My watch is running …. backwards. Mitch, how about yours? Forward, double speed? Wait a minute. Somebody check the man-sized tuber’s watch. No watch? How does he breathe?
Oh, yeah… hi out there in normal-land. It is I, Joe of Big Green, speaking for the entire enterprise when I say, w.t.f., we are more lost than ever, if such a thing is imaginable. Bad enough our renegade man-sized tuber went on a rampage, reducing our navigational console to a somewhat less than functional state. After that, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee decided to take the reins, using a little technological prestidigitation to make the ship go this way and that. Unfortunately, one of his most dramatic “zigs” (or was it a “zag”?) sent us through what can only be described as a hole in the time-space fabric. (Hey, the universe is getting a little long in the tooth, okay? It’s bound to fray around the edges. Just wait until you’re 13.5 billion years old and see how you feel.)
So anyway, we hurtled through a rift of some sort, entering a netherworld where the ordinary laws of time simply do not apply. I’ll give you an example. Five minute eggs? They take 7 minutes. And I mean, even then, the yolk is just barely beginning to set up. Even stranger, I got 
on the phone to Dell tech support, and was talking to someone in about three minutes. So clearly, time is like an accordion in this place, and it’s not exactly clear how to get from here to planet Neptune. And as you might imagine, any time-space continuum that resembles an accordion is bound to be annoying as hell. The only thing worse would be the banjo dimension, or perhaps … I shudder to suggest it (for in some sphere of hell it will then be real) … a … a bagpipe dimension. OOOHHHHHHHH….. Not a nice place! Well, that’s not where we are, anyway. Narrows it down a little, at least.
Okay, so anyway… how to get to where we’re going? One of the Lincolns (in this netherworld it is unclear which is which) has a somewhat useful suggestion: employ the sextant, and raise the mizzenmast. Of course, Lincoln (or anti-Lincoln) is speaking in the lexicon of a 19th Century railroad lawyer, so some translation is required. When the suggestion was made, Matt dropped his acoustic guitar and motioned to our interpreter, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is 
programmed with an understanding of no less than 73 languages, including 19th Century television-show English. Well, Marvin chewed on the Lincolnian advice for all of seven minutes, then spit out a little slip of paper that read, “contact sFshzenKlyrn“. That seemed like a capital suggestion (if a somewhat liberal translation), and we asked Mitch to twiddle whatever knobs necessary to get in contact with our perennial extraterrestrial sit-in guitar player from the planet Zenon.
Hey – damned if old sFshzenKlyrn wasn’t on Neptune already, doing a solo gig in our absence. Mother of pearl! You just can’t trust anyone these days.
