Thoughts converging toward reality
Diverging from January 22, 2012.
…Or perhaps it isn’t.
Putting behind me last week’s delirious declamations of my possible alien insectitude, I set about rebuilding my life and my house this week: Brick by brick, shingle by shingle, and nail by bent and broken nail. (For you see, dear readers, my most recent addlepated rant didn’t merely end with a spate of explosive verbiage, but a rather large spate of actual explosions, too. Why remains a mystery, but why often remains a mystery in my life.)
And as is often the case, when I finally checked back into reality, I had no earthly idea what had transpired in the time period following my earlier checkout therefrom. I merely woke up lying in a pool of muddy water, with nothing covering my body other than a pair of torn dormfuddies around my neck and a single wool sock lying limply across my left knee. Next to me in the pool of dirty water my gluefish swam in jittery, confused circles, turning the water into a viscous, adhesive mess as they dodged the iridescent bubble-congeries that pursued them around and around the puddle. I groaned in aggravation thinking about what an ordeal it would be shoving those shuggoths back into their tank—without being driven into the depths of madness in the process.
In front of me was a gaping, ragged crater a hundred feet in diameter and nearly half as deep. Flaming wreckage was descending from the sky all around me. I sat and watched it for a few moments, dazed and contused; I was more fascinated by the patterns of thick, black smoke trailing behind the falling debris than horrified that that particular piece of debris was my broken bedroom door, that one over there was my shattered bathroom sink, this one closer by was my cracked (and empty) shuggoth tank, the one directly above was the entire contents of my pantry fused together in one melted, flaming mass—
“Pwee-wee-wee!!” I exclaimed reflexively as I found myself rolling suddenly across the ground. The melted mass of every kind of food known to mankind crashed down onto the muddy patch upon which I had been seated moments before. Clumps of flaming pasta held together with pounds of melted mozzarella flew everywhere; big, floppy pieces of beef, chicken, pork, dog, and cat bounced along the ground and came to rest inches from my Pnårpy body. Clouds of spice—salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, and rosemary—billowed outward as tomato juice, soy sauce, and potato juice squirted into the air.
At first I concluded that my quick roll-out-of-the-way was a result of my finely honed cluster lizard instincts kicking in, but I was quickly disabused of that notion when in front of me I presently saw a sneering and cackling Mr. Van der Woobie. I also remembered that I wasn’t a cluster lizard at all this week, but a chitinous, blue-carapaced warrior, aggregate rank, and—as surely as my name was Pnr’rrpfh, it was my duty to defend the garrison against the coming onslaught. The orbital bombardment we had been warned about by GC had begun, and any moment those hairy, pink creatures that the invader employed would be beaming in to make my life difficult…
But why had mean old Mr. Van der Woobie saved my life? Surely he hadn’t become any less mean nor old since my last run-in with him, when he had sworn up and down on a stack of adult diapers that the next time he saw me, he would push me into a hole in the ground and then bury me alive. I pondered the question as I continued rolling, pweefully, down a slope, and…
With a squickening squunk! I landed at the bottom of the crater. Above me, Mr. Van der Woobie stood with a shovel, cackling like a mad, mad madman. Suddenly it all made sense.
“You curmudgeonly old knave!” I howled wrathfully from the bottom of the crater. “You haven’t seen the last of Pnr’rrpfh!!” Flaming bits of my erstwhile house continued raining down even now. Mr. Van der Woobie sneeringly began shoveling dirt into the enormous hole. I shook my chitinous, clawed fist impotently, my only consolation being that it would take old man Woobie at least six months to fill in the hole with a hand shovel, and—if he didn’t have a heart attack first!—surely I would die down here of starvation before I was inhumed by the old crotchet. I would die nonetheless… but he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of being the cause!
I brightened suddenly. I looked around for my trusty staff. If it had made it down here with me when I tumbled, surely I could hit the creature from here. He thought I had landed defenseless down here after he got the drop on me, but I hadn’t! A sharp bolt of plasma right square in the chest would wipe that arrogant smirk off the sneering monkey’s face—the garrison would be saved—Hlford would pin a medal on my chest…
Out of nowhere, Ravna Olegg-Thorssondóttir appeared at my side—my black-haired, porcelain-white, little skeetch-truncheon had come back to me! I murmured unintelligibly (as I do so often). She was trying to ensure that I was unscathed, but I kept insisting that I was, on the contrary, quite scathed. Very, very scathed in fact.
I was still standing at the bottom of the crater. Mr. Van der Woobie sneered down at the both of us. Ravna said something in Icelandic, full of sounds I couldn’t pronounce, let alone ever hope to transcribe onto my umbulious little blog using letters that any Earth-dwelling creature could hope to interpret back into throat-sounds. I looked down at the muddy pool of water that we stood in, six dinches eep, distractedly wondering if Rav was standing upon bare feet or not and if she had five toes or only three. I looked back up at old man Woobie and honked epithets in Pfhoric. The knave seemed to have gotten the upper hand on both of us now! But I wouldn’t go down without a fight…
I crouched down on my haunches, pulling Ravna down into a squatting position next to me. Casting her a furtive but reassuring look, I began to outline my plan to—it was flawless!—get the drop on the vile creature that had trapped us down here at the bottom of this bomb crater. As I continued describing my plan—oh, how flawless it was!—Ravna’s countenance grew more and more concerned: She was now looking at me as if my middle eye had mysteriously migrated from below to above the other two at some point in the past seventeen years. I ignored her bemusement and plowed forward describing the intricacies and abject flawlessness of my plan to kill and flay a sufficient number of the local rodentine fauna in the next fifteen minutes to be able to stitch together two suits made out of their skins, sew Ravna and I up inside of them, and then convince the shovel-wielding “human” (yes, that’s what the hideous thing up there was called in its own language!) that we were nothing more than a pair of unusually large specimens of the gray and bushy-tailed little creatures out for a stroll, and further that he should let us go free at once, for we assuredly were not the enemy soldiers he was looking for.
Gr’czzhne would box my thorax if he knew that I had ended that rambling paragraph with a preposition. But now wasn’t the time to be worrying about old grammarians.
One of the rodents that played so large a part in my plan swam by right then, in the muddy pool in which Ravna and I were now squatting with our buttockses hovering mere millismoots above the water’s surface. With a cry of Drinnioline proportions, I lurched forward and dove upon the poor, startled creature. It chittered its enstartlement but its claws and fangs were no match for my own, and after a short bout of violent splashing and galumphing I had subdued the thing handily. Ravna just watched as I rose to an upright position, holding the wheezing little beast by its bushy tail as it flailed and did its best to gnaw itself free from my bony grip.
Improvising, I hurled it at Mr. Van der Woobie with an exclamation of, “Here—catch!!” A panicked squirrel spiraling through the air is not something easily dodged. It struck ol’ Woobo square in the chest, a veritable ball of flailing claws and gnashing fangs—not nearly as effective as an orb of superheated and ionized gases but, as field improvisations go, it would suffice.
The “human” leapt back, shrieking, as the rodent–thing tore into him like a nrzzh’lak in a hllr’czne store. Panicking himself, he ran off, flailing his wrinkly forelimbs above his head as his hindlimbs carried him away in some random direction. It didn’t matter to me which direction that was, as long as that direction was “away from here.” I would deal with him later, once I recovered my armaments—and reinforcements from GC had arrived. Perhaps his panicked flight would carry him right across their path! I chuckled to myself and…
…turned back to Ravna. I grinned, knowing what must’ve been going through her pretty little head. “I’m fine, Rav! The dog’s all shaved now. Where’s my hair sandwich?” I clouded the issue of my nuttery with unrelated nuttery: “I could sure go for a good hair sandwich right now!” Thoughts of the grilled redhead that I had devoured at Pam & Meg’s yesterday scurried through my head. (Or was it tomorrow that I had noshed upon the redhead?) One thing was for sure: Hlford would put in a commendation for me for my efficient neutralization of the invader’s advance ground force leader and, if Sfiera were smiling on me, I would be off this barren rock in no time!