“Great. Another chasm,” I thought. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t that at all. It was. . . a flying carpet? Yes. A flying carpet came up out of the ravine straight at us. It was moving so fast that I didn’t have time to dodge. It ran straight into my ankles and tripped me right onto it. It did the same thing to Plittereeg, knocking him onto it behind me.

“I have no idea how to steer this thing!” I said, my cheeks flapping from the g-force. (Editors note- I was wearing a space suit, so take notice that it was the g-force, not the wind.) We shot back down into the ravine through endless tunnels of ice and rock until we came to a palace that looked like the Taj Mahal. We stepped off the carpet and inside the palace cautiously. Plittereeg created foot pads so that we wouldn’t be heard and I rode piggy-back so the footsteps of my space boots wouldn’t be heard. (Editor’s note: it’s about time I told you that Plittereeg wasn’t actually wearing a space suit but due to his wildly adaptive evolution he was able to survive in space without needing breathing gear.)

Plittereeg ran as fast as he could without emitting so much as a single pat on the icy floor. He slid to a stop and pressed himself against the wall in a spread eagle position next to the door. Unfortunately, since I was still on his back, this made for a very uncomfortable stop for me. Plittereeg jumped around the corner and into the door. The first room was a long hall, at the end of which were two spiral staircases leading up to one very wide staircase vanishing up into the darkness of the highest turret. The walls of the hall were lined with marble columns and the floor was a very long carpet with pictures of dragons devouring humans and large animals like hippos and rhinos.

Plittereeg leaped towards the marble columns on the right side of the long hall ducking behind column after column and making sure the coast was clear. As I watched the scene go by from Plittereeg’s back, I realized that Plittereeg was actually humming the James Bond theme song while he ducked for cover behind tremendous columns. He flew, not literally flying, by that I mean leaping, from the last marble column to the edge of the spiral staircase on the right.

Plittereeg hopped up the stairs, with each step humming a new note. We made it to the top of the stairs and Plittereeg tip toed from the top of the stairs to the wall, then shimmied across the edge to the next staircase. He hopped from stair to stair up higher and higher into the tallest turret, at the top of which he completely forgot about trying to be sneaky and started humming the theme song louder and louder.

“Well, well,” came a voice from behind us. Plittereeg lurched and hopped and I was thrown from his back. As I struggled to see whoever had been talking, I realized Plittereeg was also sprawled on the floor. Looking up, I saw sitting on the throne was somebody who looked like a sultan. He also looked like a human.

“Welcome. I may look like a Sultan, but I am certainly not the famed Sultan of Space. That, my friend is the palace you are in now. This entire palace is actually a space ship. It’s been hidden down here for centuries after being forced to make a crash landing due to -a-hem- heavy interferences from-” he paused, “dislikable patrons.” With that, he pulled a lever and the Sultan of Space shot up in the air and crashed through the roof of the cavern the palace was hidden in.

Plittereeg and I ran as fast as we could down the stairs and along the hall. We leaped out of the door about a hundred feet above the ground and went careening downwards at an incredible pace until we suddenly slowed. I looked up to see if there might be some reason for this. Plittereeg’s hands had melded together and formed a giant parachute. We settled down safely on the ground and ran even faster than we could, surprisingly, back to the Great Flying Pickle Jar. To our relief, Dave had woken up. He had a bandaged wing, one bandaged tentacle and a bandage wrapped around his head, but aside from that he seemed to be okay.

I ran to the control room and said for Alabaster to gun it and get us out of here as fast as he could. With that, we took off into space and, as it turns out, that’s where we’d be for a long, long time.

At first its comments were unintelligible, but with some twiddling of the knobs on my headband I could understand it. It revealed that it truly was an “it,” and not a “he” or “she” of any kind, due to heavy mutating from Kaptain Kronk. It also told me that its name was #476248. Technically speaking, its name used to be something else, but yet again, due to mutating it could no longer recall what its previous name was.

As I was listening to it speak, my eyes darted around the room. I noticed an immense creature sitting in the darkness in the far corner of the chamber.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to the creature.

“That,” muttered #476248, “is the arm.”

“Why is he called the arm?” I questioned.

“Well you’ll be able to see once he comes snaking out if the darkness again.” Just as #476248 had predicted, the Arm came slithering out of the darkness. It looked like some sort of deformed version of Quasimodo, and Quasimodo is already deformed, so it’s like a deformed deformity. The Arm, like his name implied, had only one arm, and one of his legs was longer than the other. His hip bone was shifted sideways so it looked like he had a spike jutting out of the left side of his body. A shiver went up my spine. I tried to avoid eye contact with the Arm. I turned my attention back to #476248.

“How did the Arm get here?”

“I have no idea,” it replied. “I have a better idea of how I got here, and like I’ve already said, I’ve had a complete memory wipe of anything that happened before my mutations. But I can tell you about the mutation process, if that will satisfy you.

“Kaptain Kronk used to be head of mutation sciences for somebody called The Military Exus Leader of the Great and Mighty Deathbird.” I think that #476248 rolled its eyes at this point, but it was hard to tell because they were solid black. “Apparently they had some sort of fight and Kronk was forced to leave the ship. He constructed his own ship, the Mayfly, and has been building up creatures for his mutant army ever since. The mutation process is simple- I’m not really explaining how the machines work, I’m just explaining what they do. First, several different specimens are transformed into various combinations of sand, water and fire. Then, three specimens are mixed together in different formulas:

“sand, sand, sand,
“water, water, water,
“fire, fire, fire,
“sand, sand, fire
“sand water fire,
“water water fire, etc etc. until you’ve reached all possible combinations. Then, one of the various combinations is put into an incubator and sealed inside a synthetic egg and sent to another part of the incubator to be hatched. After the eggs hatch, the miniscule creatures are surgically refined and given extra limbs, artificial coloring and and unnecessary bone matter including spikes and extra long spines. Then, the creatures are put under special memory-loss hypnotism by Kaptain Kronk.

“I don’t know what happens after that, all I know is its a long, painful series of events that leads to super creatures.”

“Bzzzt Bzzzt!” #476248 turned its head. “It’s my turn, it said solemnly. “See you later, if I even get the chance.” With that, it walked out of the room and our conversation came to an abrupt end.

It whipped a warty mottled tentacle at me. Its beak snapped open and shut but I couldn’t hear what it was trying to tell me due to the soundproof glass. The octopus creature whipped a tentacle out into the darkness where it had emerged from. Five deformed mutant guards that looked like dogs standing on their hind legs only, you know, deformed, started to madly press buttons on a control pedestal next to my container. The tube began to rise until it had completely slid up through the ceiling into a humongous tank of water where it opened and I was set free out into the building/spaceship/whatever it might be.

I swam towards the “shore” and pulled myself up out of the tank and onto the metal floor. I attempted to stand up and make a break for it but before I could even start to run, I was hoisted up into the air by a metal claw. The metal claw deposited me onto a stainless steel chair, the armrest immediately shot out tiny grapnels that wrapped around me and restricted my movement and erased the possibility of leaving the, well, I’m not going to say the long thing about the spaceships and buildings, but I’m just going to call it spaceship since that’s what it was anyway even if I didn’t know at that point.

The octopus thing slithered into the room and immediately started talking before I had time to ask a question.

“Fligamerhc slke agododo” it was cut off by my shouting.

“HOLD ON” I said, as I strained to pull my arm up and change the dials on my translator headband. I eventually succeeded and the octopus creature continued to blabber.

“First of all, before you ask, I am Kaptain Kronk. Second of all, you are on board the Mayfly and thirdly you are actually going to be turned to a hideous mutant.”

“I actually wasn’t going to ask that,” I said. “Well, I would have asked what your name was, but I wasn’t going to ask if I was going to be turned into a hideous mutant.” But Kaptain Kronk wasn’t listening. He was too busy rattling off the other things he assumed I would ask.

“Yes, the Mayfly is a spaceship, yes you are going to be kept in a prison cell, no you aren’t going to have your own personal buffet table,” and on and on. When he finally stopped rattling off the things he assumed I would ask, he started to talk about all the “inside facts” that you probably didn’t know about the famous Kaptain Kronk. For example, “I used to live in a fish bowl. Before that I was the captain of a submarine. Even before that, I was an egg. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

I assume he continued to go on even after I had fallen asleep.

“And my friends are inside of it?” I asked suspiciously.

“I think so,” said Dave.

“Well, okay then, let’s go inside- Wait a minute- did you say ‘the great flying pickle jar’?”

“Yes indeed,” gushed Dave. “I came up with it myself.”

“Oooookay,” I responded in a dubious tone.

Dave slithered inside and I followed him, feeling insecure. The first room was pitch black, but we ascended a flight of stairs into a well lit control room. Dave reached over to the control board and pressed an ominous large red button. A hatch on the left wall slid open, and a gorilla charged across the room and vanished into another hatch on the right wall. Dave pressed a different button, and a robot with a flame thrower attempted to transform into a pogo stick. Unsuccessfully, it attempted to hop across the room. That, too, vanished into a hatch on the opposite wall. Dave reached over to press another button. I could tell this was going to take a while.

After several more malfunctioning mishaps, Dave finally found the right button, which activated an elevator platform to lift us up into the next room. In this room, the light was dim, though not as dark as the first room. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that it wasn’t much of a room at all. Rather, it was a long tunnel. Dave led me through. I could see his eyes glowing in the dark. In fact, I soon realized that his eyes were the only light.

Eventually, we came to a fork in the tunnel. Dave led me in the right direction. And by that, I mean right, not not wrong. We came to another fork. He led me through to the passage way to the left. It continued on this way: left – right – right – left, sometimes even straight or up and down. When we finally left the maze, there would have been no way I could have possibly found my way back.

When my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the next room, I was surprised to see my friends fast asleep lying on various size cots. Dave pressed a button on the wall. When he pressed the button, a panel on the wall just above the button slid open and deposited a bike horn in seconds. Dave non-chalantly pulled a sledge hammer from a weapons rack on the wall and proceeded to bring it down upon the bulb of the horn. A noise that sounded like a goose being strangled by another very sick goose that was constantly coughing came from the horn.

My comrades woke up immediately and shot out of bed, literally in the case of Weasel. I have no idea how he did that.

“What’s happening?” he said. It was great to hear his way-too-thick Irish accent again.

“Yeah, where are we?” added on Plittereeg.

“You,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect—just as the Military Exus leader had done at the end of Chapter Two—”are in the Great Flying Pickle Jar.”