Just when you thought you'd never see it again.
My doctor ordered me replacement lithium. I was out when I crashed back in December. Making a mental note not to be out of it again. Ever. Still not exactly well, but the maybe-killing-yourself-IS-a-good-idea thoughts are gone. Which is awesome.
Went back to my favorite cafe to sit down again for the first time in several weeks. Decided while I was there that it was time to pick up on the story again. It was nice doing something normal. At least insofar as sitting over a laptop, writing about a despotic sandwich is normal. Normal enough, methinks.
It's been a while since the last. Here's a brief summary of where we are: we had just arrived at the foot of the mountain. We were all in a good mood, humming along to Ravel. Then one of sandwich's slaves popped out of the snow and rawked one of our Battle Chickens, breaking its beak and our calm.
If you want to read the entirety of the last episode again, you can get to it here. I just read it again today, and I'm proud of the thing. It's goofy and weird and lovely.
If you're new to this and want to understand why I've been talking about sandwich (it's a proper name, but it's never capitalized), a mountain, Ravel, slaves, snow, and Battle Chickens, then start at the beginning. When you're done with that, you can find the next episode in this list.
The story so far is approximately one-million words long.
Good luck.
With that first attack, the battle was finally underway. That it began with one of our Battle Chickens being taken down by a slave with a shovel was a hit to morale. I was worried for a moment.
I stopped worrying when Massif charged the slave and impaled him on Serge's great corn. The troops cheered. It was a bandage over morale and the bloody slave sliding down Serge's corn would send a message to the enemy. That message would be: "When a human-being receives an unexpected hole in its torso, its inside-stuff comes out. This leads to all sorts of health problems."
I sat for a moment atop My Battle Chicken, taking in the joy of Massif having spilled the blood and guts and brains and eyeballs of an enemy combatant. Then I realized that Massif was the only soldier who could do such a thing. I'd completely forgotten to provide our men with weapons. I thought I should probably remedy that before they found themselves in a situation where having weapons might come in handy. Like a war, for example.
"Let there be guns that shoot things!"
My powers of creation were back. Every troop was suddenly holding a gun that shot things. I had neglected to round out some of the details, but any gun is better than no gun at all.
Massif had his arsenal of tree-frogs, much like the one he used to rescue Me from The Aquatic Stomach Monster. He had many, many more than anyone would have guessed, each one serving a different function. Where he kept them was a mystery.
Our army advanced again, rejuvenated from that first kill, but we hadn't made it twenty feet before a dozen slave troops emerged from a trench dug in the snow, aggressing us with their shovels, making us feel uncomfortable.
Several of our troops, with a delight that creeped Me out, leveled their weapons at the slaves. One by one, they fired.
The first to shoot discharged a very small, very angry dog. The thing flew right out of the barrel and went headfirst into the chest of the nearest slave. Although the very small, very angry dog didn't do any actual damage, it startled the slave, knocking him off balance. He fell backward to the ground, and the very small, very angry dog held on through the journey. When they landed, the very small, very angry dog stood on the chest of the slave and positioned its head directly over the slave's face.
The slave started to chuckle, it dawning on him that he had taken a very small, very angry dog to the chest, but that the very small, very angry dog couldn't harm him any further.
The slave was wrong, of course. Anybody could have seen that coming.
The very small, very angry dog eased into a low, throttling growl. He curved his lips at his canines. Then he started to drool. The quantity of drool was entirely disproportional to the size of the very small, very angry dog. What began as a trickle of slightly viscous spit turned into a fountain, soaking the slave from head to foot in stinky, sticky doggy slobber. Shortly thereafter, covered in spit, the slave froze in the snow, dying a quick, but exceptionally uncomfortable death. Having slain his first enemy troop, the very small, very angry, very drooly dog moved on to the next.
A group of five troops had watched the entire thing from the comfort of their Battle Chickens. The one who fired the shot looked down at his gun.
"Huh," he said. If "said" is the right word. I'm not sure that people say "Huh" so much as they utter it.
This troop's pause to examine his gun was a tactical error. It distracted him from noticing the slave coming up from his right who was about to kill him.
A slave came up from the right and killed him. Shovel to the head. It was ghastly.
Another nearby friendly, titillated by the interesting ammo, raised his gun, aimed for the slave, and squeezed the trigger.
This time, there was no very small, very angry dog. Rather, a Christmas present blew out the gun and landed in the slave's hands.
The slave, giddy like a child, tore open the present. Inside was a pair of light blue slippers. He looked disappointed.
Then the gun, without having been triggered, discharged a second time. A receipt flew out, and the slave caught it. His spirits lifted as he could now return the present to get something he really wanted. But, as he was standing there, distracted, thinking about what he was going to get, another of our troops fired, unleashing a small missile that hit the slave in his torso, exploded, and blew slave meat all over the place.
Over the next few minutes, the good guys (us), tested these new guns further, surprised each time as some new, unexpected payload emerged. Before moving on to the city proper, I smiled as a slave took a high velocity fruitcake to his head.
I liked war.
----
Leaving a trail of slaves, tears, blood, fruitcakes, missiles, Christmas presents, and very small, very angry dogs in our wake, we passed over from the foot of the mountain into the city.
Every light was on. White flares hung in the sky. It was bright, but it wasn't like daylight. The walls of the buildings flickered with the intense white of burning magnesium.
Massif and I rode side-by-side. It was the job of the troops to slaughter the slaves, taking from sandwich the powers of creation radiated by the immigrant workers. It was our job to be at the top of the Ivory Tower when our men were done.
It seemed at first that our break for the tower would be a simple matter. Our army was all around us, firing snakes, hot cocoa, indigestion, and more at the bad guys.
Our confidence took a little punch to the gut when we first saw the shapes of three great vessels in the sky. Flying machines circled overhead, descending in slow spirals from above, then through, and finally below the clouds.
We didn't know any details at the time of the nature of these flying ships other than what we could see from the outside, though, as this is an historical record, I have the benefit of reports from battlefield interrogations and observations from which I learned much.
-- The Great Flying Machines --
sandwich's flying machines were, despite the evil behind their creation, things of beauty.
Perhaps two-hundred feet long, they were made entirely of wood. The cabin was cigar-shaped and held together by bands of iron around its circumference, spaced at regular intervals along the length of the craft.
Jutting out from the cabin near the front of the ship were four towers, each of which sported two enormous propellers. The propellers rotated, turned by a complex system of delicate clockwork that disappeared into the interior of the craft.
The propellers were clearly designed to drive the craft forward rather than to keep it in the air. Buoyancy was handled by four helium-filled elephants, bound by rope to the ship, who exhaled to allow for descent. Once down, the craft could not ascend again unless the elephants were refilled.
Inside, thousands of hamsters in thousands of cages running on thousands of hamster wheels supplied the energy and torque to drive the clockwork of the propellers.
Up in the cockpit, two hamsters - the pilot and copilot - directed the flying machine. They sat on large stacks of phone books so they could see over the yokes. They took their jobs seriously and endeavored to bring sandwich victory despite being almost entirely unable to steer.
The payload. well, that brings us back to the action.
----
As with the details of the craft, what I know here is what was reported to Me. I cannot guarantee accuracy, but I feel it is My responsibility to provide as thorough a record of this battle as possible.
There was a cargo hold beneath the cabin of the flying machines. Inside of each hold of each of the three ships was an army of thousands of hamsters. Each wore a parachute on his back and held a little tiny hamster rifle in his little tiny hamster hands.
Some were assigned to other tasks, carrying instead bits of equipment with which to construct little tiny artillery stations with little tiny sandbags and other little tiny war things.
The bravest of the hamsters - the elite warriors - were The Swift Black Death Hamster Brigade from Hell, known informally as "Demons Anonymous."
One of the three brigades was led by a Captain Nibbles. He was a blonde hamster. He looked cuddly and he spoke in a sped up, squeaky soprano, but he was as fierce as hamsters come.
He addressed his men in one of the cargo holds.
"Our target, hamsters, is the small band of troops heading for the Ivory Tower. That is the enemy's goal. To bring down the tower is to bring down sandwich, and this we cannot allow.
"This is what we've trained for. This is our moment. While the common infantry slams shovels into chicken beaks, we'll be raining hell upon their highest ranking officers.
"We will still have to contend with their enlisted, as it's a bloody mess down there. But I trust all of you with my life, and I have confidence that we will prevail over our enemy."
As Captain Nibbles spoke, two hamsters turned cranks on either side of the cargo hold, slowly lowering a ramp at the back of the craft, opening it up to the sky.
"We are the best. Hell, we are the best of the best. Oh, crap, we are the best of the best of the best. Nobody can stop us. Nobody.
"I thirst for blood, and I know where to find it. I think we're all parched. Tonight we will drink our enemies dry."
The ramp was lowered. The rear of the ship was open.
"It's time, men."
Captain Nibbles hopped upright on his two little tiny feet to the end of the hold, and stopped just short of the end of the ramp. He turned around to face the troops.
"Let's do some damage!"
With that, he hopped backward out of the ship, followed immediately thereafter by the rest of The Swift Black Death Hamster Brigade from Hell.
"Geronimoooooooooooooo!"
----
Captain Nibbles rolled himself over in the air and extended his various appendages out in their appropriate directions.
He narrowed his little tiny hamster eyes to slits and searched the ground below for the unicorn that intelligence indicated would mark the troops who were his target.
He sneered, curling his little tiny hamster cheeks. They rippled a little in the wind. It was peaceful and quiet up there. It disturbed Captain Nibbles. His comfort zone was amid the low frequencies of shelling and the high frequencies of screams.
To take his mind off the calm, he inspected every inch of his gun, which was just about one inch. There was a scuff approximately one millimeter long marring the barrel. Captain Nibbles exhaled on the spot and buffed it out on the fur of his chest.
Next, he brought the gun to bear. It felt good, he thought, to gaze down its length, through the sight, holding the cold metal body in his little tiny hamster hands.
He aimed for someone on a Battle Chicken below.
"Pow," he said, "...I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
Then he saw it: the unicorn. He oriented himself as best he could and then pulled the cord to his parachute. There was a lot of chop up there and his chubby lower half bobbled back and forth as he was tossed around.
With expert control, he manipulated the handles of his chute to steer himself closer and closer to Massif. This is right about the time I met him.
I was facing forward on My Battle Chicken when Captain Nibbles landed on its head. I was a little surprised.
He detached his parachute, leveled his rifle directly at My face, squinted as he trained his sight right between My eyes, and spoke:
"Adios, you sandwich-hating, chicken-exploiting sonofabitch!"
He fired.
The bullet bounced off My forehead, and then he flew back at a high rate of speed from the recoil. As he shot away, his eyes never left Mine.
Captain Nibbles was calm as he soared backward over the ground.
"You're mine," he said, cool among the clamor of shovels and guns.
I wasn't especially worried. If anything, it was nice to see a cute little hamster in the middle of the battle. I was getting stressed out.
The not-worrying didn't last long. One hamster was a manageable affair, but I glanced up in the sky and saw that it was dark with thousands upon thousands of silhouettes of hamster paratroopers descending on the battlefield.
Massif saw, too. I looked at him, puzzled.
"We keep moving," he said.
And that we did.
----
I summoned a gun for myself. If we were going to have to ride through a swarm of armed hamsters, I wanted some protection.
As they drew near, Massif got to work with his own impressive assortment of tree-frog weapons. Serge was running out of room for slaves, anyway. At this point in the fight, Serge had about a dozen enemy combatants mounted on his corn. Blood was getting everywhere, and it was beginning to stink.
Massif pulled out a frog, aimed it at a group of hamster paratroopers nearly to the ground, and squeezed its head.
The frog's tongue shot out. At the end of its tongue were two more frogs. Those frogs then extended their tongues, and at the end of those were two more frogs apiece. As each wave of frogs emerged on the tongues of the others, a geometric progression flared until the final tier emerged. There were one-hundred and twenty-eight frogs sitting on the tongues of another sixty-four which were, in turn, supported all the way back to that first frog.
The one-hundred and twenty-eight frogs unleashed their tongues in every direction, and one-hundred and twenty-eight hamster paratroopers were instantly eaten by one-hundred and twenty-eight hungry tree-frogs.
And on we rode.
A hamster landed nearby and came charging at me. I lifted my gun, took aim, and fired. A stream of LSD squirted out the end, covering him in enough acid for an entire hippie dance-in-the-mud party.
The effects were immediate.
"I believe quite strongly that I am an orange!" he yelled.
"No! Wait! I'm a shower! Yes! I am a shower!"
He paused.
"I take that back! I'm an orange taking a shower! Or a shower taking an orange!
"Above all, I'm confused!"
He spun around three times, fell to the ground, and spent the rest of his short life unsure of whether he was an orange or a shower. Altogether not a bad way to go.
A group of six hamsters landed on Massif's head. They bounced up and down. It was horrific.
He reached up, pulled one down, opened his mouth, put the hamster inside, and then bit its head off.
Inside his mouth, the head bit his tongue. Outside, in his hand, the body kicked and scratched.
For the first time since we'd met, he looked scared. He flailed about, nearly hysterical.
"Guh ih uh! Guh ih uh!"
He couldn't articulate with the hamster head biting his tongue.
"Ih huhf! Heh muh! Fuhbohy heh muh!"
I reached over, stuck my fingers in his mouth, and yanked the hamster head off of his tongue.
"Better?"
Massif nodded. And then the hamster head spoke to me:
"You're dead, punk!"
I examined the thing for a moment and then tossed it aside.
"That's just weird," I said.
And on we rode.
By my best estimate, we were perhaps halfway to the tower. Throngs of slaves and gaggles of hamsters stood between us.
"We need to get to the roofs of these buildings!" shouted Massif, "We'll never make it through all these immigrant workers and militant hamsters!"
He indicated that I was to hop over to Serge, presumably so we could fly up rather than climb.
As we sped through the mess, I got My chicken alongside Serge, slowly stood, and then leapt over. The second I connected, Serge took off, swept up the side of a building, and we were on our way. The tower wasn't far, and we were hauling over the buildings. I wondered why we hadn't just done that in the first place.
Following the everything-must-go-wrong trend that had been set by My very first day of creation, Serge faltered. His right wing was trembling, and we were losing altitude. Massif tried to reassure me:
"It's probably just a cramp!"
Then large plumes of dense black smoke erupted from the wing. It broke off, and we flew straight into the roof of the building below.
We hit and then skidded a dozen feet before coming to a stop. Massif and I were spared the brunt of the impact when the mound of dead slaves on Serge's corn acted as a giant bloody airbag.
We were all in shock. I didn't move. Massif was still. Serge was smoldering where his wing had broken off.
After a moment of coming to terms with the fact that we'd just crash landed on a flying unicorn, I crawled off and rolled over onto my back, looking up at the sky, watching the dark flying machines.
"What are we going to do now?"
"I'll tell you what You're going to do now, Your Holy Lordness!"
The voice wasn't Massif's. It was a sort of sped-up, squeaky soprano.
I glanced to my side and saw about thirty hamsters carrying a shovel at me in a hurry. A second later, they had it over my face.
One of them spoke as they worked together to slam the shovel into my head.
"You're going night-night, motherf-"
BAM!
And out went the lights.
Again.
[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]
- Clippy - Apparently, Clippy's going to start writing. I know about this because Clippy linked to an interview I conducted with him back in 2004. He's contesting the validity of the interview, but that's no surprise - it's the booze talking.
- Russell - I asked you people to provide your unethical services in tilting a contest in my favor. Although the majority of you didn't (which is understandable, and there's no hard feelings here (ASSHOLES)), we still won by a significant margin. As with all the other things I didn't get done while staring at the wall and contemplating the uselessness of the universe, I have yet to write about the contest, though I will. I have to - I won.