I did it!!!!

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.