Pater Panther, flanked by his advisers Pit and Peach and Can Do and Cannot Carrot, surveyed the field. His auto-choirs sang him awake and to sleep and as-above-so-below. He was Über as unity, Fit as fire resolving complicated carbon bonds into charcoal, Ripped as the rising water which lifts all ships, Mad as the milk which makes coffee taste alike to any other animal. He stalked in, alternatively obvious and incognito, stomping his feet and treading lightly fit to wake the dead.
“Panther Up!” went the alarm,
Reverend Paul the Two Lights by Knight, Ultimate (in the sense of the final member of a string) Super-Detective, crisscrossing the crisis, lids
heavy from sleep. Incorporating the notes from that incomparable
choir into a tune of his own design.
People heard. Boy did they ever.
Scientists scrambled to make their own Panther, an exact duplicate,
polyphonic and with his own train of musos, feline supple, and in the
end of such alike fidelity that they just became the same Panther so
that was a wash. The Knitting club gave a shot at introducing this
fine young world-turning and boardwalk-wrecking young hurricane-man
to a very nice, if timid, unmarried member of their order. Mark and
Martha constructed an elaborate series of follies and trapdoors,
getting so lost in the moss that even when they escaped detection they thought
they were found out and surrendered entirely. Cabaña Joanna ignored the stalking cat and worked toward an alternative arrangement with Peach, the most
inexperienced of the generals and in dire need of someone to cook him
a decent meal with some greens and to sit on his lap. Soon he was
her's and she his and both belonged to Pater Panther.
All belonged to Pater Panther.
Except for maybe Mark and Martha,
hidden away somewhere, self-betrayed but like any good revolutionary
cell lacking a sufficiently diversified portfolio of facts to turn
informer, even under the highest of ordeals.
