Alice kissed him, and the old man's lips were salty with life.

"Flummoxy Wummoxy!"

"I beg your pardon?" said Alice.

"Wibbily Wobbily!"

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Lubberlyjubberly!"

"Who are you?" asked Alice.

"Flippety Floppety!"

"Oh, where am I now?" cried Alice.

"Chimeree Shimmeree!"

"This is the Chimera?"

"Flutterly Utterly!"

"Oh dear!" said Alice. "I seem to have landed inside a Chimera show. Mister Dodgson must have kissed me here, somehow or other."

"Misterly Dodgily!"

"So you're Flippety Floppety?" Alice asked the orange and blue rabbit that galumphed all around her. "I saw your name on a Chimera poster, isn't that right, Mister Rabbit?"

"Posterly Mosterly!" guffawed the animated rabbit as he jumped, and clung onto Alice's leg!

"What am I doing here?" cried Alice, as she looked all around for an escape. A soft white light covered the whole emptiness she was trapped inside, and within and around the emptiness danced and laughed a group of teasing children. These children were all laughing gleefully at Alice's attempts to shake off the clinging Flippety Floppety rabbit.

"Alice, you've made it at last!" cried another voice. I've been waiting simply ages! It was Captain Ramshackle's voice calling to Alice from nowhere at all, until she noticed that amidst the children lurked the adult badger-face that belonged to Captain Ramshackle!

"Captain Ramshackle!" Alice cried. "What are you doing here?!"

"A little birdy told me where to find you," answered the Badgerman.

"Could that birdy be Whippoorwill the parrot?" asked Alice.

"The very same," replied Ramshackle. "He told me you were currently playing the flutters at the Palace of Chimera in Rusholme. This matinee show is called Flippety Floppety Comes Unstuck; it's a children's projection, and you, Alice, are this week's guest artiste."

"Questingly Guestingly!" squeaked the rabbit as he climbed further up Alice's body.

"But what is Chimera?" asked Alice of the Captain. "And how can I escape this rather rampant rabbit?"

And the children laughed to see such fun!

"Chimera is like the theatre or a lantern show," Ramshackle replied, "except that it's more real. You have to tickle your nose with a tickling feather, and then you actually become a part of the story. You get turned on to it. It's called a collected vurtual experience."

"But how can I escape being vurtually collected?" asked Alice with a U.

"It's quite easy," said the Badgerman, "you must turn yourself off."

"But how do I turn myself off?"

"Just say the words DONE WONDERING out loud."

And as Ramshackle said the words DONE WONDERING out loud he dissolved into the light and disappeared from the Chimera. So Alice immediately followed suit. "DONE WONDERING!" she cried out loud.

Alice then found herself sitting in a cold, damp seat in the dark beside Captain Ramshackle. In front of them on the vast wall fluttered the images of Flippety Floppety and the children, and all around her in the rows of seats sat the children themselves, tickling their pert little noses with a collection of tickling feathers. The children's eyes were all glazed over like cup-cakes and filled with wonder-dust. Captain Ramshackle untickled his own nose and then took Alice's hand, to lead her towards an illuminated REALITY THIS WAY sign.

Outside, in the grounds of the Rusholme Palace of Chimera, Pablo Ogden's garden shed was sitting patiently upon the concrete. Captain Ramshackle led Alice to the shed door, relating upon the way, "After hearing Professor Chrowdingler's tale of woe, I decided it best to gather together all the remaining-alive witnesses to the Civil Serpents' murderously jigsawing plan, in order to best protect them. And here they all are!" At which he opened up the shed door and pushed Alice inside.

Alice looked around the crowded garden shed, and there indeed they all were! There was Miss Computermite grown to human size; and there was the Zebraman (whose name turned out to be Stripey); and there was Long Distance Davis, the Snailman, playing a lonesome note upon his trumpet! And there, oh there! was Pablo Ogden, the reverse butcher himself, weeping over a pile of rubbish that Alice recognized to be James Marshall Hentrails's jig-sawed remains. "How dare they rearrange my finest creation so?" Pablo was wailing. "Those silly Serpents will pay for this undoing!"

Celia, the Automated Alice, however, was not there: but Alice didn't even have a second to think about that, because straight away Stripey the Zebraman was shouting out (in a black-and-white voice), "Pablo, the police are approaching at a rate of knots on the starboard bow!"

"And they're in their whirlybird!" added Ramshackle.

"It's not the police," squeaked Miss Computermite, "it's Mrs Minus!" (At which news, Long Distance Davis immediately vanished into the shell of his hat; which at least made a little more room in the shed!)

"All hands on deck!" shouted Pablo, and Alice really did think she was on a ship for a moment, especially when Pablo started to pull upon the series of levers which lifted the garden shed onto its rickety-chickeny legs. "Our destination, Alice?" he called out, taking over the wheel.

"To my Great Aunt Ermintrude's home in Didsbury!" replied Alice.

"I'm not sure if I know the way," said Pablo.

"Oh dear," said Alice, "neither do I."

"If I may make a logical suggestion," said Miss Computermite, "perhaps we should follow that green-and-yellow parrot; he seems to know the way."

"Full steam ahead!" bellowed Pablo and off the shed lurched at a frightening pace, along the road.

"Whippoorwill!" cried Alice, and rushed to the shed's front window to watch the parrot's colourfully flashing flight. "What time is it, Captain Ramshackle?" she asked (whilst hardly daring to ask!).

The Badgerman consulted his wrist-clock. "It's just gone almost exactly, not quite nearly, half-past one."

"Thirty minutes left!" worked out Alice. "I do hope we get there in time!"

But they were making a tremendous pace by now; the garden shed had already carried them along Oxford Road. (You should have seen how it leapt over the houses!) Now it was transporting them down Wilmslow Road towards Didsbury, and what a marvellous transport a walking, running, hopping, skipping and jumping garden shed can make; how easily it can scamper over the driving droves of auto-horses! Miss Computermite had climbed out of the window (quite an easy task when you have six legs!); she was now perched on the shed's roof, shouting out directions from there, and keeping her eyes on stalks for the flutterings of the distant parrot. Stripey the Zebraman was stationed at the back window of the shed; his job was to keep a look out for Mrs Minus's automated whirlybird. ("She's catching up with us, Pablo!" was Stripey's incessant cry. "Faster! Faster!") Pablo was at the steering wheel, trying his best to urge the shed forwards. Long Distance Davis was still firmly curled into his shell-hat (which was rolling around the shed's floor like a corkscrewed bowling ball, and threatening at any minute to fall out!). Alice was trying her best to be useful, but Captain Ramshackle wasn't trying to be useful at all! Instead, he was dancing around excitedly whilst chanting out yet another verse of his little song:

But somehow or other the six strange travellers managed to stay on board and to work together in a rather slipshod shipshape fashion. (Or should I say a slipshod shedshape fashion?) Whatever, shipshape or shedshape, the intrepid half-a-dozen made a pretty pace. Through Rusholme they rushed home; through Fallowfield they ploughed a fallow and through Withington they (almost) withered; until, finally, Didsbury and its sprawling cemetery were in their sights. The place where Manchester buried its dead. Alice looked down from the garden shed's tottering heights, as she tried to locate her Great Aunt's house. The cemetery looked a lot sprawlier than Alice remembered it, but she supposed to herself (correctly of course) that many many more people must have died since she was last here in 1860. Now she spotted Whippoorwill landing on the broken-down roof of an old, decrepit house. "That can't be right!" said Alice. "Great Aunt Ermintrude would never let her house get into such an untidy state!" But the house certainly seemed to be in the right place, as far as Alice could remember: it was just that the cemetery had grown so much in the intervening years that it had actually grown all around the old house!