WHA? Continued

The voice was perfectly toned, pitched, and modulated--at least in terms of the quality of sound.  "Too loud" was more a question of quantity and the "Wha" noise I had made was understood, fortunately, by my still-skull-bound Slizzed, as a need for some relief from the excessive volume.

"John," it said again, "turn on the TV."

The voice was like that of a long-lost brother, the prodigal sibling returned from a season of raucous debauchery, ready now for a serious devotion to the family work.  There was a desire to reach into one's pocket to pull out the photograph saying "See this?  That's my brother Jack.  He's the black sheep but he's mended his ways."  There was the latent ur and um of my father's considered conversational style, the sturm und drang of Mom's urgent soprano, the full fricative range of my sister Molly and brother Kurt's sibilant 's'-s and the whispering certitude of coming doom ever-present in the vowel inventory of my Swedish grandmother's swallowed vocal cacophony.  Point is, the sounds were utterly familiar and soothing to me on every level.

And it had only so far said to turn on the TV but I was compelled to comply.  How could I not?  Such was the nature of the voice.  It made me do whatever it said.  And, because when it said to do something it sounded so perfectly reasonable, you just WANTED to do it.  I would learn ultimately, too, that it never said to do anything that wasn't, in the end, in my own best interest.  That was Rule Beta, although essentially a restatement of Rule Alpha/Prime: Slizzeds were, for all intents and purposes, part of their human hosts.  They were one and the same, not aliens, just as in the way that your foot was its own thing but still part of the whole.  There was something about that in St. Paul, wasn't there?  It was a holy and sacred alliance.  The character of that relationship had changed slightly with the awakening but it was still the same.

On TV, CNN was in a panic.  The anchors all had lizards in their hair or on their shoulders or standing there before them on the desk up on hind-legs staring into the camera waiting for their cue.  Some lost their cool and excused themselves, the TV personalities I mean, while others, like Anderson Cooper lost only their focus.  He had stood up and walked off to one side where he listened in rapt attention to the Slizzed whispering in his ear.  He was still miked so the first few of his occasional out-of-context outbursts were sent out over the airwaves, interrupting whatever cooler heads were saying.

"Chiaroscuro DOES sound like sausage!" Cooper screamed giggling and John Roberts stopped mid-sentence.  Roberts had been piecing together the scope of the 'crisis' effecting the studio, no city, no nation, wait WORLD! as reports poured in from remote news bureaus and affiliated foreign correspondents.  He would ultimately win a Congressional Medal of Honor for having the foresight to interpret Wolf Blitzer's savage, saliva-tossed squashing of his own white-bearded Slizzed, subsequent toupee-flung screaming-madness and quick impalement off-camera on a huge shard of the smashed glass that had previously separated the studio from the studio-tour, for what it was.  He quickly absorbed Rule Prime emotionally and intellectually and began to spread the word.

"Strange as it may seem, they don't appear to be of any danger to us," he had ultimately and quickly concluded.  His Slizzed gazed up lovingly at him prompting Roberts to lift it up from under its tiny Slizzed forearms/-paws with his thumb and index finger and greet him eye-to-eye.  This screenshot would make it all the way to the cover of Time and Newsweek (magazines like the National Review and the Weekly Standard ultimately folded quickly in the weeks following the awakening as most of its writers, editors and correspondents, being a paranoid and latently violent bunch, had all killed their Slizzeds in knee-jerk fashion causing eventual madness and death, of course.  Willam Kristol lasted longer than most and was able to toss-off a quick editorial comment on his v-log about what he saw as a "Sino-fascist plot" hidden in the "slant-eyed- lizard invading hoard" before he went completely insane and smashed his skull into the wall right below a framed photogragh of Ronald Reagan.  This vlog entry was endlessly parodied for weeks by less high-minded satrical website's and often with human-slizzed comic duos performing said parodies in adorable little 'me and my shadow' routines.)

Roberts cut to video from all over the world of the awakening and its many after-effects, violent, confused, bloody and insane.  But very quickly it all stabilized and the clean-up began.