Chapter Thirty Eight. The Trap Door

The Trap Door

"What do you mean I've become a real bitch?," asked Derby to the big face which stared down the top of the vase.

Umpa was careful how he chose his words. "Derby. You are not a man or a woman at the very essence of yourself. You're pure spirit. As is everything at the very base of essence."

"But you said I've been nasty and whiny and acting like a spoiled, pampered bitch," repeated Derby. He crossed his arms and stuck out his bottom lip and threw himself/herself on the soft pillows of his apartment lounge.

"And so you have, my pretty little princess. And so you have!" Umpa winked to the tiny doll of a Jeninqua, sprawled out on the circular sofa in the vase. "And you're about to further integrate the various attributes of your character!"

Derby, in his Jeninqua body, found the right muscle mechanism to arch his/her beautifully sculpted eye brow. "And how will I," and here he maneuvered his fine Jeninqua first and middle fingers on both hands to make quotation marks "further integrate my attributes?"

"By finding your black marble at the base of yourself!," responded a proud Umpa, as if announcing the birth of a new bouncing grandson. 

At first Derby continued to recline, even as he stared down across his generous bosom, past his exposed belly button, across his pantaloons, and to his shiny dainty slippers. Finding no evidence of a marble anywhere on his lovely torso, arms or legs, he stood up.

Looking down again, Derby asked, "And where will I first find the base of myself?"

"Derby, my boy...for I still think of you as a boy, even though you've been Jeninqua for over a month now," gently lead the smiling Buddha to the vase bound prisoner. "This whole vase is you and everything about it."

"And what does that mean?," demanded Derby, as if he were a housewife who had just been told she should keep her place.

"Of course you remember being in a limbo state without a body?" asked Umpa.

"Of course," conceded Derby.

"Nothing has really ever changed before or after that limbo state!," exclaimed Umpa excitedly.

"Excuse me?" snapped Derby cupping his hands under his breasts. "What are these, egg salad?"

"Hahaha!" trumpeted Umpa. "Well in many ways yes! You see, as Jeninqua and you and all the circumstances that went into the merger, you were sort of like an egg salad while you existed within the white marble."

With that, the lovely Jeninqua in a bottle, threw herself back on to her overstuffed pillows, as if exasperated. "Umpa, please," he/she blirted in a very pouty voice. "You give me a dragon for my Mr. Willie. You give me these," again cupping his hands under his pair of cupcakes, "to kill-for boobies. You make me laugh and I swear, I don't even remember what it feels like to have a swinging weenie. But what the HELL are you talking about? and what torture am I about to have to endure now?!!!"

"Surely you understand that you, like all things of the Earth, have both Yin and Yang natures?," taught the guru.

"Yes, yes," agreed Derby, waving the back of his fingers as if he were brushing away a fly. "Yin Yang, water, fire, blah, blah, blah. You've told me a hundred times if you've told me once!"

"Now don't get the water and fire confused with the Yin and the Yang," continued Umpa. "I mean, water is Yin and Fire is Yang, but what I've been teaching you about water and fire are elements within major nested Holons." Here Umpa stopped and stared down at the princess to see her reaction.

"Oh Christ Umpa," argued Derby. "Just send me down a chimney sweeper to blow out my pipes, or give me back my tally whacker, but please stop talking in circles!"

"Open the hatch door at your feet. On the edge of the carpet, you'll find a tab. Pull it up," instructed Umpa.

Immediately Derby threw open the hatch door and discovered a small downstairs compartment under his lounge area. "Holy shit Batman!," declared the Derbinqua Meister. "What have we here?"

"Go grab the black marble at the base of the stairs," said Umpa to the astonished bottle dweller. "In your present state, you are mostly your Jeninqua self. But when you grab that black ball from your lower chamber, you better hold on to your tits. Because you're about to undergo one more metamorphosis!"