Caution Wet Floor

I arrived in the city without the hill in February 2010 with nothing to do but shop and do artwork and home decoration and generally drift about not thinking too much and noticing everything…then I went on a spiritual pilgrimage to Spain a few months later. I was away for two months. Upon my return in July, I made a lame effort to get jobs at Very Fresh Fruit and Veg and at Super Food Barn without success. I went on bike rides around the lake. I took photographs of anything and everything that took my interest. I made hundreds of asymmetrical wave generators. I hung out in coffee shops and tried on dresses that took my fancy. I noticed everything.  
I discovered some very interesting things pertaining to the head honchos of the city where I live. They are not very nice people. I managed to foil at least a few of their pernicious takeover plans…if not all…since this whole situation blew up in my face in 2010. More on that later.
In early 2011…around March I met up with an old friend and enemy. Suranan e Absolam Salah.
 He gave me a job…as a data processor…that I did not ask for. I am his unpaid servant…essentially.  In the beginning I was working only for him. Now I work for the other side as well as for him. Basically I am stuck in the middle which forces me to be a double agent whether I want to be one or not. Since both sides have vested interests in this city without a hill and in some cases less than noble intentions towards each other’s offspring…I tend to go with whatever side is espousing  theories  most like my own…if neither of them are…I go my own way.
Rob Wallace accompanied me to Spain…that was the beginning of this crazy adventure I am still on.   It was April 17, 2010… spring time in the northern regions. The Camino is a spiritual pilgrimage that is at least a thousand years old and nearly that long….It was in the La Rioja region that I discovered the Lizards lair.  Not only that but I think I made my peace with Estella the Lizard Queen. With so much water under the bridge we could have been enemies and by then it was just pointless.  In the end we discovered that we both wanted the same thing….an exciting new adventure.
Oh…btw…how I met Rob…Rob broke into my house…actually it was a fruit and veg shop, I was working the till and he was a customer…but it was a bust in by any account... and then because of his predicament and partly because of mine I made him my spying and adventure accomplice. Rob… I was to discover was a wartime refugee…he was on the run from bandits at the beginning and end of time…which was a huge dilemma for me.
So arriving back in Arcadia was a pleasant surprise…even for someone like me who is used to surprises…to cut a long story short. The city without the hill was not the same city that I left…it was like I had fallen asleep then woken up in the future….

Caution Wet Floor.
This was my first clue and the inspiration for many of my predictions and subsequent explorations.
First off I saw a magpie perched on a bucket. Next to it was a sign…it said Caution Wet Floor….inside the Grand Central Palace!!!
The floor did not appear to be wet although the bucket was right next to a large, dark grey, square shaped, granite slab over which water continually ran. Could ‘they’ possibly be referring to this flat fountain? It was a ridiculous. It was a fountain. You could not see the running water. You just knew it was there. Sooo maybe they had to warn people about that. And… if the floor had ever been wet, how did the water get on it. Did it come from the fountain or did someone spill their drink. Why leave the bucket there? It was after all a very grandiose and public part of the building. And it wasn’t just any building. It was the central palace of the Grand National Assembly…possibly the most splendiferous structure in all the land. 
The new palace was built into city hill and city hill was my old stamping ground. Every time I go there I picture how it used to be, when I first came to this city as an eleven year old in 1971. A group of us metamorphose kids went there on a school excursion once. It was an excursion with a botanical theme. Carefree and curious among those long gone gum trees, we inspected bark, banksia’s and bugs, varieties of leaves and flowers, rocks, sediments and strata…and collected specimens for our school projects.  Later when I was living in a forest, not far from the hill, I would sometimes go there at night with my friends from the  indoctrination colleges… we would run around like mad things, smoke herbal relaxants and tobacco products, put on various theatrical performances like pretending to be people from another era such as Victorian, Edwardian and Sumerian.
I remember once…I was the only girl with five boys…none of us had any clothes on. It was the middle of the night in the middle of winter. We decided to swim across the lake. Squidgy Green and Slippery Pinko were there along with Rusty Jo, Woody Cornish and A R Ving. That is all I remember.
Excuses for digressing…on that particular November day I remembered the hill as it was then… not that I am sentimental about it….being there just brings back those memories. The hill was gone, carved out and covered by the new central palace in all its half buried magnificence. I don’t even know why I went there. I was curious perhaps…about the writing on the Common’s Bridge and the bright flash of light from the Warriors Memorial Hall that momentarily blinded me as I walked down the tunnel towards Reconciliation Bridge the previous evening. It was almost/ exactly 8.30 when I saw it.
“Did you see that”, I had exclaimed in wonder to Rob the previous night. He hadn’t. He was looking down absorbed in his own private conversations.
I had noticed the messages scrawled in pink chalk on the pedestrian access on the way over the bridge. On the way back I noticed them again. One message in particular jumped out at me. I don’t remember the exact words but it warned of a ‘pulsed microwave audiogram’. Naturally I wondered if there was a connection to the bright booming flash of light that I had seen coming from the Warriors Memorial Hall.  It was pointed at the Grand Central Palace.
Birds are messengers, of that I have no doubt.  As for the bird on the bucket…the message was clear. If a wild bird can find its way into the centre of a building via security vestibules and a grand foyer bypassing elaborate rooms leading through to other elaborate rooms, promenades and walkways or up sweeping staircases leading this way and find itself a nice resting spot that was both theatrical and geometrically succinct… defined as it was by a fountain and a flag. If a wild bird can do that… then surely I too would find shelter in the heart of this city….as it was I ended spending about a thousand years living it up in Yarrabah and was in dire danger from a crocodile attack during one of the episodes from that adventure….but that is another story.