The Family

The initial group meet at New Street Station, then spiral down the ramp and round to the indoor markets, feeling like we’re going down the rabbit hole.

We see a Cafe Rouge balloon drifting along the ground in the markets and continuing the white rabbit method, follow it there. We get a message from last night at the Victoria and think about going there immediately, but decide to follow the rainbow umbrella instead.

We lose our guide near St Martin’s square, but get invited to “select what you’ll enjoy tomorrow”, and get led into a mysterious clinical bus, run by a group who “do a lot of stuff behind the scenes”.

We’re separated and fed strange food and have to answer questions – it feels a bit like we might get led to another room to watch a Scientology training video afterwards.

Glimpsing the rainbow-child-bear, we manage to escape across the sky-bridge to Max’s portal, we run through and find ourselves in a palace of consumption. The pink Xoo Fluff calls to us, something alien and compelling trapped in a jar.

Robot animals bleat out baby-talk hypnotic messages in praise of safe comforts. The atmosphere is making us sluggish, as the caged lizards stare at us, saying “you’re becoming like us, run away”.

On the balcony we have a vision of a meeting in the past, and standing in sleep-water manifest a dream-dance.

We find some coded markings in the border-zone so walk along the fissure between the seething and the howling.

We see the clocktower and follow it to find an invisible market, where we buy our own rainbow umbrella. The door to the city beneath is locked, so one of our party leaves to find another route.

Then we find a thought-net and bounce around to decide our next move. Noticing the concrete fortress, we cross the moat and sneak in the back route.

A fire-maned lion-man runs ahead of us, so we follow him out to a brightly coloured festival, where he makes the sun come out.

To celebrate we have our first ritual drink of Kool-Aid, and filled with energy watch the opening ceremony with it’s invocation to Ganesha, the remover of obstacles.

Following his lead, we go to the canals to open a gate between equal waters, and watch the debris being pushed up from beneath.

Walking though Portal: North, rattling umbrellas on the floor,

and come out in the Quest Portal.

Then we feel drawn towards the skeleton towers, and make an energy line to harness the force.

We get as close to the source as we can, and in the undergrowth find some concrete portals, but they are blocked with earth.

We see an apparition of murco-white, and twin elephants lead us to a twin portal, via a spooky alien holding complex. The clocktower makes anther appearance, this time echoing the Hockley manifestation

We crawl some grim and lonely streets, with memorials to the lost, but on top of the hill find an animal-gate to a world of new tastes and experiences. We tread quietly through the Towers of Rivers, and towards the lights of St Andrew.

We come to the old Bloomsbury Library, where we find many picture stories where clever animals helped people, and in particular a very strong power creature that shows us the old city, and the zones of intensity to investigate further.

Outside, we see the first vision of the black-white cat, wise and sphinx-like, emitting an ultraviolet light.

We stop for food and the cat in golden form waves us on, affirming the quest. We skip through the Victoria at the appointed hour, investigating the variations.

At one of the zones Skizz showed us, we celebrate the statuesque qualities of our new arrival in a memory-dance with the monumental.

We get to half-time and go to a sacred space to share the ritual forget me pie Fluff and Kool-aid.

It’s colder and we grow extra layers, hoping the sugar will protect us from the chill.

The glowing sign guides us away from the safe spaces and into the darkness.

Our living sculpture finds plinths and poses wherever we go. We discuss architecture by the shining towers, taste by the house of baubles, alternative communities by the hill of holes.

The Hospital is multiplying and we haunt it up to the broken time room where the beeping of the life-support machines and the beeping of the vending machines became indistinguishable.

Another border walk down the road that never ended as our energy waned.

We have to rest for a long time at two different stops until the Vision Bus comes. Some of us see men in white running, some see flying shapes, some see mossy rabbits to lick.

Eventually the black-white cat leads us towards the circle-square, wrapped in taped messages from our envoy in the Other Place.

We gather scraps from the signs carefully, adapting the hooks of our umbrellas. Some of us start to read the messages through our fingers, but the insights are wiped as soon as they arrive.

Then the 12 seats line up the viewing point for the thirteenth hour as the clocks go back and the car explodes in slow motion.

The third appearance of the black-white cat tells us that we won’t find the flattened castle, and we folded the map to get to the good streets again. Some of us attempted a stick meditation, and managed to summon our first fox.

Time became the most chewed then, patchy and refracted, and it was all we could do to stagger to the park and watch the sun rise on our new eyes.