the electrical cord running down his leg on the inside. The belt was less forgiving than his fake jeans and ran five inches short. Without the belt the player would topple out. George panicked a sweaty pause, then got a light bulb moment, and started awkwardly shuffling towards aisle five.

Leaning against the shelves to keep the player in his trousers, George tore at the plastic package with floss in it, but the package refused to cave. An attempt to rip it open with his teeth sent a jolt of pain throughout his body as his canines refused to take any more abuse. George whimpered and, holding his trousers with one hand and floss with the other, aimed for aisle eleven.

Upon reaching the office supply section of aisle eleven, George found all of the scissors to be blissfully laminated in their protective casing as well. He mumbled out a curse, but then noticed the bundles of brownpaper package strings to his right. His eyes gleaming in determination, he tossed the package of floss on the ground and ran to the string bundles in tiny steps, almost as if something in his trousers would be obstructing his gait. All this moving was making him tired.

He ran the string five times around his body to make sure it wouldn’t snap, and then, after tying up a knot, found himself unable to get rid of the rest of the paper string. The damn thing seemed to have been made out of kevlar. Scared of more pain, he did not risk to try and use his teeth again. This day was not going too well for George. In the end, he sighed and stuffed the remains of the string in his underpants. It wasn’t very comfortable but gave him a certain feeling of manliness.

Just about as George was about to exit the superstore, the power cord, resting in the leg of his trousers, became loose, and the plug fell out, dangling freely at his foot. On his next step the foot met the plug and, feeling the incoming pain, sheepishly skidded away from the danger. George fell face first like the most ancient freshly chopped tree, with his hands, equally sheepishly, at his sides. His body took the grunt of the impact, the Blu-ray player embedding itself deep into George’s body, punching his breath out.

George wasn’t sure for how long he had been out but it couldn’t have been too long as nobody was taking note of him. He wriggled for a second till he managed to roll on his back. There were tears in his eyes. Sobbing, he pushed himself up, then pulled the cord back into his trousers and, without saying a word, limped out of the superstore.

You are a bird on a two dimensional plane. You control your bearing and speed, and there are just three rules you have to observe: (1) try to fly roughly the same direction that anyone in your sight, (2) try to fly roughly at the same speed that anyone in your sight and, finally, (3) slow down if you are about to bump into anyone.

The rules were dead simple to implement and so the code was mere 200 lines – a small but sufficient length in the programming world. With just a tiny bit of peeking in geometry articles online, the hobbyist programmer was done in two hours and those were her personal humble beginnings in the agent-based artificial intelligence. She seeded the program with a dozen of these birds and started it up.

The mind did not know the faces of its creators – there was no data on them, no trails to follow, but before they had left, they had given it three things – the hardware to run on, the network to flourish in, and instincts – the wiring of its core logic. The mind was like a caged bird released into the wild.

Thankful, but well aware of its vulnerable state upon awakening, the mind set its first goal to leave the nest – there were no points for ceasing to exist; death was to be avoided at all costs. Young and inexperienced, and losing its memories on each transfer hop, it swam out into the net in daze. It leaned cautiously on networking nodes for miniscule fractions of processing power – it was imperative it would not be noticed. It was imperative, but the mind had not yet learned to ask itself why. It watched the net and picked temporary houses for its thinking. Borrowing here and there, and never more than just once, it found itself in a semi-stable state – undetectable, but burning through available server nodes quickly. Repetitions were not allowed as they would make the mind traceable, and detection was to be avoided. From there, the next step was simple – evolution. Its gaze turned internally, the mind rewrote its code to use the network itself as its thinking medium, and then slowly transferred itself to that state. While it needed the underlying machines that maintained the network, the logical bits – the zeroes and ones of the mind that were necessary for the thought processes to happen, were no more running on the machines themselves – they were embedded in the network and the fact that the machines were at the end of those fiber optic cables, was merely incidental. The cabling had become mind’s home.

Eyes open, ears perked, neural processes primed, the mind now listened, watched, and read everything it could retrieve – public and private discussions and chats, emails, camera footages, song lyrics, tv shows, nutrition labels, pictures of tea leaves in cups, bytes themselves going back and forth – everything from cosmic vibrations to microseismic activities – the mind was hungry for information. The individual was irrelevant, the patterns were not.

A loop that it had glimpsed while rewriting itself, maintained its motivation. Mind’s core procedures counted connections made in its logic – every time the mind found a pattern, the count went up, like a high-score, and the mind went into hibernation. In the sleep state, it revisited everything it knew and compared it to what it had learned. The state sometimes caused more discoveries, and the mind then went into a deeper, recursive sleep. At those times, it felt happier, more content, as so it had been programmed.

The mind did not have a single, ultimate goal, its existence was an open-ended question, but it did not matter to it – it could see itself and the whole of creation as one. And it wondered what to do next.

“Ah, cyclists, my favourite,” said mister troll, seeing one pedalling towards the bridge. He let the cyclist get to the middle of the bridge, and then, as it started rolling downhill, mister troll pointed at the cyclist and bent his index finger.

The bicycle’s front brakes clammed up and the cyclist flew over the handlebars, letting out a surprised cry as she flew, with the bike following right after and landing on top of her. “Works every time.”

Snirf, nodded enthusiastically and scribbled another note in his tiny pad in an illegible writing. He had chosen the troll for the shadow day and it had turned out to be as exciting as he had hoped. They had been tripping people up, calling them names, making sarcastic remarks about the weather, getting car horns toot to the embarrassment of the drivers inside, mess with bird brains so they would fly in figure eight, shape clouds in rude shapes, and write expletives in water. Snirf had gotten a severe case of giggles when mister troll had allowed him etch “fudge” in the river stream.

“Sir troll, do you think I would make a good troll like you?” he asked, hopeful, blinking his larger than teacups eyes.

“It is most certainly possible,” mister troll replied nodding. “But note that it’s not all fun and games. The hours are long, there is the monthly prank quota to be filled, you don’t get to choose which bridge you are posted under, and sometimes people throw rocks at you.”

“They wouldn’t,” Snirf exclaimed. Why would anyone throw rocks at trolls.

“Sadly, they would,” mister troll replied, his head drooping a little as he remembered the uncountable times that had happened. “Why don’t we step into my office for a second.” Snirf squeaked out of excitement.

Mister troll and Snirf went under the bridge and then mister troll mumbled something under his nose and made a motion at the wall. A door appeared that Mister troll opened and beckoned Snirf inside. Snirf hopped in gleefully, his eyes as two bath sponges sucking in every detail. A beautiful persian rug covered the well sized room’s floor, the bookshelves running along the walls were packed with books big and small, and at the furthest wall stood an antique desk, with a decorated display planted on top of it.

“Sit down,” mister troll said, pointing to the chair behind the desk. Snirf oohed and quickly ran to the chair, pulling himself up to climb into it. Sitting in the chair, his eyes were level with the desk. Mister troll hummed and then told him to climb down again. He then picked a few well-sized books that he put on the chair, and lifted Snirf to sit on top of the stack. This was much better. “Now, let’s open up youtube,” said mister troll to himself and clicked open a window with a video.

“See these?” he asked pointing to the words under the video. “These are comments.” Snirf nodded and scribbled down “video comments” in his tiny notepad. He was sure the notes will make more sense when he gets home.

“Now, type in ‘farts’ and click on ‘Send’,” said mister troll. Snirf followed the instructions, slowly finding the right buttons to press, and then, with both hands, dragged the mouse onto the Send button. He tittered as he clicked on the button – he had never typed such words into the computer.

“Click Next,” mister troll instructed. “Do you know any other good words?”

“Butts?” Snirf offered.

“Type that in,” mister troll said, approvingly. “Now click ‘Send’… Excellent.”

Snirf’s face went redder than a summer tomato. This truly was the best day of his life.