The Party- Planning 1

    Xandra Omegra drove quickly to the Human Beans coffee shop to meet her old friend Ovoline. Having just come from an intensely pleasurable melting session with her wife, Charen Feeney, Xandra's head was still a bit foggy. She shook her head to try to clear the cobwebs out, but it didn't really help. She smiled broadly at the memories of what she and Charen had become during those hours of bliss, as she carefully maneuvered her car into Human Beans' crowded, too-small parking area. She grabbed her purse and got out of the car, her cheeks still flushed; walking quickly down the sidewalk to the coffee shop door.

    Ovoline Sdanley sipped a mocha latte and tapped her tiny foot as she waited patiently at a corner table. Xandra flung open the door, and Ovoline smiled broadly. "There you are!!! Weren't you the one who wanted to meet at three o'clock?!? What time is it now?"

    "It's four fifteen, O, and I'm sorry, dear! I got... erm, caught up in something I was doing with Charen...", Xandra said as she hugged Ovoline. She kissed her friend on the cheek. Ovoline kissed her back on her cheek.

    "Don't give me that, honey... I know that look! You were melting with that adorable wife of yours, weren't you?!?" Ovoline said, grinning playfully. "And without little old me?!? What nerve!!!", she laughed.

    Xandra chuckled at the joke. "I never could fool you, dear!" She raised her hand in mock surrender. "Guilty as charged! Oh, but it was pure bliss!!!"

    "Soooooooo... Tell me all about it!!!", Ovoline asked. Xandra spent the next ten minutes doing just that, punctuated by various smiles, "ooh"s and "mmm"s from Ovoline, who had ordered herself another latte and a cappuccino for Xandra.

    Ovoline was a bottle blonde, about ten years older than Xandra, and had gotten much further into the burgeoning melt subculture than nearly all of her friends. She had also been into a few other drugs as a young adult, and had experimented more than most melt users with various different ways of taking the drug, becoming something of a pioneer chemist type. She'd tried crushing up the pills and snorting them through her nose, (which became known as "snarfling"), as she used to do with the Ritalin she'd scored as a rebellious youth; which seemed to get the melt into her system faster, but gave her nosebleeds that wouldn't change into anything else, unless she left the nose off her face entirely. She'd tried crushing the pills into small nuggets and smoking them as if they were the crack she'd tried a couple of times in her mid-twenties (which entered the ever-expanding melt lexicon as "crelting"); the effects were more potent, but didn't the melt didn't seem to last as long as it did when she just popped the pills as most people did. She had also tried cooking the melt into an injectable form (which became known as "meltoin"), which worked brilliantly, but seemed to become even more addictive than the pills were. Finally she hit upon a brilliant idea: to crush the capsules into powder, "lace" them with various other drugs, then fill gelcaps with the results. These experiments made her a sort of underground celebrity of melt and its resulting derivatives. Ovoline had been a basketball star in her youth, and was nearly six-foot-five when she began melting. After years of what some would call abuse of the drug, she had regressed in height to just over four-foot four ("And getting smaller all the time!", she'd chortle at nearly any mention of her short stature).

    Xandra finished telling Ovoline about what she'd been doing before arriving, and when she finished her tale, Ovoline smiled broadly and clapped with glee. "Oh, I wish I could have been there, honey! I could've hooked you up with some of the new stuff I've been working on... but then, you might not have made it here for a few hours more!" She held up her latte and chortled, "I would have needed a 50-gallon drum of this stuff!!!" Xandra fairly exploded with laughter as she vividly imagined her diminutive friend sitting on top of a large metal barrel with a plastic straw coming out of the top.

    "So, dear... What kind of "new stuff" have you been working on, and will Outlandishrink be there?!?", queried Xandra. "You KNOW how much Charen adores them!"

    Ovoline nodded and replied, "They'll be there, as well as a couple other groups that play more roots-oriented stuff, but with modern instrumentation... If Charen and the others give them a chance, I staunchly assert that a truly meltariffic time will be had by all concerned!"

    "Excellent! Now what kind of theme will we be going with this year? And how are you gonna top last year?!?"

    Ovoline raised an eyebrow and asked Xandra, "Have you ever heard of an old group called The Grateful Dead?!?" She grinned knowingly, as Xandra shook her head. "Well, honey, have I got a audfyle for you!!!" She slid the small orange card across the table to Xandra. "Listen to this first, then let me know what you think!" She stood up from her chair (which still only placed her at chest-height to Xandra). "I gotta talk this over with Pie, too... I have a feeling he'll adore the idea! Toodles, honey!!!" 

    Xandra bent down to receive the kiss Ovoline gave her, then got up from her chair, placing the audfyle card in her purse. She waved to her longtime friend, then settled up the tab and left Human Beans. She thought to herself, "Ovoline's got yet another of those crazy ideas of hers... still, it's gonna be tough to beat last year's party..." She smiled at the memory of Charen, Ovoline and herself melting together and forming into a ten-headed hydra-like creature. Xandra licked her lips and beamed, sighing nostalgically.

    She went to insert the audfyle card into the car's player on the way home, and noticed a small plastic baggie taped to the bottom, on which Ovoline had scrawled, "Eat me, play me... O". The two small, thin squares that resembled paper in the baggie intrigued her as much as the audfyle did. Xandra decided to wait and share this experience with Charen, who knew a lot about old music. "Maybe she's heard of these... er, dead guys..." she thought to herself.