As much as she didn’t want to admit it, she felt strangely safer encased in his two dimensional grasp. Stranger still is that she could swear that only mere minutes had passed since she came into the office with the roasted mocha emblazoning on the door, but from the looks of Highwayman’s stack of remotes and the amount of would-be heroes captured and locked in the monkey cages, she knew that much more time had passed.
Just then the alluring robot voice came on over the loudspeaker once more. Missile launch in twenty minutes.
Something definitely wasn’t right. Pixanne grabbed a hold of Esteban’s wrist and looked at his watch. She was about to complain the uninvited arm wrapped around her waist when she realized that his clock was stupid. There were like seven hands on that thing, and there was even a digit readout in hexadecimal numerals. No sane person could use that thing to tell time.
Esteban read her confused gaze as well as he could read his own wristwatch—he was after all no sane person, being anthropomorphic did not make him an anthropomorph. “Were you checking the time m’lady? Or were you just wanting me to hold you closer?”
“What’s going on?” Pixanne asked, forcing his arm away and ending their embrace now that attention had been called to it.
“I suppose you are referring to the little time anomaly that you seem to be experiencing, no?” Esteban asked, settling into an explanation he’s given a thousand times before to anyone willing to listen to him. Once Pixanne nodded in response he continued. “Have you ever heard of the theory of relativity? It is when you are unhappy and your hand is on the stove for a minute and it feels like an hour but and then when you are happy and with a pretty pixie for an hour it feels like a minute.” He stared in a blank expression for at least a minute. “I don’t understand. How are those two are related. Second cousins maybe? That Einstein fellow is not too bright.”
Missile launch in ten seconds.
“Esteban!” Pixanne trembled. “What in the blue blazes does that have to do with this wacky time anomaly?”
“Blue blazes? Again, the colloquialisms. They make no—“
Pixanne stomped her feet and placed her hands on her hips, ending up in that adorable ‘harumph’ position that was proprietary to pixies and their ilk.
“Ah, yes. The time,” Esteban pulled the pocket watch from the tiny pocket in his vest and fiddled with the exposed hands. “To your eyes I am but a two-dimensional anthropomorphic coffee bean. This is not entirely the case. Where you are bound to three dimensionality and the confines of linear time, I experience two dimensions spatially and two dimesions temporally. Two dimensions of time. While I am not privy to such features as say, a well-rounded behind, I am able to access and manipulate time—to a degree.”
“So that explains the wristwatch and the pocket watch,” Pixanne said. The resolution of the two-timepiece dilemma was much more satisfying to her than the revelation that Esteban experienced time in two dimensions. At least now it made sense whereas before she found it superfluous and annoying.
“Chronometers,” Esteban corrected.
“What?”
“This,” he held up his wrist—chronometer, “and this” he presented his pocket chronometer. “These are chronometers, not watches.”
“What? I don’t care.”
“Oh, okay—“
Missile launch in two minutes.
“You have to do something!” Pixanned shrieked. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t want to be here to find out when that missile goes off.”
Casually, Esteban reached for his pocket chronometer and flung open the spring-loaded cover. Looking fondly at the picture that he kept inside—a fond memory of the coffee bean farm back home—he fiddled with the knob. When the big hand and little hand and the medium hand and the stagehand and the other three hands were exactly where he wanted them to be, Esteban snapped shut the lid and tucked the chronometer back neatly in its place. Patting his pocket, he said, “There you have it m’lady. You now have all the time in the world. How about you and I go grab a cup of coffee?”
“Sure. Yes, just,” she was incredulous of her quick and honest response. There was no sense in fighting it anymore; she really did have a thing for Esteban Calcutta the two-dimensional anthropomorphic coffee bean. “Let’s go.”
Esteban opened the door to a still world. The rocket stopped rearing to be shot into space, the henchmen were no longer being hopelessly incompetent and Highwayman’s plans were on a temporary hold. “After you, m’lady” Esteban chivalrously gestured.
Pixanne acquiesced to his request. On her way out she paused, “Coffee? You drink coffee? Isn’t that a little—you know—odd? Being a coffee bean and all.”
“I don’t like to think of it as cannibalism m’lady. I prefer to think of it as getting reacquainted with old friends.” He smiled to himself. “I think I’ve just come up with a wonderful new slogan for the ad guys: ‘Coffee. Not cannibalism.’” He let it simmer on the edge of his tongue. “Do you like the sound of that, m’lady?”
“No. Not at all. That’s actually the worst—it’s just terrible.” Pixanne said, savoring the bittersweet taste of her brusqueness. “And would please stop referring to me as ‘m’lady’? It really is one of my pet peeves and I don’t like it.”
“I don’t get it. Centuries and centuries devoted to domesticating the peeve, yet nobody seems to like them. Why do so many people bother with all of the trouble of getting a peeve in the first place? Unless they are just finding these peeves abandoned in some alley. I understand that it would be considered inhumane to just drop off all of the little helpless peeves at the pound and let them care for the poor animals. But if you’re not going to love the peeve, then why keep the peeve? It doesn’t make any sense. You domesticate the peeve, you let the peeve into your home, you don’t like the peeve. Every time I hear that people say that, it really bothers the part of my nervous system that deals with logic. I find it annoying to a greater degree than the mean of the population.”
“Pixanne stopped short and turned. “You really don’t get it, do you? That is what a pet peeve is.”
“What is?”
“A pet peeve. It’s not a pet. It’s something that bothers you.”
“Another colloquialism?” The look of confusion on his face faded to understanding and back to confusion again. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh what?” Pixanne asked, already knowing the answer to her query. The floor of the fantasy factory was slowly churning back to life.
Missile launch in ten seconds.
“I think I lost track of the time.”
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