I left my soc m8s DJ, chai and Rurik one day with a story hanging in the air. Chai said "whats the story about the argounats?", and I said "Once upon a time there was a crazy scientist called Dr Argo and his wife Naut". DJ sat down on the grass and prepared to listen, but I was on my way to Genesis, and left them in a vacuum. So I felt obliged to give them this story. 

Its a love story involving the uggliest creatures on Calypso, the argonauts. 
I never saw myself as a soap text author, might pursue that further after this and write 
Lust for Lyst 
Pogo Passion at Cape Corinth 
Skilling in the Dark - The Hunter and the Prey 

Dr Argo and Miss Naut 

Once upon a time in a place which may exist lived the famous Dr Argo. You may think Dr Argo was a real doctor, well he was not. The "Dr" in his name was just a title his friends had given him after years of listening to his theories, hypothesis and many ideas which never rendered any actual valuable result. It had slowly grown into his sub conscience that he actually was a real doctor in something. That was enough for him. His friends had stopped laughing and let him keep on believeing he was something important. They did'nt want to hurt his feelings and let him feel content and happy in his illusion. 
---Dr Argo's main interest was mountains and how life found it's way onto their hostile slopes. For Dr Argo mountains was the cradle for the most survival fittiest creatures on the planet, and the higher up the life existed, the more fascinated he was about it. He asked himself, "is it the strongest or the weakest who takes the step to adapt to lesser and lesser air to breath, food to eat or space to roam?". Why choose a hard life at the top instead of a well fed and simple life at the rich fields below? Did the stronger creatures push the weaker upwards to places less rich or was it by own choice, where they attracted by simply getting higher up? He used to sit at the foot of many mountains just looking up, and taking notes and more or less speculating about matters like these. He had a problem which made it hard for him to really study these matters, he was afraid of heights. It was a pain, to long for those views, to long for the air, to long for the simplicity, but everytime he tried to climb a mountain an invisble hand took a grip around his throut. For every step upwards he took the hand squeezed a little bit harder. For him it was a question of dying for a peek from the top or survive at the bottom, and keep speculating about it. Some of his friends climbed his study objects without hesitation, and they waved and cheered for him to come up, but he nodded and looked down in his notebook. 
---Dr Argo let them wave and cheer, he knew they would never understand, for them there was no mystery, for them there was only a mountain to climb, a mountain to concer. He also knew that the moment they had their conquest they would come down, they would never stay up there. His study objects where those creatures that actually lived there. If his friends saw the creatures they saw the insignificance to them, they saw "grass" and "dirt" and "annoyance". Obstacles for fame. Obstacles for getting up as fast as possible. 
---Maybe Dr Argo's interest in these matters where his appearence, if a crowd stopped talking when he approached it was not because they where stunned by his beuty. His head was to big, his shoulders to big, his hands where like belonging to someone else, like attached to a weight lifter and his feets was like bridge fundaments. He always knew he where never meant to exist because he was to early born. He was born 3 months premature and would have been disposed if there hadnt been for the tubes and the life support system. On top of this he had had grown to fast for his spine, and he always walked slightly slanting. He still could remember with agony his mother sticking a finger between his shoulder-blades saying "stretch youre back!", but he couldnt, and if she would have had the medical education she would have realized it was impossible. 
---But he didn't pitty himself, he knew his value and always exaggerated his appearence, and boosted his ego for every contemptious glance. And if it hadnt been for her he would have grown ugglier and prouder for every year. 

She was hunting wasps, Miss Naut. It was her staple food and there was nothing special to it. She had caught thousands and thousands and she had it in her spinal coord. It was not a skill, it was a reflex. She was strong and adapted. She was a part of the mountain as much as anything else at that height. She was alone, but never felt like it. There was to much to do. Collecting, storing, preparing and above all surviving. Even if there had been someone there to keep her company she would have outhunted them, outrun them and emptied the spawns of wasps before anyone had seen one at all. She was born a hunter and the prey of they day knew its destiny. She never thought about moving either up or down, just give it all she got to survive where she was, and all she cared about was following the wasps. 
---But her hunger could would never rest. And her anger would never pale. There was no end to the storages she kept. She was full, but for every wasp cathed the hunger increased. A hunger for what? Her belly was full and yet there was nothing else than wasps, it was the only thing she knew how to catch. And her destiny was to follow the wasps where ever they went. 

They where both occupied doing what they wanted to do, to busy to watch the skies, to busy to watch the horizon. The wasps felt the pressure change and descended. Miss Naut followed, and moving like mercury she floated down-hill, along with the wasp swarms. She catched and they evaded, she anticipated their moves and came in front of them, they split up, but to late, she was always one step ahead. But suddenly she stopped and looked at the ground, and it had a thick carpet of grass and small flowers she never had seen before. She realized she had moved down the mountain to a height she never used to go to. She forgot about the wasps and looked up and what she saw made her stommack crumble and she opened her hands in agony and dropped her preys. Sick pusses of enormous led colored clouds stretched their lethal fingers towards the ground, fingers the size of entire forests or small lakes. A shell shaped lid of darkness slowly ate the remains of sunlight, and covered the light with a raster of infected brown and yellow veils. 
---Dr Argo picked up another flower, looked in his notebook, compared it to his notes and nodded and mumbled something to himself. He pinched a leaf and let it loose, opened his mouth and put the leaf on the tongue. He always did a taste test. He knew the value of that test was highly questionable, but it made him feel closer to the things that lived on the mountain. He never payed much attention to sounds, they where all familiar to him. If he had been on guard and listened carefully he would have stopped what he was doing, but he didnt. A thick string of wind crawled like a huge wild snake, with its head plunging through the forest and the tail still attached to its origin. His ear drums began to shiver, but to late. He heard the crack of trees, he felt a whipping shower of rain on his back, and the roar of the snake behind him. The snake hardly noticed Dr Argo with his notebook and his wide open mouth and green eyes, it just picked him up in it's jaws and kept on moving. "I'm dead, i'm dead, i'm dead!", he thought, for every bruce he got, for every turn and bump the wind made him do. He never for a moment let go of his notebook, and with the other hand he gripped the grass, the sticks, and plowed through all the rubble on the slope. He never saw the thick flying stick before it hit his temple. And his body surrendered, and he never noticed the cave opening come rushing towards him. His spinning body slided violently on a sand bed, into a dark room of the mountain, and his lungs made a deep sigh when the body hit the inner wall. 
---She never worried much about trouble and problems, her target was clear and she was trained to be focused as a hunter. She soon got a grip of herself and knew she had to go somewhere safe. It was not so much the wind as the darkness which made it hard, and she had to use all her skills to navigate. A normal person would have crumbled and stopped on the spot, not moving an inch, but she took the beating from all the sticks and stones which came flying from all directions. She gripped the tufts of grass with hands full of blisters, and pulled herself towards a jagged mountain edge. She rested, pressing her back hard against the wet, cold rock and glanced down the tortured landscape. The edges of the storm clouds was covered in grey light. A thick and huge pillar from the sick skies slowly lowered itself, like a leg and a foot of a giant. The foot of the storm didnt even touch the forest she looked at, it just ripped it up, with grass and stones and mud and grinded it to a primitive porridge and spit it out. 
---Even she realized that it was some kind of end, but she was still alive and had no other intention than staying alive. She moved sideways, to the end of the mountain edge at the same time as a log smashed and crushed into the stone wall just above her. She rapidly pressed herself to the ground, and moved around the bend, onto a flat surface filled with sand and small stones. The stone walls on her sides was embracing her, and she kept crawling. Her eyes was almost blind, and the ground was blurry, but she stopped above a strange object. Her eyes opened when she saw the back of a scratched notebook. Her noose could almost touch it. She snatched it like it had been a wasp and kept crawling, and the light dimmed even more, and the alarm from the storm became something behind her, not around her. She suddenly stopped moving, just lay flat on the ground, exhausted but still breathing. She knew the storm couldnt touch her anymore, and the minutes became an hour, but it didnt matter. Her chin was starting to itch from resting on the uncomfortable sandy ground. Despite the pain in her eyes and eye lids, she did an effort and slowly opened them and the first thing she saw was the sole of the biggest foot she had ever seen. Out of nowhere, filling the cave from its top to bottom, bouncing from wall to wall, you could hear the laughter of Miss Naut. She couldnt stop, and her body jumped up and down when she forced air into her lungs to laugh even louder. The air puffs of her laughter made the air dusty as she lay on the floor. She came to her sences, raised her body, ignoring the pain, and sat herself up on her knees in front of Dr Argo. Every whish to laugh disappeared when she saw his eyes. Two huge green eyes drilling it's way into every corner of her lonelly life, the eyes of a watcher, watching someone never watched before. 
- Argo, he said 
- Naut, she said 
And no more words where spoken. He saw his notebook in her hand. He shaked when he stretched his arm out with his palm open. She surprised herself when she without hesitation put the notebook in his hand, she was a hunter, and never gave away something she worked hard to achieve. The pen was still tucked into the back of the notebook. He opened a new page and wrote "haha ... eyes ... Naut", and stopped. It was an old habit to take notes, but he couldn't think straight, he couldnt let go of her eyes, and her laughter was still echoing in him, bouncing around, pushing and playing with his mind. She saw his condition and grabbed the book and pen and threw it in a dark corner of the cave, walked on her knees the few steps towards him, wrapped an arm around him and pressed herself as hard as she could against him, against the only safe place left. And so they sat, side by side, Miss Naut, the huntress and the pretended Dr, Argo, with their backs towards the cave wall. They both clinged harder together when they saw the dark and deadly swirls outside and heard the storm winds moan. 
---They both knew that nothing they had left would be there when they came back. It was all destroyed, or its contents shuffled to a new soil. But as long as the storm lasted they only knew one thing, those two big eyes watching them. She was the most practical of them both and fed Dr Argo with wasps, something he learned to enjoy, even though it was hard in the beginning. She built a protective wall at the cave door, threw out things they didnt need and always tended to things like this very quickly. He was amazed by her being so descisive, and how she could even think about throwing out a nice stone or a stick. "It could be useful later", he thought. But for some reason he always trusted her, after all the mountain was her home, and he was only a guest. She once stopped throwing a stick out of the cave when he moaned something, and she quickly knew what the stick could be used for. "Argo", she said and pointed the stick at him with a smile, and he looked worried which made her smile even wider. He didnt stand a chance, she was to quick for him, and before he knew it she had poked him in the side with the stick. He screamed like a kid and tried to escape, but she was faster, and he was clumsy, and her laughter made him bend and weaken, and she poked him again. And the only way he could stop her was to throw himself at her and wrap his arms around her waist, and don't let go. 

They lost count of days, not that it mattered to them. They both had what they wanted and they where not alone. But they where both wrong. A life in a cave is no life at all. One morning they woke up as usual. Naut poked Argo with her stick, which had become an amusing habit, which always annoyed him. When he was awake and watching her again, she put one hand in her wasp bag and found it empty. She started to cry, and Argo couldnt understand why, he only sat up and held her tight and pulled his fingers through her hair. Quick as usual Naut realized what had to be done, and she grabbed Argo's hand and he stood up. He knew something had changed, but didnt knew what, until she dragged him towards the cave door, shovelled the protective wall away with her feets. A few more steps and they where both standing under a cloudless sky, watching over an old but changed world. Naut shut her eyes and took a deep breath and her muscles prepared themselves. "Wasps", she thought and looked up on the mountain slopes, and she knew she had to get to higher grounds. 
---She started to run as she was used to do, and the steep slopes filled her muscles with blood again, and she was happy. She pushed herself harder than usual but suddenly stopped, "Argo ...". She frooze and felt ashamed she had been rushing off like that and turned around, and nowhere down-hill was Argo to be seen. She hasted down the slope with fear of what could have happened to him, and ran all the way back to the cave. Argo where not left outside the cave anymore. She bent down and and went back into the dark cave. She found him in the darkest corner, holding his notebook with his both hands. He was shaking and sweating. At the same moment as she had left him standing alone on the mountain shelf all his fears of heights came back, multiplied and more intense than ever. Naut was devastated, whatever she did he was disconscolated. Now it was his turn to comfort her, and he stood up and took her hand. He did the unthinkable, he took the first steps towards the daylight, and she followed. She had stopped crying, and he turned towards her. He looked into her eyes in a way he had never looked at anything in his whole life. He tried to give her his eyes, for keeps, for ever, but the rest of him couldnt stay on the mountain. She was born up here, and he was a child of the flatlands. And then their hands let go. 

His friends had stopped laughing at him. Noone laughed anymore. As soon as he had reached the foot of the mountain he knew what had to be done. Not long after these events he finnished his geology and biology exams. He published some of his work in the very respected scientific paper Argonautica. Everybody respected him for his passion for mountains despite his fear of heights. He started working on his doctor's degree on the subject "Survivers on high altitudes". 
---He used to do his research in the mornings, alone with his notebook, sitting on his stool. There was noone in the world who knew more about Naut's Mountain than him. With his green eyes pressed against the binoculars he tried to cover the highest grounds possible. He knew the seasonal patterns, how animals behaved during differant weather conditions, and who was the hunters and who was the prey. 
---One morning, as so many before, when he did some routine checks on the slopes he spotted a movement he didnt recognize. It was at a very high altitude, and yet it was bigger than anything he had seen at that height. "It must be a mammal", he mumbled. The creature bounced around playfully, like it was on flat ground, and not on a steep mountain slope. He spotted one more of the creatures. They wrestled, they hunted each other, they threw sticks at each other, and poked each others with them. They descended to a point where Dr Argo could see more of their anatomy. Their heads where quite big, and he couldnt spot any neck, it was like their heads where sitting straight on their shoulders. Their hands and feets where huge. He was so exhited he almost fell off his stool. The creatures stopped what they where doing and Dr Argo stopped breathing. They where looking at him, and he was looking at them. One of them raised an arm and waved it slowly above its head. Dr Argo started to cry when he saw the other creature did a fast attack with his stick in his brothers or sisters waist. A thundrous laughter rolled down the hills, while Dr Argo saw them running back up on the mountain. 

And this is how the argonauts where born 

And if nothing has changed Dr Argo is still watching his mountain, and Naut is hunting her wasps, while the argonauts are playing on the slopes