Foxy and Miss Riddello

(751, Second Nunning Calendar)

Foxy dropped the phone in its cradle. It missed completely, bounced off the desk, and fell to the side. The connection wasn't cut, but Foxy didn't notice. One-two-three, he snorted line after line of black powder. His nostrils flared to sneeze, but no! my blow!, Foxy thought, and he held it in, blasting bits of the black powder with no small force back into his sinuses.

Two hundred emm-pee-esses away, a gravitational anomaly extended from the black hole at the center of the Omega Centauri galaxy and wiped away the ghost-planet Syllabium.

Foxy’s boss Miss Redello came in, and he quickly wiped the powder from his wet little nose onto the sleeve of his 100% non-reflective Sool Silk jacket. His was the last one in the universe, though he didn't know. His entire silhouette - except for his alligator leather shoes, his tiny foxy head, and his red paws - was absolutely dark. But on the left sleeve, there was the powder he had wiped off; it was now a light gray smear. A snotty smudge, like a child had pressed its sticky lips against the clean windshield of his sports car.

"Mister Foxy." Riddello called. In contrast to Foxy's sleek dress, Riddello was dressed in alternating layers of blue and white curtains. Her clothing leant her no shape.
"What is it Miss Riddello?"
"Orders from the Orionite Council."
"Extinction of the Pigeons, I'm sayin!"
"No -"
"-Sir, what?-"
"It says it's a Totem Order." Miss Riddello had never seen one of these before, but she knew precisely what it meant.
"You're not serious." Foxy snatched it up in his paw. "Whatta cock!" He smacked the paper with his fingertips - "this" - and pushed it back in Riddello's hands - "is a crock. I knew it, tho! I knew it'd be the birds!"
"I don't think this is political."
"Yeah. Look." Foxy lit a cigarette "If the courts are opening a new seat up. No less, for a di-no-saur –"
Miss Riddello sneezed. Her eyes bulged and watered, and then she sneezed again, and a third time violently.
"Hey, you want somethin?"
Riddello sneezed again. "Ah-ho-ho," she stuttered.
"Di-no-saur!" Foxy snapped, and laughed.

The Nunning Hospitalers of Syllabium were firstly physicians, and later became known as witches and antiquarians. Unmatched medical wisdom and thousands of years of patronage by the wealthiest beings in the eight galaxies of the Numenskal Alliance had left the Nunnings in possession of a number of singular artifacts. In their earliest days as an organized sect, just as their fame was beginning to spread through the cluster, the Nunnings were bequeathed with seven nearly complete articulated Iguanodon skeletons. Despite the Witches' inability to save The Collector's one major organ - its lower intestine - from progressive saponification, it – the Arch-Tube itself – felt that the Nunnings were the best that Earthling stock had to offer the universe, and that they should be the custodians of the relics.

More than twelve thousand years earlier, a geologist named Louis Dollo (1857-1931) had dug the skeletons up from a mine. After surviving five world wars, a set of eleven articulated skeletons were rescued from the sixth by the dedicated professors of Serenitatas University on Luna. Within two hundred and fifty years Lunar society was crumbling under corporate neglect and all eleven had been pawned to sympathetic museums and galleries around the Sol System and its neighbors. They were separated for the next several millenia. Four were destroyed by the Zealots of Tyl, but The Collector slowly procured the other seven.

The Nunnings built cathedrals to serve as mounts for the dinosaurs. From the plasticite crust of the planet Syllabium, they blew towering churches crowned with hanging paleozoetical gardens. Each garden nourished the last remnants of some all-but extinct ecosystem, salvaged from one of but seven worlds ravaged by humans. The dinosaurs themselves were mounted at the gardens' centers, directly in the blown plasticite of the cathedrals, one to a garden. At night, the Hospitalers would fill each cathedral with chants in honor of the dead worlds - including the human homeworld, long left for barren. The Nunnings would subtly vibrate their strange, froth-like buildings until the cathedrals themselves shook, and their connections with the ghosts of the old worlds were reaffirmed.

Miss Riddello lost all of it. She could no longer hear warbles and howls and squeals - the noise of Earth had shut off for her. Seven hundred and fifty one years ago, the Nunnings had abandoned Syllabium and fled the hungry heart of Omega Centauri. It had become clear to them that the black hole at the galaxy's center was expanding and it would swallow everything in a matter of centuries. The Numenskal Alliance - who had relied on the medical knowledge of the Nunnings in their many wars - mandated that they relocate. Within days of the expansion’s discovery, the Nunning Hospitalers and everyone around them had fled.

Seven hundred and fifty-one years is how long it took to happen. The Iguanodon bernissartensis skeletons were left to languish in their mounts: horse-shaped heads aimed skyward, thumb-spikes sticking straight up, half-leaning on their tails like gigantic kangaroos. Fused as they were with the planet’s crust, there was no hope of extracting them whole. For their part, the Numenskal did not encourage the removal of the cathedrals, the paleozoetic gardens, or the dinosaurs. Once the planet was cleared, Omega Centauri was quarantined in its entirety.

The Nunnings resettled on a green world, Hunanum, which orbited the twin stars Daxal and Raxal in Kishwa Galaxy. This memory – the knowledge of a beginning more than seven centuries distant, on a new world – was as far back as Miss Romal Riddello could recall. It was as far as any descendent of the Nunnings would be able to ever again.

Foxy leaned on his desk and rested his cigarette arm in the crook of the other. “You sprung yet?”
Riddello touched her forehead and let out a slow, mournful coo. "Uh, no, it's okay, I just – I finally felt the shock." She fixed her sideburns.
“Syllabium’s good and gone, isn’t it?”
"My - my - memory went down, I think. I think the Nunnings’ memories are down."
“Sad about your planet.”