🚀 go-pugleaf

Our hero, disguised as a vicar and surprised to be alive, found
himself in a small cottage in the outskirts of the village where
decisions would have to be made.  He'd been terribly clever, he
thought, in building a Post Office Tower and escaping from the
castle dungeons by blasting his way through the net curtain which
had lingered so tantalisingly between himself and his freedom.  The
boy, reluctant to leave the rockery of bat-carcasses he'd built
around the bust of Byron, had elected to stay a further while,
and our hero, who was celloloidically indoctrinated into preferring
to think of himself as the strong silent solitary type, had not
argued.  He found the vicar's garb enabled him to move more freely
among the village people, though, at times, he found himself
unaccountably pausing to straighten crooked pictures, paving stones,
sunflowers and ties.

Never very incisively decisive, he was plagued by thoughts of whether
or not he should ask the advice of his father, the bishop, on the matter
of his impendency to trip, whether or not to take offence, and, his
greatest worry, how best to manipulate the case he'd brought against
parties formerly participant in his marriages for bloodrot.  These
anxieties occupied his mind on and off until, as the milk-jug struck
midnight, he straightened from his task of checking the incline of the
kitchen floor to see if it needed to be taken into account in aligning
the dusty but still recognisably pornographic calendar, relic of a
previous inhabitant, over the stove.  Having failed for the past hour to
convert millimetres to BST, he seemed tetchy and worried.  As he turned,
his attention entangled itself in a white fluttering figure outside the
window.  Focussing his judgement, he went to loosen it, and observed
that a Wicked Vampyre hovered without the walls.

The Vampyre smiled pleasantly enough, and was admitted, explaining
that it was really sorry to be a bother at such a late hour, but only
wanted to borrow a calculator.  From its pagoda in the chimney, it had
immediately recognised our hero as the manner of man who would probably
carry his entire wardrobe, bureau, and tipper truck in his briefcase,
and was perfectly prepared to settle for a slide-rule if he had turned
out to be old-fashioned in his tastes.  The Vampyre's usual habit was
to gain entrance into village houses by assuming the shape of a Vedic
Vacumn Salesperson and then set about amassing a few souls for Chick,
who collected them.  Pocketing the proffered abacus and accepting our
hero's offer of some illegally distilled water, it sat on the sofa and
sized up his soul.

Our hero, though slow on the uptake at times, could not have failed
to have heard of Ward's lengthy quest, and, while entertaining his guest
with the details of the FBI cleaning-roster, he slowly realised that
it was the conchologisticsal one, missing for so many years, who sat
before him.  In truth, he could not think what to say or do next, and
the conversation soon chasmed.