Fu Tichi shook his head and restarted the engines. But as Cuspitui cast off, I overheard one of the femen warriors say to our erstwhile companion: “So, you wanna join us hitching a ride on a sugar worm?”

“You bet!” The kid answered, dropping the flattened gnome and fumbling hurriedly to don his own, broad-shouldered version of local attire.

I would soon come to wish that I had a dessert-suit of my own.

An hour later, while we plunged ever-deeper into the sparkling sand waste, a mini-tornado whipped past us, leaving behind clots of cottony, pink fibers, a sweet-sticky mess that Cuspitui had to clean off the masts and then her own fur, yowling curses that even my demmie-made ear nanos were too embarrassed to translate.

The backwash from that sugary dust-devil filled the air with so much choking powder that I felt dizzy.

“Are you all right?” asked Coalshack as I clutched a railing.

“The wind… a gust of dust…” I answered groggily. “I breathed in… a whole bunch.”

Stumbling over to the cargo hatch cover, I sat down and covered my lower face with a bandana, but it could only filter so much. The dizziness lingered – a sugar high that contained its own wild lows.

“So where are we going now?” I asked, gripping cogency with both hands.

“Same as before,” said Fu Tichi. “Obtainia.”

“Wherever that may be,” added Cuspitui with a querulous yowl. And I looked at her shaggy form, which now seemed more blurry… and much more feminine… than before.

“My machine – my finder – still needs more information,” Nuts pointed out. “It insists we must stop somewhere along the way.”

“Yes, from our heading I know where it’s guiding us,” said Fu Tichi. “To the Nameless Oasis and the city of the icons, near the far edge of the desert. We just find the structure bearing the right icon and we’re in business.”

“Right icon?” I asked, blinking, barely keeping it together. “Which icon is that?”

“The Necronom icon, of course,” he replied.

Part of me wanted to climb the rigging and howl at this crazy world. But things only got worse, as cogency seemed to unravel amid the ever-worsening sugar high.

I will do my best to relate what followed, as it flows from memory, though my recollection of this next stretch is as murky and dreamy as Coleridge rousing from an opium binge. I know some of what follows did not happen – it couldn’t have!

At least, I hope not.

It might have been an hour later – or a day or a year – that Nuts held up the finder and announced, as her voice seemed to warble in both tone and volume—

“It’s wriggling.”