Then again, of all traveling salesmen, meatball salesmen are the most convincing. Not to pawn off my problems on another, but they really do have a way with words. Especially here on this planet.

And then I found five dollars. Five dollars such as no five dollars had been found before. Wonder if that meatball salesman would give me a deal...

did so in a manner I was unaccustomed too. Then again, I hadn't spent much time around meatball salesmen. Perhaps they are always like that.

"Oh God" I screamed as the realization crashed down on me that those meatballs were made of ground panda...

"Yet how advantageous to have detected this currency on such a numb lurid planet." Recalling the experience...

Little did I know at the time, the five dollars that I found were laced with a substance that made me extremely violent. This combined with the realization that the meat was in fact panda meat I had no other choice but to pull out my 45 and pop the salesman's head like a zit! My only fear now was that he would become a zombie...

The pulp of his once obsequious visage was set upon in moments by the waspants, Their metallic green shimmer glinting in the light of my torch... but what was that light coming from his earring? It was not a reflection, their was an unmistakable light coming from inside. I was hypnotized as I plucked his flesh from the barb that had held it in place. A magnificent stone encircled by smaller gems, each of them representing one of the colonized planets, but the center stone, the sunstone, was radiating a warm, inviting light. I peered deeply into it and saw...

The baroque tarnish of the stones conjured associated imagery - ink dropping into water in a cup, a paintbrush, dimly lit bamboo forests. Each of these sparked in front of my eyes quickly, replaced eventually by soothing black. The meatball salesman and the $5 bill were cropped from my vision, and I opened my eyes to gaze blearily along my own outstretched arm. The paintbrush held in inkstained fingers hung listlessly over the edge of the divan on which I lay, dripping blue into a teacup on the floor. The wooden slats around the cup were stained with a constellation of drying color, like the spatter from the salesman's head when I'd coldly obliviated him. The early morning light shone dimly through the balsa slats into my modest studio - the wind rustling the bamboo outside softly rustling the hem of my kimono where it draped the floor. An acrid taste in my mouth warned me before a finger touched to my lips came away blue - I really had to stop this habit of licking my brush between strokes, it always gave me such horrible nightmares. I stood up slowly and stretched in the early morning quiet, looking across the studio floor at the dozens of ink drawings I'd managed to paint the night previous. A sudden snap, crunching in the bamboo groves outside broke the stillness, and I turned towards the window, startled.

Seeing that it was only a falling branch caused by the large amount of snow that had built up over night I ignored it, I decided to that the best way to clear the nightmares from mind and start this chilly day right was to blaze up a bowl. Little realising that I was about to start out on a quest that wouldalter my life and change the destiny of planet Panda forever...

Boo!