...and the winner is...!

ME!



That's right, ladies and germs, I FINISHED MY NOVEL A DAY EARLY!

PWNED.

FTW.

YOWZA.

ALL OTHER CONCEIVABLE REJOICING PHRASES HERE!

And to put the topping on the cake, I will herein unfold the last chapter I wrote, including the last 1K words, which were specifically for one Kathy Rittenhouse (EDIT: for those of you who bet on my progress for NaNoWriMo and can't remember what you bet, you can find the details here):

The men and Uma came back to camp around the same time, each man carrying at least a brace of conies, if not some form of larger or more plentiful game.  Tony, now practically a member of the married women’s quilting circle,  he was introduced to all the husbands and children, and the women, particularly Rachel and Polonia, vouched for him with their families, saying that he was an asset to the camp and that they would gladly accept them into their homes if he needed a place to sleep that was more fitting than Uma’s tiny hovel.

And although the sensible and level-headed Poplar seemed to actually like Tony by now, Toleman did not seemed wholly convinced that it was safe to have him in camp.

“How do we know this isn’t some elaborate ruse and that he’s really trying to pull one over on us so he can slaughter us in our sleep.”

“The man could barely chop scallions,” Therese said, rolling her eyes in what Tony had discovered was her characteristic way.  “We would have to be a sorry excuse for a camp indeed if we could not defend ourselves against the likes of him.”

“All the same, I’ll not let him within twenty paces of my cabin.”

“You’re cabin is even smaller than mine,” Uma said with a sharp laugh.  “We wouldn’t want your help anyway.”

Toleman looked hurt by Uma’s words, and Tony realized in that split second of silence where he looked at Toleman’s expression of both longing and sadness when he looked at Uma, that if he really did want to woo Uma, he’d have to fight for her.

And then, with a pop that sounded like a central-vacuum turning on and opening, everything around Tony froze, and out of nowhere, the strange, long-haired, invisible-eyed witchy woman appeared right next to Uma, leaning on her shoulder.  

“Well well well,” she said, her voice on the brink of laughter, “what have we here?  It seems that Mr. Graduate Degree in Narcissism has actually found someone he can love as much as himself.  Is that true, or do mine eyes deceive me?”

Tony blinked and looked around, confused, at the frozen world.  It was as if his life was a television screen and someone had pressed pause.  “Okay, that’s it.  Who are you?”

The woman smiled, stood up, and thrust her hand out in front of her, as if to prompt Tony to shake it.  “My name is Bonjo, damsel of distress.  It’s really has been a pleasure working with you thus far.”

Tony just looked at her hand.  “What?”

“I specialize in tomfoolery, have a degree in ballyhoo, work part-time for mayhem, and generally thrive on total chaos.”  She saluted him eagerly.  “You’ve been one of my pet projects for the past couple days.  I’ve really enjoyed the progress you’ve made so far, but I’m afraid that it might be because of the unfamiliarity of your environment.”

“What do you mean, I’ve been your pet project?”

“Well, you have obviously figured out by now that I am the one who brought you here, right?”

“Yeah, that incident with the field and the wolves and the random treadmill  in the middle of nowhere kind of tipped me off on that one.”

“I’m proud of your observational skills.”  She nodded sagely.  “I did all of this for your benefit.  You see, you are, what we call in the business, an ‘orderly.’  You try to organize too much of your life, putting yourself into a dangerous box that keeps you from realizing your full potential.  I brought you here to take you out of that box.”

Tony raised an eyebrow.  “Excuse me?” 

Bonjo shook her head, as if she were mourning something.  “This conversation is a result of your self-imposed box.  If you would just let go of your death-grip on reality, let yourself go a little bit, give in to the imagination and spontaneity you were born to have, you would have a lot easier time believing me and moving on with your life, if you had any reason to talk to me at all.”

“So, basically, you’re trying to make me as crazy as you are?”

“Oh, gaawwd no,” Bonjo said exaggeratedly.  “I am the last thing I want  you to be.  If I were human, I would be so out of balance, I would hardly be able to breathe.  I simply want you to be more chaotic than you are, since right now, you are more lawful than you need to be.”

“Wait, you’re not human?”

“I’m technically only half a being,” she sighed.  “But you’re getting off topic.  This is not about me.  This is about you and your little female friend over there.”

“Who?” Tony asked feigning innocence.

“Let’s not try to play that game,” she said, raising an eyebrow.  “Little Uma over there is a real person, with real feelings and a real brother and all that.  Just because you think you’re in some sort of dream doesn’t mean you can treat her as if she’s a fictional character.”

Tony narrowed his eyes.  “Okay, I actually don’t know what you’re talking about now.”

“You’ve been doing a pretty good job since yesterday of keeping up with all the hitches I’ve thrown at you, from the wolves and the treadmill, to that walk through the cave, to the breakfast club this morning.  That dance epic while belting out Gloria Gaynor was quite the show, I must say.”

“Hey, now—“

“But I’m growing more and more leery that your seeming comfort with all of this is simply due to the fact that you’re convinced that all of this is fake, that you’re in some sort of dream state and are imagining all of this.”  She shook her head sadly again.  “It happens with my clients a lot, actually.  I throw too much at them at once and they get overwhelmed, and just blot everything out.  It’s one thing to become a balanced, contributing member of society in a fantasy dream world.  It’s another thing entirely to translate that way of life into your reality.”

Tony laughed.  “Okay, so you’re basically saying that I’m screwing up, but it’s your fault.”

“Oh, I certainly misjudged you, yes.  But you’re the idiot who thinks all of this is fake.”

“Well, what am I supposed to think when you’re messing with everything going on around me?  How could you do that if it weren’t fake?”

Bonjo laughed a high-pitched clear sound like tiny bells on a Christmas wreath decoration.  “You think I’ve waited until just recently to start interfering with your life?”  

Like a wave of color and fabric was washing over her, her shape changed into that of the woman at the coffee shop whom he had argued with for five consecutive days about the way he brewed her drinks.

“Recognize me?”

Tony didn’t say anything.  He just stared.

Then a second wave passed over her and she turned into his landlord, who he had been ripping off for the past six months by paying him in singles and leaving out at least $150 every month because he knew the man didn’t own a cash-counting machine and he secretly didn’t believe he could actually count for himself.

“Do you feel bad yet, for the way you treat people?”

“Not if that man was you the whole time.”

She rippled back into herself with a jolt like lightening and launched herself at him, tackling him to the ground and pinning his neck under her forearms.  “I told you,” she said, hissing into his ear, “these are real people.  You can’t just mess around with them and think there aren’t any consequences.”

He pushed her off of him with surprising ease and choked out, “Hey, it’s your involvement that’s got me thinking they’re fake—“

“I never said I became them.  I only manipulated them to affect you.”

“Oh, so it’s okay for you to manipulate people, but it’s not—“

“I told you, I’m not human.”

“So you’re above the law?”

“I am the law!” Her black dress turned into a flowing judge’s robe and her hair turned into a long, white powdered wig.

Tony deadpanned.

Her face cracked from a stern, even angry expression to an irrepressible grin instantly.  “Bah ha ha,” she blurted out, clapping her hand over her mouth.  “I couldn’t help it.  It was just so perfect,” she said from between her fingers.”

Her appearance returned to its original state, and she brushed herself off while clearing her throat.  “Anyway, this is all just to say that I think you need some continued intensive work.”  She snapped her fingers and everything around them fell away as if the Earth had dropped out from under them, leaving nothing but one of those vast white rooms that seems to go on forever that they use for car commercials and the Matrix movies.

“Wait,” Tony yelled, lunging at the empty space where Uma had just been seconds before.  He stumbled and fell onto his knees.  “What did you do?”

To his horror, Bonjo smiled.  “I see my plan is working,” she said, her voice soft.  “I just have a little test for you, and then you and your little lady friend can be merrily on your ways, galavanting about the world, having a gay old time.”

“What sort of test?” Tony asked, looking up at her from the ground.  

She didn’t say anything, but made a dramatic move with her hand, bringing it around and over her head, while bringing the other one down near her waist, and shaping her fingers in the poise of two snaps.  

“Ida Rango!” she said, then snapped twice, doing some sort of seductive salsa dance move with her hands and stomping her feet, and with a loud crack that echoed throughout the endless room, she was gone.

Tony sighed heavily and pushed himself to his feet.  By the time the soles of both his shoes were planted firmly and flatly on the ground, the starkly white room was replaced by a stage floor filled with fake fog and reaching arms whose bodies he could barely make out beyond the limited visibility of the fog.  There was scaffolding all around the perimeter of the stage, and women were dancing in cages hovering dozens of feet in the air  

He turned behind him and looked out beyond the blinding lights into the house, and he could make out the shapes of what had to be hundreds of people sitting in plush red velvet chairs.  He looked down at his own body and saw that he was wearing tightly fitting white pants that had artistically place rips along the thighs and shins, and he had a sort of torn sash barely covering a diagonal strip from his shoulder to his opposite hip.  He felt a headband constricting the flow of blood to his head, and felt sweat beading up on his arms, chest, and face.

It was his worst nightmare; he had been thrust into some perverted disco movie, and he knew in his heart, the only way to escape was to dance his way to freedom.

Suddenly, the thudding dance music that had been playing grew stormy, and Tony watched a spotlight move from him to a place up stage onto one of the scaffoldings.  There, sliding down banisters and suggestively wrapping slender athletic legs around poles and hand rails, was Uma, dressed in a red sequence unitard with a glittering gold headband around curly brown hair Tony hadn’t seen before.  Though the movements of her body were fluid, graceful, and beautiful, her face looked horrified.

Evidently, this was her worst nightmare too.  

“Curse you, Bonjo,” Tony said under his breath.  “I thought you said this was a test for me.  Why did you have to pull her into it?”

She came to a break in the scaffolding, and, held at the wrist by two men dressed like dominatrixes, began gyrating heavily, thrusting her pelvis at angles not seen in nature.

Tony was surprised by how calm he felt about all of this.  Not only was he not freaking out at the idea of being on a stage and being expected to perform dance feats he’d never even tried to imagine pulling off, but he was not even remotely turned on by Uma’s seductive dance movements.

The men holding her lowered her knees on to his shoulders.  He turned her slowly around and slid her slowly to the ground, where she gave him a quick look of terror, before taking off backwards into the fog with long, dancing steps.  

Tony chased after her like a panther stalking his prey, but he tried to convey to her with his face that he was just following a script already set out for him, that he didn’t want to scare her, and that he wasn’t any better at dancing than she was.

He grabbed her arm and spun her close to him, and they danced and lept together across the stage, before she did an amazing back bend and he followed the curve of her body with his chin.  Then they both stood up and he spun her again before dragging her off behind him slowly and rhythmically.  He whispered into her ear, trying to keep his ragged breaths even enough so that she would understand him.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I swear I’m going to get you out of this.”

She broke away from him and dance forward on gazelle-like toes, and they chased each other flirtatiously in an elegant game of cat-and-mouse.  When they met at center stage, he held her in another fierce backbend, and then spun her through the air in a sweeping circle, as if she were a banner he were waving for the whole world to see.  He held her on his back while she did slow, strong kicks in the air, and as the music grew in momentum, the zombie chorus dancers popped up out of the smoke like daisies and began pulsating like waves crashing against rocks on the beach.  

Uma made a violent dancing gesture that Tony couldn’t have described if he had been asked to, and disappeared.  Tony leapt like a frolicking white-tailed deer around the stage looking for her, and while he was standing in one corner, he was accosted by a woman who jumped on to his leg and began swinging herself around his pelvis.  If he hadn’t been caught by surprised and slightly revolted, he might have enjoyed it.  While she sat there on top of him, more of the zombie dancing women gathered around him and he felt compelled to push her off so that he could jump out of the crowd and skip across the front of the stage, spinning and dancing all the way.  Another zombie woman jumped him when he got there, but he fended her off with the grace and poise of a love-struck swan prince, and turned to find Uma running at him.  

She broke into his arms and he spun her around in the air again, letting her hips gyrate unnaturally again, and supporting her as she did nauseating backbends in his hands.  She kicked her leg high into the air, stood up, and ran off into a sea of zombie woman dancers, then turned around and ran at Tony.  

This was it.  The part he was most afraid of.  The part he’d seen in a couple dozen dance-related movies from the eighties that completely wowed him and made him awfully glad not to be a male dancer.

She leapt into his arms, and he caught her with his right arm, vaulting her into the air above his head while she held onto his shoulders and stretched her legs out behind her.  Then, as the drums in the song beat the final cataclysmic cascade of bass beats, he dropped her onto the ground, holding her back with his hands and looking down at her sweaty, frightened face.  Her eyes were squeezed shut in a wince, expecting the worst.

After a moment that seemed to Tony to last a lifetime (wherein he envisioned himself growing old and adopting two sets of twins whom he would name Reggie, Martha, Pongo, and Perdita) the unseen audience began to clap and cheer, and he felt the breath return to his lungs.  

Unlike his counterpart of the silver screen, Tony did not attempt to kiss his dancing partner.  He just looked down at her and smiled.  “It’s going to be okay now,” he whispered to her.  “It’s all almost over.  I just have to strut a little bit, and then we’re done.”

Then the clapping stopped, the stage disappeared, and Tony and Uma were standing in their sweaty dance uniforms in the middle of Kings Cross Station, between platforms nine and ten.  Bonjo was standing awkwardly close to them, her face pushing in between theirs.

“Good job,” she whispered, her voice light and clear like the ringing bells.  “You both passed.”  She then walked slowly away, and Tony and Uma were left to deal with the dozens of confused Britons who were staring at them.

I believe all (but one) bets have come to their respective ends at this point.  If you owe me money based on our wagers, click the monkey to the right and follow his instructions.

If you're Ben and your wager with me technically goes until tomorrow...don't fear.  Your turn will come soon.

If you just want to donate, I'm still open for that, for sure.  Click the monkey and follow his wise words.

Stay tuned in the next couple of days when I will update my NaNo merit badges (I've earned four more since the last update...) and tell you more about my NaNo experience.  But now I've got to shower.

Thanks for all your support this past month!

<3 spadeALLcross