Not Sally and the Agents of Duck by Glen Lemmert - HTML preview

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Chapter ten - Enter the T-UBA

I open the door and and slip in quickly with Nancy following right behind. There is a dull glow in the room from what looks to be fish tank after fish tank of photoluminescent fish. For those of you not aware, photoluminescent means the fish glow in the dark. Pretty cool if you ask me, though you probably did not as this is just some weird monologue going on in my head. Maybe this amnesia thing did more than erase my memory. Well, let’s not think about that too much.

“So NS, I mean Nancy, any clue why the T-UBA door would lead us to a room full of glow in the dark fish?”

“Dad, you should say photoluminescent, it is the correct term, glow in the dark is so imprecise.”

Teenagers can be so snarky, I wonder how I dealt with that before the amnesia.

“Yes, I know, the point is, do you know why they are here?”

“Uh, no, though they are really cool. Do you think when this is all over you could get me a purple and yellow one, they are my school colors?”

“We’ll see, you know you will have to feed them, I don’t want to find them in an expired state like the turtle we got you last year ”

“Dad, dad!”

“What?”

“You just remembered that I had a turtle that did not make it past the expiration date. And besides I’m pretty sure the turtle was dead when you brought it home from the Parrot Shop. Really, who buys a dead or living turtle for that matter from a parrot shop.”

“You’re right I did remember something, but nothing useful like why I did buy an ex-turtle from a parrot shop. It is also too bad I can’t remember anything important like in this building the floors are designated by letters instead of numbers followed by a dash and then the room number.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just remember that?”

“Nearly positive, oh wait, I did, I did, maybe the T in T-UBA is for floor T, not the T sound in tuba.”

“Right, where did you put that secret decoder ring you got in your Happy Meal?”

“It’s right here, let see U - 21, B-2 , A-1… that would be room 2121.”

“I wonder why they just didn’t put T-BABA instead on Rasputin’s loyalty card.”

“Dad, no one is going to buy 8 Grande Super Lattes with Sprinkles to get a free Tbaba lesson, that is just crazy.”

“You may have a point about the crazy.”

“Since we do not have a flashlight, grab a couple of those fish and put them in one of those bags over there and we will have our own Photoluminescent Fish Lantern, PFL for short.”

“Great idea, do you know that you are really obsessed with acronyms?”

“Was I this way before the amnesia?”

“Yes, yes you were.”

Nancy, gathers the fish to make our PFL and I examine the room for anything else of interest. All I find is a bunch of fish food and Mistaphel’s guide to Cheering up your Depressed Elevator. Who knew elevators could get depressed? I definitely did not, I like most people treated elevators as mechanical slaves thinking they had no greater desires than to see me safely up or down, never considering that maybe once, just once an elevator would like to go side to side or maybe even in a conical spiral dictated only by prime numbers and an overall whimsy to not go up and down when called to. I’m glad I didn’t read the whole book or I would mostly like would stop this Tuba nonsense and head out on a quest to free the enslaved elevator from its monotonous grind of up and down and up and down. Now, about my T-UBA, I mean floor T room 2121.

“Nancy, I think my mind has wasted enough time on elevators and don’t get me started on escalators, do you have the PFL all set?”

“Yes dad, I was just enjoying you beginning to cluck like a chicken while you were looking at that crazy elevator book.

“Good, let’s get out of here, it is starting to smell like fish.”