This Story Sucks

[Dleg]

"hey old nellie! be a good girl and roll over there for me"

Old Nellie turned her massive, heavily jowled and whiskered head to face Ripperson, who was in the process of removing his pants. Old Nellie remembered this human. The last few times she had seen him, she had fallen asleep and woke up with a horrible headache. This had happened twice a day for the past day and a half, and because of that, Old Nellie had not been able to eat. So, when she saw it, she immediately was reminded of the sardines that were her favorite snack, and reached over and bit it off.

 

[Dleg]

Ripperson screamed in pain, startling Old Nellie, who then whacked him with her tail, sending him slamming into a nearby boulder, breaking every bone in his body.

 

[Dleg]

Darth HVAC was busy in the command center, preparing for the beginning of Phase II, when two gray-suited technicians approached him.

"Lord HVAC! We have bad news, sir!."

HVAC turned and faced them "Oh? skuhh-huhhhhhh"

The technicians, wearing imitation deathstar officer's caps, looke at each other nervously. The senior technician spoke. "Sir, the stormtroopers are on strike!"

"Whaaat?!"

"They have taken the sub docks and all the main passageways! They're extremely angry and violent , sir!"

"Well, stop them! They can't do that, they all signed contracts saying they would not participate in a union! skuhhh-huhhhh"

"Lord HVAC, we tried! They tasered six of us, and we had to retreat to the sphere room!"

"Are the spheres safe?"

"Yes sir, we closed the blast doors behind us."

"But that's not all, sir." The second technician swallowed hard and spoke. "Master Ripperson went up to the surface, and was attacked by a walrus. Our security cameras caught the whole thing. We think he might be dead!"

"WHAAAAAATTTT???!!!"

 

[Dleg]

"Send a team to retrieve him. Immediately!"

"But, Lord HVAC, by the time we get there he'll either be dead from the injuries, or more likley frozen to death! It's 40 below out there!"

"skuhh-huhhhhh My Master needs Ripperson to conduct Phase II. Bring him to me! Dead or alive! I will hold you personally responsible if he is not returned to the sphere room in the next thirty minutes! skuhh-huhhhh"

"Yes sir!" The two technicians returned through the door to the service tunnels.

HVAC turned and walked to the door on the side labeled "Evil Emperor". He hesitated for a moment, "skuhh-huhhhh", then turned the handle and entered the room.

 

[Dleg]

"What is it, my apprentice?" croaked the dark, hooded figure, seated in his throne.

Darth HVAC knelt and bowed his head. "Master, Ripperson the Asinine has wandered outside and has been badly injured by an enraged walrus. I am afraid he may be dead.skuhh-huhhhhh "

"Yeessss.... I foresaw this. It is in his nature. Just collect his body and place it in the sphere. He may be dead in this world, but the Dorcs can repair him in Middle West."

"And one other thing, Master. The stormtroopers are revolting. skuhh-huhhhh"

"What? I thought you chose only the most beautiful during your recruiting trips to Vegas. You are not pleased with them? I would say that is your own fault, then, apprentice."

"No, Master, I mean they have formed a union and have taken up arms against us. skuhh-huhhhhh"

"Oh, I thought you meant... What?? How could you let this happen? Have they takend control of the spheres?"

"No. The spheres are locked safely away, and we can still access them from the service tunnels. But, we have been separated from Timak the Self Righteous. skuhh-huhhhhh"

"This is not good, apprentice! You know how unstable he is! Almost worse than Ripperson! You must get him before something happens! We need them for our plan to work!"

"Yes, Master. skuhhh-huhhhhhh"

"And prepare the spheres for our entrance! We must accelerate our plans now!"

 

[Dleg]

"Whatcha doing, Goredalff?"

VTEnviro rubbed his eyes in the bright morning sunlight of the castle gardens. He was hungover from the heavy ale drinking the night before.

"Good morning VT!" Goredalff was bent over in the garden, carefully pulling up flowers and placing them inside one of several boxes he had brought with him. "I'm taking living samples of every type of plant and animal in Middle West."

"What for?"

"Just in case."

"Just in case what?"

"Just in case we somehow survive what is coming. We will need to repopulate Middle West, so I am taking a male and female sample of everything."

 

[Dleg]

"Here, you can help me." Goredalff stood and walked toward a garden pathway that ran through a small rise behind the castle, exposing a rocky slope. He stooped and lifted a rock, revealing a large number of wriggling, slimy life forms.

"Ewww, what are those, Goredalff?"

"LOL! Those are tub girls and goatses, VT. They only live under rocks. There are lots of other things that live under rocks, and to be complete, we need samples of them, too. I have a feeling you might be pretty good at finding these types of things." Goredalff handed VTEnviro an empty sample box. "Here you go!"

 

[Dleg]

VT stooped and began collecting the wriggling things from under the rocks, working his way toward the exposed rock face in the narrower cut. He found lemonparties, meatspins, 2G1Cs, and all manner of less glamorous life forms. "Disgusting!" he said. But he secretly enjoyed his task.

Soon he made it to the rock face, and found fewer loose rocks to look under. He walked along the path, examining the cut for signs of worm holes or other burrows. Something caught his eye near his feet. It was buried in a layer of rock and had a long, hard edge. He knelt down and brushed away the dust and pebbles from it, revealing what looked to be a long, perfectly rectangular piece of rock, about 3 feet long and 4 inches square. He pulled at one end, and it suddenly came free in his hands. A smaller rock cube fell out from behind it, about 4 inches square.

"What the hell is this?"

 

[Dleg]

Goredalff looked over his shoulder and called out to him from the garden. "Fossils!"

"What? It looks more like a brick!"

Goredalff stood and walked over to examine the object. "Well, that's quite a find there, VT!"

"What is it?"

"A perfectly preserved set of Pong bones!"

 

[Dleg]

"Pong bones?" VT examined the fossils with a look of confusion on his face. "You mean like that old videogame, Pong?"

"Yes, the old game. That is one of the oldest relics you can find in this world, and dates from previous attempts to create it."

"Someone tried to create a world based on Pong?" VT asked, incredulously.

"LOL! Yes. It was one of my old college roommates from Harvard. He teamed up with a buddy from MIT and they created the initial framework for this world, and moved into it themselves in 1975."

"Really? What happened to them?"

"Oh, they died of starvation within a week or so." Goredalff sighed. "Someday some future paleontologist is going to find their bones and really be blown away! LOL!"

 

[Dleg]

VTEnviro stared at Goredalff in confusion. Goredalff sighed again and explained. "You see, there was nothing to eat in the Internet back then. You could only play Pong. You just didn't have the biodiversity you have nowadays. Come." Goredalff motioned VT to follow him, as he walked slowly down the pathway, deeper into the rock cut. The layers of rock dipped downward in the direction they moved, revealing thick layers of more recent rock.

"See here, these are thick, almost homogeneous deposits of e-mails. This is really what laid the basis for the life we have in this world today. It formed our atmosphere."

Goredalff walked a little further, and pointed his staff at another thick layer that was different in color from the first. "Here is where the Usenet posts began to accumulate, adding additional gases to the atmosphere, enabling some of the more rudimentary forms of life. Aha!" He stopped, and tapped a dark boundary, followed by a thick, variegated layer of rock beyond. "Here is where bulletin boards and newsgroup postings began. This is where we began to see the first forms of complex life."

VT moved forward a bit and touched a long, rounded object protruding from the rock. "What's this?" He pulled, and an enormous pelvic bone fell to the pathway. "Holy crap, Goredalff, there were giants here?"

"LOL, No. That's the skull of a ******saur!"

 

[Dleg]

Figure something point something: ******saur skull.

 

[Dleg]

"Holy crap, Goredalff! That thing is huge! And look at those teeth! Are they still out there?"

"LOL, no. They went extinct about 65 million cycles ago. Once the world wide web came into being, life evolved at a tremendous rate in here, undergoing almost countless iterations, up to the point where we are today."

"Well, when did you move in here, Goredalff? When did the Internet become capable of supporting human habitation?"

 

[Dleg]

"Human habitation? I thought by now you would understand that we aren't in here as humans, my dear hobbit! Apples and oranges! Different universe!"

"Well OK, when did the Internet become" VT gestured to everything around him, "this? You know, a whole world?"

"Gradually! There was no moment, per se, when the Internet suddenly became a whole new world. It started as another world to begin with. But, it was sometime around 2006, in the human world, that it attained independence."

"What the hell?" VT was really confused now.

"LOL! You know, independent from the the comings and goings of the human world. When it became a free, sustainable, new world. And that's when He became interested in it, and when Lindor became the dark place that it is now."

 

[Dleg]

"You mean Lindor wasn't always like that? You know, all dark and stinky and gaseous and full of Dorcs?" Asked VT,

"LOL! No, Lindor was once the bright and thriving center of activity here in Middle West. But once He saw that the Internet had achieved independence and opened the gateway to his potential domination of all worlds, he banished all that was good from his territory."

"And is that when this castle was built, and the fight against Lindor began?"

"You are finally catching on, VT! But there really wasn't ever a 'fight,' to speak of. He was an annoyance, and his territory a place to be avoided, but it was not necessary to destroy him, or even to be particularly vigilant. It was only recently, when the Three Who Shall Not Be Named were joined with Him, that Lindor began to rise in force. And now, it is very likely that Lindor will destroy all of Middle West, making it exactly like Lindor."

"You mean dark, stinky, gaseous, and full of Dorcs?"

"Yes."

 

[Dleg]

Goredalff turned and walked back out of the rock cut toward the garden, motioning for VT to follow him. "And that, VT, is why we must prepare to preserve what we can, if possible, of our precious ecosystem."

"You mean this stuff?" VT looked in his box with a half-feigned look of disgust.

"Yes, that stuff, and all the vulva flowers, and lesbian bananas, and ***** fish, and metallica birds. Everything." Goredalff stopped and crouched down to VT's level and gripped him suddenly by the shoulders. "If I don't survive this, and you do, I need you to promise me you will guard these samples for the rest of your life, and pass on your duty to someone else! Even if we lose, there may come a time that we can restore Middle West to what it is now!"

A distant roll of thunder echoed across Middle West from the direction of Lindor.

"Y- Y - Yes, Goredalff, I promise!"

 

[Dleg]

General Highway escorted Wolverine and the Dark Knight on their long journey through the tunnels and elevators of the USS Clinton to the hangar deck of the USS Nimitz, which was one of six nuclear aircraft carriers used to float the Clinton's massive treadmill runway. Currently, they were descending from the lowermost maintenance deck of the Clinton, through a flexible elevator shaft, directly through the former flight deck of the Nimitz. The flexible shaft swayed and shook violently as the Nimitz plowed through the massive arctic storm swell. Wolverine gripped the handrails inside the elevator cab and shook his head.

"Don't worry. This baby's as solid as it gets!" Major General SapperPE boasted, still proud of the massive, and now aircraftless aircraft carrier. "Kevo and his structural team designed this baby to withstand 100 foot seas! And believe me, that came in handy when the Antarctic ice sheets slid into the ocean in 2012!"

The Dark Knight stood silent, watching out the window as they passed through the deck and into the hangar bay .

"Here we are!" announced General Highway, as the elevator made a ding-dong sound and the door slid open. The floor under them was pitching much worse than up on the Clinton, which was insulated from the movement by the massive support structure.

"So where's our seaplane?" Asked Wolverine, seeing nothing resembling what he was expecting.

"Flying Boat!" Highway Corrected him. "Its right over there!"

 

[Dleg]

"Oh come on, not again!" Wolverine walked forward across the pitching hangar deck, headed toward what looked like a ship's launch on a trailer, with a couple of rocket engines strapped to its hull.

Two men were seated near the boat, playing chess on a magnetic board. One of them, dressed in coveralls, stood and addressed them "Gentlemen! Welcome to the oil spill containment and mitigation department!"

"Freon!" General Highway shook the man's hand. "Is it ready to go?"

"As ready as it's ever going to be, I guess."

"Oh wonderful!" Complained Wolverine. "A rocket lifeboat!"

"Technically it's a 32 foot Boston Whaler, rocket-deployable spill containment system." Freon said, smiling with pride.

"A spill containment boat?" The Dark Knight looked at Freon skeptically. "Where's the boom?"

Freon walked to the stern and pulled out a 12 foot section of boom. "Here!"

"That's absurd! What kind of spill can 12 feet of boom contain?" asked Wolverine.

"Pretty much nothing." Replied Freon. "I just do what I'm told. It's great for fishing, though!"

(p.142)

 

[Dleg]

"Freon here was put on a special assignment by his company back in 2013 to man the Continental Shelf Rapid Oil Spill Response Program." General highway explained.

"You mean the program President Palin paid 3.5 Trillion dollars for?" Wolverine scoffed.

"Yes. This is it." Freon stood in front of the rocket propelled Boston Whaler, crossed his arms, and smiled.

"This is it? As in, this is the entire program?"

"Yep!"

"Enough chit chat, gentlemen!" General Highway interjected. "Freon, we need you to get us onto that island."

 

[Dleg]

Wolverine and General Highway were suited up in Arctic Ocean survival suits, and were standing near the Boston Whaler on the treadmill deck of the Clinton, as Freon and his crew of dedicated technicians readied it for launch. The Dark Knight had declined the bulky suits, claiming his Bat suit already protected his from the elements.

"Gentlemen!" Freon addressed the three. "You are all going to need these," he handed each a bright red crash helmet, "and you're going to need to buckle up. The acceleration is a *****!" He climbed the small boarding ladder into the boat and sat in the modified captain's chair, buckling himself in using the six-point harness. He motioned for them to seat themselves in the other three chairs.

Highway and the Dark Knight climbed aboard and buckled up, but Wolverine declined. "I'm pretty sure I can hold on." He held up his claws and grumbled.

"Well OK, then, gentlemen." Freon continued, as he began to power up the instruments and motor heaters. "I suggest you hold on tight." He pressed a large red button, and the rocket motors ignited.