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a. Q.v. Note 304 sub.

[303] Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by Broullîme and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop’s brothers active and alert. For they believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: even the dim brothers Antitoi, seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a Master, would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m. hardware to view it to check for special value, and been already lost.

[304] Q.v. @ 2O3Oh. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis Academy, where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits slumped, chin in hands, forehead slathered in (C₂H₅CO)₂O2^a, elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly humming, word-processing converter plugged into its green-lit dock, HD screen set atop the cartridge-viewer chassis on its fold-out support like a loved one’s photo, keyboard hauled out of McGee-like chaos of closet and set on Heavy Touch, cursor throbbing softly at screen’s upper left before Struck, hunched blearily over what’s starting to emerge as like unabsorbable amounts of research material for his post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. Pout-rincourt’s History of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. Struck always refers mentally to his classes as ‘things.’ Original hopes for at least originality of topic have long since gone over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns out the more luridly absorbing the angle of topic you choose, the more people have already been there before you with their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic-type-journal articles to try and absorb and, like, synthesize. Struck’s been at this over an hour, and his original sights have lowered considerably. He’s been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with that infallible storm’s-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache that throbs with his heart, and he’s now trying to find some new resource in the piles that’s obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without worrying about Poutrincourt having read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile.

‘Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous Separatist “Wheelchair Assassins” (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents or A.F.R.s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized “Feral Infants” allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’

A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms A.F.R., wheelchair, fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Quebec, Separatism, terrorist, Experialism, history, and cult, which you’d think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles, essays, and papers, in everything from The Continent to Us, from Foreign Affairs to something called Wild Conceits, a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.-looking thing put out by someplace called Bayside Community College up 1-93 in Med-ford, nowhere near any bays, and edited by the same-named guy whose Wild Conceits wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch of times to even make sense of it, gauges he’s pretty safe in ripping off, since no way Poutrincourt’d have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this insufferable: