I did it!!!!

Plittereeg, Alabaster and I agreed that this was definitely a last resort. As we walked out of the ship Weasel continued to hop up and down supplying ideas.

“Or we could lower a television down, or we could lower a lamp down, or a maybe a laundry basket. . . ” Weasel continued on with ridiculous ideas as we walked towards the crater. The Plittereeg did something that, even with his vast array of tricks, seemed to be unaccomplishable. He shut his eyes, concentrated, and his right index finger shot off of his hand like a rocket, became pointed in midair, and hit the wall of the crevice on the other side, leaving a gooey strand of flesh behind. Plittereeg demonstrated how strong this was by swinging down into the pit. He continued to jump down farther and farther until we could no longer see him.

He came up holding Dave having formed a platform with the bulb on his left second finger (because he only has two fingers and one thumb). He hoisted Dave up through the walls and tunnels of the great pit. He set Dave down on the ground and kneeled down to feel his heartbeat.

“It’s beating,” he said, “but only very slowly. We don’t have much time.” The next few hours went by like a blur. Checking Dave’s vital signs, darting out of the room to grab a breathing mask of a bottle of pills, standing amidst the blur of figures running past and worrying about Dave filled all the time. The moment the blur stopped going past was when Plittereeg asked me if I would come with him to the ashes left behind by the giant larval insect and take samples of it for Alabaster to turn into medicine.

Plittereeg used yet another of his amazing tricks to contain the ashes- the bulbs on all the fingers on his right hand swelled and then mushed together to form a kind of large orb. His hand rounded out until it looked like part of his wrist. A line appeared around the diameter of the orb. Plittereeg flipped the lid open and began to collect the ashes.

After we were finished collecting the ashes we went back down the crevice and attempted to salvage the moon buggy. This was hard work, but at least the pickles were easy to collect. Plittereeg formed a container on his back and became our self-assigned container for collection.

After climbing back out of the chasm, we went back to the space ship. Me and Plittereeg ran as fast as we could back to the space ship. We dumped the salvaged parts into a bin and hurried back outside to continue our mission, but trouble was afoot. (dun, dun DDDUUUUUNNN!!!!!!!)

Weasel wasn’t too thrilled about this idea, but he was glad that the jar would at least eventually be opened, even if he didn’t get to eat the pickles inside it. Once Alabaster had opened the jar in one twist- (”after I loosened it,” insisted Weasel,) they poured the pickles into the fuel tank and we headed out.

Alabaster stayed behind and took atmospheric readings, which I figured was okay because he was hard to phase and wouldn’t be too surprised at Plittereeg’s amazing abilities. We trundled along the dusty surface of the planet all clad in space suits. I was surprised at the incredible array of different size and shape space suits that Dave had, because seeing how the Great Flying Pickle Jar had once been a Ductopi colony, there should only be ductopi space suits. I was awed as without a second thought he pulled a small, four-armed space suit for Weasel out of the glove compartment of the buggy- but then again if all of the ductopi colonies were like the Deathbird then they probably tailor-made all sorts of space suits for their various mutants.

As we headed out, we didn’t see much at first. There were three moons orbiting the planet and there was about as much gravity on this planet as there had been on the great blue expanse of desert that had been Plittereeg’s home. But it wasn’t wrong before we ran into some problems.

The first problem was the precarious rocks and mountains and hills everywhere. We had been lucky enough to land next to a valley- a shallow valley and some flat ground- but we were still surrounded by hills, mountains and large boulders. Nervously, I glanced back and forth, setting my gaze on Dave and the rocks. I realized that it would have been better if Alabaster had come along, because Dave had displayed how terrible he was at driving. Dave later explained that when he was a military exus leader he didn’t have to do the steering, he just had to be in charge, so he had limited experience in navigation.

Dave’s first driving mistake came when he started talking about how he couldn’t possibly measure how lonely his childhood was, and swerved into the side of a rocky wall. Dave immediately pulled the buggy back into the middle of the valley but the boulder still came tumbling at us. This is when Plittereeg displayed the first of his tricks. He concentrated very hard and the bulb on the top of his antenna grew at such a tremendous speed that it nearly burst before leaving his head. He swung his head around madly and the bulb detached itself at maddening speed whistling through the air with one side burning up with friction. It hit the boulder so hard that both the boulder and the bulb disintegrated on impact.

The next problem came not from Dave’s driving mistake, but just from the fact that we had neglected to wait for the results of Alabaster’s atmospheric testing. We had stopped to take some rock samples when Weasel started juggling rocks. He was incredibly good at it, given that he has four arms. He started tossing them higher and higher until one of them stayed in the air. Weasel watched it in awe. It started to shake thirty feet above the ground, then it was pulled back like a sling shot up into the atmosphere and shot down like the atmosphere was spitting out a watermelon seed. Plittereeg moved so fast I could barely see him- he was a blur- he did a variation on the hammer arm trick. Rather than forming his arm into a hammer, he left it as a hand, the other part that he changed was that the elbow stayed bent the entire time, so he used it as a boomerang. He tossed his arm up into the air and it grabbed the rock mid-flight. Plittereeg flinched with the pain of the rock hitting his hand with such tremendous speed, but I imagine that the hit severed his telepathic connection with the arm, thereby letting him work without having to concentrate on the stinging pain.

The arm flew back to him like a boomerang, just like he had planned and he held it up in the air in a dramatic pose, trying to look like, well, like who I don’t really know, and in any case, he was doing a dramatic pose. He let Weasel keep that arm but he did so in a confused manner. I don’t blame him. I had no idea why Weasel would have wanted a disembodied arm.

Dave took some rocks, hid them in teh glove compartment and trundled on. The third problem came, not because of atmospheric pressure or because of Dave’s bad driving, but because of the first signs of life we had seen on this planet- a giant larval insect. (I have to call it that instead of a grub for scientific reasons).

The giant larval insect came slithering and lurching out of a cave and attempted to absorb the buggy into its gelatinous body. Plittereeg’s fingers grew longer and the bulbs shrank and his fingertips sharpened. He coiled up his fingers, sticking his thumb up into the spring shape and flicked them out, shooting razor-sharp needles at the beast. This was the first time I’d gotten to see the actual effect of Plittereeg’s finger trick on a living creature. The embedded needles started to shake in the flesh of the larval insect and shot out snaky tendrils that also embedded themselves then flopped end over end across the creature, like a slinky down stairs, leaving horrible chemical burn marks where ever it flopped. The snaky tendrils invaded the body, burning it all over until the entire larval insect shriveled up, burned with very small low-heat flame for about a minute, then crumbled into ash. Plittereeg stood proudly in the backseat of the buggy.

Dave, worried about any more mishaps, drove us back to the pickle jar, but before we could make it to the pickle jar, a boulder fell on the ground in front of us causing a cave in. Dave attempted to turn around, but instead of doing that, he gunned it and zoomed into the hole. Plittereeg and me alone managed to jump off of the buggy. Weasel also tried but failed miserably, falling short by about a foot.

“I’m okay!” We heard Weasel’s voice through our radios. We could only keep in contact with Weasel because he had caught onto a ledge. The others’ radio receivers were most likely broken. With that, we headed back to the space ship to inform Alabaster.

The more cool stuff consisted of a large static shock, a super magnet, a skeleton key and lock picking set, and a limited stretch which allowed my arm to stretch out to three feet. The less cool stuff consisted of an airbag (I mean who needs an airbag in a hand?). That’s it. The kind of neat stuff consisted of an automatic rock, paper, scissors microchip that could sense what the other player was going to do, (I didn’t use it much because I consider it cheating) also a candy dispenser, used for firing tiny lead pellets but I assumed it could also be used for candy. Unfortunately I never got to test out my assumption because there are no M & Ms in outer space.

Plittereeg and I spent hours hunting down these various functions. Our deal was that I would let Plittereeg help me discover the functions and Plittereeg would teach me some new tricks I had never learned. When we finished discovering the various functions of the arm, Plittereeg did something I would never have expected of him. He shut his eyes, concentrated really hard, and the bulb on the end of his antenae lit up and started glowing with a tiny pulsating throb. The more he concentrated, the brighter the glow got. Eventually it got about as bright as an average light bulb. After a while it got so bright I couldn’t look at it directly, then the brightness went back down to a steady, glowing pulsating throb and the bulb began to swell until it was about the size of an exercise ball.

Then Plittereeg began to nod and shake his head at the same time. The glowing exercise-ball-sized-bulb began to swing in circles until it detached itself, flew across the room and hit the wall, exploding with a band and sending green flecks everywhere. I conveyed my amazement as best as I could without clapping and hurting my left hand a lot. Plittereeg did another trick. He concentrated very hard and spread out his fingers. His long dexterous digits became even longer. The bulbs on the tips of his fingers and thumbs shrank until his fingertips and thumb tips became wickedly sharp. His fingers coiled up into a spring shape and his long thumbs curled slightly and slid inside the cage of fingers. Then he flicked open his fingers and thumbs and tiny green razor-sharp needles shot from the tips of his fingers and embedded themselves in the wall.

The bulbs on the tips of his fingers grew back and his fingers shrank back to normal size. Very vaguely, Plittereeg attempted to explain.

“Most of my species’ tricks of self-defense and attack are possible because evolution has made most of our body parts detachable.” He displayed this concept by detaching one of his arms and dropping it on the floor. He shut his eyes and began to concentrate again. The fingers on his detached arm fell off and the stub of his wrist flattened out into a hammer-like shape, which he picked up with his remaining arm by the stub that used to connect to the shoulder. The elbow in his hammer-arm bent and he threw it with his remaining arm with all his strength. The elbow of the hammer-arm remained bent until it was about half-way from Plittereeg to the opposite wall. Then it straightened out and spun wildly out of control so fast it blurred in a way I had never seen before, looking more like a flying ball than a flying hammer. It hit the wall with such force that it almost dented it, and would have dented it if it had been made of any normal metal.

Plittereeg was lucky it hadn’t dented it or Dave would have made him rebuild the wall from scratch. Plittereeg’s missing arm grew back slowly, but completed its growth cycle in a matter of minutes. Plittereeg was about to display even more tricks when Alabaster called him to get to work on the terra-buggy we were building to help explore the planet we had landed on.

I watched as Plittereeg bounced over to the entrance to the maze in his usual energetic fashion and imagined what his next trick might be. With that, Dave called me to work on figuring out a power source for our buggy and figure out what we would use as protection. I grinned at the thought of how many possibilities there could be for self-defense.

When I woke up everything was a million times bigger. I was lying in shattered pieces of eggshell on an incubator platform. A humongous creature in a detox suit was reaching down to grab me. I attempted to stick my arms in the air and motion for it to stop and not pick me up, but I realized that I only had one arm.

It was dark inside the creature’s hand and the room he brought me into was also dark. I was full size again but that didn’t reassure me. Another creature in a detox suit came over to me and dropped a pill into my mouth. I was forced to swallow it, and immediately after that I fell asleep.

When I came to, I was lying on a hospital bed in a well-lit room with no one in sight. As I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, I heard voices coming from the other room. Two of them were the talking dog guards, and one of them was Kaptain Kronk. In my mind I went back to #476248 telling me that Kaptain Kronk performed mental hypnotism on his mutations. Without paying any attention to anything around me I leapt out of my bed and made a break for it down a random corridor.

I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that my arm had been replaced with a robotic one, but I guess that didn’t really matter at that point. I ran down the corridor and searched the various passages for signs of an escape pod. Then I realized something: Dave. I had to get to him.

I ran back to the crib and saw how incredibly lucky I was. It was the one day a week that Dave was unlocked from the wall and given the freedom to sleep in a cot rather than in chains. I woke Dave up as fast as I could and hauled him through the corridors and into the escape pod I had found. Without a second thought I rocketed off, without giving a second thought to the fact that I hadn’t the slightest clue how to pilot a escape pod.

The first thing I did was set the steering on a lock and make sure the coast was clear. Then I located the brakes and acceleration. Then I unlocked the steering wheel and began to steer. It’s as simple as that. I set the space coordinates for space sector .92872. I had no idea where this was, but Dave was murmuring about it in his sleep so I assumed it must be something good.

When we reached sector .92872, I realized why Dave had been murmuring about it. It was actually a landing area that he had plotted out for Alabaster. I settled the escape pod down next to the Great Flying Pickle Jar and woke Dave up. He led me through the maze and down into the control room. There was nobody there, so we left the control room to the sleeping quarters. There everybody was, sitting on the various sized cots and murmuring about me and Dave in worried and hustled speech. When they saw us, for the first time in as long as I had known him, Alabaster’s jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide. Weasel paid no attention- he was still trying to open the pickle jar.

Before I could even turn my eyes toward Plittereeg, he was already rushing towards me. I gave him a hug. I told them all about the mutation lab and then after a long, excited evening we went to bed.

“This is the Krib,” he shouted gleefully, pointed to a rotting wood sign hanging above the door. One of the nails in the sign was rusted and broke in half as soon as he pointed to it. I continued to assume this was a coincidence.

To my surprise, the first creature I saw upon entering the Krib was Dave. He was chained to the wall and had beads of sweat dripping down his forehead and through his feathers. Next to Dave, there were several other tortured prisoners from other corners of the galaxy. The Kaptain pushed me into the room and slammed the door shut. With a loud klanking, a key fell into place and Kaptain Kronk locked the door.

I tottered over to one of the cots and just sat there. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t talk to Dave, and I couldn’t talk to any of the other prisoners, either. The only thing to do was just sit there. So that’s what I did: I just sat there. For hours. I sat there until I started to see tiny ducktopi floating around my head, from sleep deprivation.

When I did fall asleep, I had cluttered dreams about the Military Exus Leader and Weasel fighting over the glowing egg. I often had visions about the unseen creature from the egg attempting to tell me the future. It talked about robotic arms and extra features, and strange things I couldn’t picture. I had dreams in which I attempted to save Plittereeg from a giant fire-breathing snake. And just when we were in mid leap from the falling rope bridge to the edge of the cliff on the other side, somebody would rewind and it would play over and over and over. I never got to see if we made it out alive.

Those were the dreams of the first night. They got worse every night I spent aboard the Mayfly.

I had diabolic visions of what the Deathbird would look like from the outside—signs and portents from the tiny creature in the egg—and even more terrible monsters attempting to destroy Plittereeg, with no sign of whether we got out alive or not. Every night I awoke dripping with sweat from another nightmare. Each night, the nightmares were worse and worse, leaving me in worse and worse situations with Plittereeg with more terrible predictions from the creature in the egg.

One night, as I was waking up in a cold sweat, before I had a chance to throw my head back down onto the dusty featherless pillow, I was picked up by two metal arms and carried at ferocious speeds out of the Krib. My first month in the Krib was over. Whenever the arms went around a turn, I was swung against the wall, being knocked almost out of my senses. I eventually arrived in the biggest room I had ever seen on the ship. There were chairs and benches and tables everywhere. A sign above the door read: “Waiting Room.”

As I strained my eyes to read the sign above the door at the other end of the chamber, my heart skipped a beat. This was the waiting room for the Genetics & Mutating Lab.

We had probably been asleep for hours when he finally passed out from sheer exhaustion. We assumed this because when we woke up, Weasel was left lying on the floor clutching the pickle jar and murmuring something about rusty pickles. When Weasel eventually woke up, we had already been planning our lift off for a couple of hours.

By the time Weasel figured out which room we were in, Dave had already plopped down into the pilot’s seat and was fiddling with a nonsensical array of levers and buttons, but before Weasel could ask what we were doing the ship shot up into the air at such an incredible speed that anybody who wasn’t buckled in was thrown backwards against the opposite wall.

It was dark most of the time because Dave had neglected to back the space ship out of the cavern before lifting off. We rocketed upward through level after level of family cave. When we finally reached daylight, I was too dazed to actually pay any attention to it until it got dark again. We were back in space.

Numerous times, Dave started to tell us his story, but then had to stop to avoid an asteroid or the gravitational pull of a planet that he didn’t see because he was too busy talking about how he had a lonely childhood. Several times Alabaster had to pounce at him and grab a lever at the last second to avoid crashing into a neglected and broken satellite.

Eventually, after several dozen near collisions, Alabaster just gave up trying to help and sat down in the pilot’s seat himself. Dave motioned us out of the room and slid the door to the pilot’s cabin shut.

“Ummmm, what are out here for?” said Weasel.

“So I can tell you my story without being interrupted by a meteorite,” replied Dave. “Well. When I was young I had a very lonely childhood-”

“We knew that already,” I interrupted.

“You did?” said Dave, feigning surprise. “Well, after that, I had a very lonely-”

“I think we knew that too.”

“Anyway, about halfway through my lifespan, an army of my kind came marching through my clan and said that our planet was going to explode, like Krypton, and that we had to leave the planet in spaceships. Our spaceship,” he said, motioning to the ship around us, “was originally named ‘The Dark Duck’, but I renamed it ‘The Great Flying Pickle Jar’ later, after it came into my possession.”

“How did it come into your possession?” I asked.

“That’s for later. Anyway, after spending several years on ‘The Dark Duck’ working with my military exus leader-” two of Weasel’s four arms shot up in the air.

“Ooh! ooh! ooh! ooh! ooh!” he said. Dave rolled his eyes, which was strange because, as I had mentioned before, they were about the size of baseballs.

“What is it, Weasel?”

“What’s a military exus leader?”

“What I became after mine died,” replied Dave, as if that answered the question. Weasel looked satisfied and pulled down his arms. “Anyway, like I was about to say- Oh look at the time,” he said, pretending to look at a watch, “I must go,” and he ran out of the room through the maze of corridors I had come through when I entered the ship.

Weasel started to follow but I explained to him that it was a maze, not just a hall. He pretended to understand and then shot out after Dave through the maze of corridors. The last thing we heard from him was, “I’ve had plenty of practice with mazes.”

Me and Plittereeg reported back to Alabaster. He answered that they’d come back in the morning and we shouldn’t worry, although he did murmur something about how he’d have to work the night shift. Then, without another word, he said, “Good night,” and pushed us out of the room and flicked off the light.

I had a small conversation with Plittereeg under the light of Dave’s red eyes glowing back through the maze and after that we went to sleep.

“Yes.”

“Why Dave?” I asked confused.

“Well, because…I’m named Dave.”

“So, how did you get here, Dave?”

“I walked here.”

“Walked to this planet?”

“No, walked to this cave. I got to this planet by means of an escape pod.”

“So did we.”

“Anyway, did you see a group of a white lion, a four armed weasel and a little green, sort-of-hard to describe creature?”

“No, I didn’t see them, but I do know where they went.”

“Where?”

“I’ll show you.”

So I followed him through about 20 to 30 minutes of winding maze until we reached a large open space with a smashed kerosene lamp lying on the floor. He lead me across the cavern to a battered up and half rotted wooden trap door. With some effort, he wrenched open the trap door and led me down.

After some time we exited the shaft and came to a tunnel. After about a minute of walking, or half slithering in Dave’s case, there was dim light at the end of the tunnel. The light got brighter and brighter until we reached an exit. It was an incredible view of the expanse of desert outside of the maze of caves. I was so drawn in by the miraculous blue desert that I barely noticed that Dave had climbed down a series of ladders and was standing on the ground next to something. What it was I couldn’t tell at that point. He motioned for me to climb down after him and I obliged. After managing to clambered down the series of ladders I saw what he was standing next to. It was a rusted up submarine hatch like the one from the Deathbird. Dave raised two tentacles and wrenched open the door. We climbed inside.

After about a minute of adjusting to the dim light, I looked up to see what an amazing thing could possibly be in this cavern. What I saw before me was the most stupendous thing I had seen upon reaching this planet. It was a humongous starship.

I expected just to fall on the ground, brush it off and keep running, but instead of a hard stony ground, I fell onto a damp, squishy surface. As I tried to pull myself up I realized it was sticky and actually coming up with me and then popping off. In my attempt to pull myself off the surface, the sticky ground made a “pop” noise as one of its suctions released on me and a pair of huge glowing eyes appeared in the dark.

The eyes blinked themselves open as if they had just awakened from a long nap and an unseen mouth made a grunting noise. Using the small amount of light from the eyes, I looked down. The surface I was on wasn’t a surface at all but a floppy mound of spongy tentacles. I realized with horror what was happening. I flung myself off of the mound and flew face first into a mound of grimy rocks and mud.

I stood up and ran in a random direction as fast as I could, dodging boulders and stalagmites as I ran through the dingy corridors of the cave. When I stopped to rest I heard Weasel’s voice echoing through the cavern: “Where are ye?” I attempted to answer but was too exhausted. In a couple of minutes, I fell asleep.

I dreamed for some strange reason, that there was a minotaur pinata above me, and I was tied up, and the Military Exus Leader was brandishing a baseball bat and threatening to smash the pinata. He did, and suddenly a herd of hairless feral cats jumped out of the pinata and attempted to devour me. I woke up with a start.

A Minotaur pinata and a herd of hairless feral cats? Well, dreams can be strange. I stood up and brushed off the mud and wet sand and attempted to find a way out of the labyrinthian maze of corridors. I called for my friends and heard a distant echoing of their voices and tried to follow it through the maze. After hours of wandering I came upon a long passageway with several doors in the wall. I looked into them. Most of them were dark, but there were a couple filled with piles of rocks and sticks and at the very end of the corridor was a brightly lit room full of offerings.

I grabbed some food offerings from the offering room and nibbled on them while I walked along the dismal corridors towards the rapidly brightening haze around the corner at the end of the corridor. I turned and I didn’t see my friends- they must have been looking for me- but the room wasn’t totally empty. Bewilderingly, there were carcasses of small animals like rabbits and cats.

I scanned my surroundings but didn’t see anything aside from small animal carcasses. I sat down on a large rock and thought about the situation. It wasn’t really much of a situation, I just needed to wait until they got back. So I waited. . . for about an hour, and they weren’t there. They didn’t come back. Just when I was about to stand up and actually start looking for them I saw a shadow slinking around the corner. Was it them? I couldn’t make it out in the dark. Before I could call out to the form around the corner, it turned its shadowy head and I saw two huge glowing eyes just like I had seen before.

I started slinking backwards to the mouth of the cave. I was going to climb down the ladder and make an escape across the desert when I realized something: this cave didn’t have a ladder. I was ready just to accept my fate and be devoured by a giant monster when out of the darkness came. . . . a Goostopus?

“I’m Dave,” it said.