It looks like they’ll soon get an opportunity to a larger work. Bloomington is expecting 5-9 more inches of snow tomorrow.

Prior to one of Carter’s preschool year parties I tried it- I sent out invites with a cute, “your presence is our present” message and promptly got a phone call from the mom of one of his best buddies at school.

Friend’s mom: Amy? Your invitation says no gifts.

Me: Yes.

Friend’s Mom: Are you serious?

Me: Um, well, yes. Well, blah blah plastic and the environment, blah blah budget and plenty-

Friend’s Mom: Hm. My son has already been talking about shopping for Carter and he’s very excited about it, so I’m sure you won’t begrudge him a chance to give a good gift, will you? I mean isn’t that part of the fun of birthdays?

I started paying attention to what Carter was learning and doing on gift-giving occasions. Even at a young age, he was a generous and thoughtful giver. When he scours catalogs, he isn’t only looking at things he enjoys- he lists which items would be perfect for which friends and why. We’ve never wandered Target aimlessly searching for a ticket into the party, we’ve headed out with a mission, Carter listing the qualities that would make the gift “perfect.”

Since that year, Carter has received homemade gifts, stories, pictures, action heroes and books for his birthdays- he enjoys all of them, but I think what he enjoys most is thinking about those people thinking about him. Giving a gift says, “hey- I thought of you when you weren’t here- you stay in my heart.”

As to the plastic accumulation, there are several alternatives. Coupons for special events, tickets to the movies, parts to a toy he already has like Legos or K-nex are all things that don’t contribute to further clutter in our home. Sharing a book you have already read and treasured or finding the perfect used toy is a way to reduce the impact on the environment. One of Archie’s favorite gifts is a robot made of cardboard boxes, aluminum cans and duct tape. It truly is the thought, and communicating it, that counts.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

“No,” again with a thick Irish accent.

“Then if you’re not a weasel, but your name is Weasel, what are you?”

“A waysel.”

“A weasel?”

“No, a waysel.”

“A waysel?”

“Aye.”

“So, you’re a waysel named Weasel?”

“Aye.”

“You’re an Irish waysel named Weasel?”

“Aye.”

“Then if you’re from Ireland, how did you get here?”

“Where’s Ireland?”

“So you’re not from Ireland?”

“No.”

“Then where are you from?”

“Here.”

“Here in this cave?”

“Aye.”

“So how did you get here?”

“Well, when a mommy waysel and a daddy waysel love each other very much. . . ”

“No, how did you get here in this cave?”

“Well, sit down. I’ll tell you all about it. A long time ago I was roaming the desert on this planet, looking for someplace to stay when I found these caves. I looked in all of them and each time one of you,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at Plittereeg, “comes out and shoos me away- until I found this cave. So, I stuffed my belongings in the corner and fell asleep.

“The first night was easy, but on the second night falling asleep was hard because I was hearing constant moaning and groaning from the back of the cave where I had never been.”

It was very hard to follow the next few words Weasel said because he was making complex gestures with all of his arms and hands.

“So the next day I went to check out that area in the back of the cave.” His voice took on the menacing tone of somebody telling the scary part of a ghost story. “But suddenly, a giant tentacle reached out and grabbed me!” Plittereeg hid his face in his hands at this point.

“The last thing I hear as the tentacle drops me into that murky pond over there is this loud ‘quack’.”

Alabaster and I looked at each other and Plittereeg’s fearful expression changed to confusion. “Quack?”

“That’s right. In all the two years since that day I have never gone back into that part of the cave. When I came here, two years ago, in a hidden room there were all sorts of things like swords and axes and masks and cloaks- and even mattresses. I had no idea what they were doing there.”

Plittereeg answered his question. “My people throw them in here through a special shaft to appease the octopus.”

“Well, anyway, I used the food offerings to stay alive and when they stopped throwing food offerings down every once in a while I used the weapon offerings to hunt for small animals out in the desert. Once I came upon this little specimen.” He stood up and motioned for us to follow. We walked passed an open door where we could see the piles of offerings and past a couple of empty rooms that were dark inside and had piles of rocks or sticks inside them.

Weasel led us to a room where it was brightly lit due to flaming torches hung on the wall and another contributor to the lighting were jars of fireflies. In fact, fireflies weren’t the only animals in this room- there were huge cages with rainbow-toothed saber-toothed tigers and elephants with wings.

“This is my zoo,” he said. He led us over to a door in the left wall and opened it. “In here is the most amazing specimen of all.” What we saw before us was a giant tooth, incredibly huge, stretching all the way up to the ceiling and into a carved out part of the ceiling so it would be able to fit. As I used my eyes to follow the tooth upward, I could see that in the cavity in the ceiling there was another specimen connected to the tooth- Weasel led us up, climbing on some notches and scratches and wear and tear that the tooth must have experienced while it was being used. We climbed up through the cavity onto a ledge outside of the cave where the biggest and most incredible wooly mammoth skeleton I had ever seen stood.

“I’m still working on excavating it,” said Weasel, “this side of the mountain is never used by the citizens of that city over there. Speaking of which, what is the name of that city, little green man?” he asked Plittereeg.

“Alchukata.”

“I have no idea how to spell that,” said Weasel, “but it sounds like a good name. Anyway, the inhabitants of Alchukata never come down here so I can excavate it in peace without worrying about anyone trying to come down here and steal the bones. It really is my most amazing-”

But Weasel never finished his sentence because we heard a deafening bellow from below. We all clambered into the cave and went to see what happened.

“My name is Plittereeg. Welcome to my home,” said the little green creature. Plittereeg led us to a hidden stairwell and signaled for us to follow him down underground. We walked down the stairs for quite a long time, at least an hour, judging by my watch, until we reached a vast network of tunnels. We walked through a couple of the tunnels and came to an open expanse of cave that was dimly lit.

As we walked farther and farther, it got lighter and lighter until we could see it was actually an exit. When we got out, we looked up.

“Wow,” I said, awestruck. We had gone at least a mile down underground in the stairwell. The mile high cliff was littered with other caves with stone ladders carved into the mountainside underneath them. There was one cave, the biggest one, that had no ladder at all. This cave looked unused and had a small stream of murky brown sludge trickling out of it.

“Whose cave is that?” I asked Plittereeg.

“That, I don’t know. When I was little my parents used to tell me stories about vile monsters living up in that cave, but as far as I know, nobody knows for sure what is living in there.”

“Huh. Maybe we’ll find out.”

“I sure hope not,” said Plittereeg, “I’ve heard way too many bad stories about that. The scariest is that it’s inhabited by a giant octopus that lives in a pool of that murky brown sludge trickling out of the cave and is lying in wait to strangle anybody who comes to close to the entrance. Another one of the scariest stories is that Abraham Lincoln lives in there and drives up to houses in a stretch limo at night and waits to attack you.”

“Abraham Lincoln?”

“Yeah. There was this weird time capsule thing that had a green piece of paper with an Abraham Lincoln portrait on it.”

I slapped my face like you see people do when somebody is oblivious to something that seems really obvious to you. “Anyway, why did you bring us out here?” I asked.

“So that I could show you my section of the house. It’s connected to the house by the family cave, but not actually in the main area. This way.” He led us back into the cave and into a hole in the wall.

He led us quickly through a tunnel and down into a large open space which had a stone bed, wardrobe and fluffy chair. Don’t ask me how a chair made of stone was fluffy, because I can’t really describe it.

Plittereeg led us to a ladder that led up a shaft. We followed and came to what was evidently a storage space full of alien knick-knacks that I had never seen before. Plittereeg said, “Hmm. I’ve never noticed that before,” pointing a dexterous finger at a chipped and broken stone ladder in the corner of the room, halfway covered up by piles of glittering brown transparent gems.

“Why don’t we go check it out?” I suggested.

“Good idea,” said Plittereeg. We followed Plittereeg up an empty shaft into another cave, larger than Plittereeg’s home cave, and much cooler and damper. We walked to the exit and looked around. We were high up, and we could see all the caves of the other families around us. There was no ladder leading down from the cave mouth, like there were with the other family cave, and in the far corner of the cave mouth was a brown, sludgy stream.

With a concerned look on his face, Plittereeg followed the stream with his eyes. We followed his gaze and saw a huge, murky pond, full of the brown sludge.

“Boo,” we heard from behind us, with a thick Irish accent. The alabaster lion roared, I jumped, and Plittereeg EEPED. We turned around and standing before us was a measly, furry little creature with two arms on each side of its body and close in appearance to a weasel.

“Me name’s Weasel.”

When I woke up, very strangely, to something patting my head. When I blinked my eyes open I saw that it was a green hand with two fingers and a thumb, with fingers that were very long and thin and grew to about the size of those really big marbles you sometimes get that don’t ever fit into the marble sets and don’t have any apparent purpose accept that they’re pretty to look at. The thumb was somewhat thicker and shorter, but still had the same sized big marble thumb tip. I sat up with a jolt. Whatever was patting me emitted a screech and ran away. The last sight I caught was a two-toed foot fleeting from my range of vision in the cave.

I woke up the alabaster lion and tried to describe what I experienced and what it was that I had seen and if the alabaster lion knew what it was. He answered no, and out of pure curiosity I popped out, “do you have any name other than the alabaster lion?”

“Just Alabaster is fine.”

“Well then, um, Alabaster, I vote that we tail it and try to figure out where it came from.”

“I second that,” said Alabaster.

We walked out of the cave and Alabaster offered to carry me on his back to get there faster. We soon caught sight of a green dot in the distance. As we got closer, we could make out that the green dot was wearing a sort of jumpsuit that was different shades of gray. We slowed down as we got closer so that he/she/it wouldn’t hear us and as the little green creature got closer to his/her/its target we could see huge pillars of black shiny pirate crystal carved with intricate designs. We had reached a city.

The green creature turned around unexpectedly and saw us. It emitted a loud EEEEEP and ran into the city and disappeared among a huge throng of other creatures identical to it. “EEEP, EEEEP, EEEEP” was all they said as we approached. We got to what we presumed was a hotel and attempted to get a room, but the concierge just EEEPED and ran in circles with its arms sticking up in the air, so we just took an empty room and plotted what we were going to do. We decided just to get one of the little green creatures to be our friend and use its help to find a way off the planet (in our desperation to find some civilization we had completely lost the escape pod in the endless expanse of desert.

We set down the little stuff we had on the beds and left the hotel and searched around the city. Everybody was either in their houses or hiding under crates and peeking out in between the boards. We did find one little green creature who wasn’t hiding.

“EEEP” it said, as brave as a very tiny creature that can only say “EEEP” can sound. “EEEEEEEP.” Then I realized something. I reached up to my forehead and twiddled with the knobs on the headband. It took me a while to get it right, at times I got “EEEEOOORRP” and “OOOOP” but I eventually got it.

“I don’t know what you are and you’re really scary, but are you friendly?” I heard.

“Yes, we’re friendly,” I said, hoping that it understood me. Its mouth gaped open and I could see that it had no teeth, which was obviously why it could only say “EEEP”.

“Good,” it said. “I’ll show you where I live.”

“Good morning,” he murmured. I checked my watch. It was 9:30 am. “We’re about to land,” said the lion.

“You don’t seem all that excited about it.”

“That’s because we’re not landing where I expected. I expected us to have already landed in a remote part of the Arizona desert by now, but we’re way off course. We’re floating through the outer reaches of the trinary star system, Alpha Centauri.” (Trinary means three stars orbiting around each other). “I need to find some way to change our course before we get too close to the stars. I believe that due to the excess heat provided by three stars that we might find a sentient life form on a planet very far away from the three stars.”

“Yippee, more aliens,” I said sarcastically.

“I don’t understand why you’re so excited,” said the lion.

“I was being sarcastic.”

“Oh.” I started to get nervous as we got closer and closer to the nearest planet. I started pacing around in circles in the small pod. I got even more anxious as the lion told me to put on a space suit. I grabbed one of the space suits hanging in the corner of the pod (you may note that a circular pod doesn’t have corners, but you know what I mean). I continued to pace until I tripped over a handle in the floor. An airlock came tumbling open and I was pulled out of the pod by the immense vacuum of air trying to escape the enclosed place.

Suddenly I heard the lion’s voice over a radio. “Bbbzzzt Don’t worry- you have a heat shield on your space suit that will protect you from the atmospheric changes as you enter the atmosphere of the planet.”

“What?? You mean I’m going to be on fire?” I heard more buzzing on the radio, then there was a bright spark and a small flurry of sparks and the radio emitted a loud pop and started smoking. Fortunately there was a filter in my space helmet or I would have choked to death on the smoke. Just as the lion had predicted, I was unhurt as an incredible ball of fire formed around me. I hit the ground on the planet with a loud thud. It hurt a lot but I didn’t embed myself in the surface and make a crater. I suspected the lower gravity and thinner atmosphere were the reasons I hadn’t embedded myself in the planet.

I stood up and surveyed my surroundings yet again. What I saw was a bluish craterish surface with strange mountains spiking up in the distance. I was in some sort of space desert. I didn’t have much time to look around though because I had to fling myself to one side as the escape pod came crashing down. Due to the lower gravity and thinner air I traveled much farther than I would have in normal circumstances. I skidded in the blue dirt, sending a cloud of blue dust up into the air.

The lion stumbled out of the ship wearing his very strange lion space suit. I saw the lion moving his mouth but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because my radio was broken. The lion looked confused but then made an “oh, I get it” sort of face and went back into the ship and for the first time stood up on two legs and picked up a whole squadron of paper planes and threw them at me. When I unfolded them I read, “this is a really bad way to communicate. Take off your spacesuit. The atmosphere may be thin, but it’s safe.”

So I did and I noticed two things: the first was that, just as the lion had predicted, the atmosphere was safe to breathe. The second thing was that it was warm. Because you could see the stars in space and three stars circling each other in the distance, it was warm. The stars were emitting so much heat, that even though combining their light didn’t produce a higher amount of light, it did produce a higher amount of heat.

The lion took off his spacesuit as well and said, “well, this is where we’re staying for the time being.”

I followed the lion through dozens of narrow passageways and secret hatches until we came to an old escape hatch, nearly rusted shut and neglected. The lion kicked the doorknob bolts to get it started and I unscrewed the hatch door. We climbed into an escape pod plenty big enough for the two of us, and not nearly as neglected as the door, but that’s not saying much.

The lion kicked a button and the door shut and the escape pod launched.

“So.”

“Yes?”

“Your story. You said you’d tell it. How did you end up on the Deathbird?”

“Like I said, long story. You see, it starts in a remote part of Africa where I was exiled from my pride because of an attempt to converse with the gazelle the leader of the pride was chasing. After wandering through the jungle for several days, I fell into a lion trap. I was knocked out. When I came to, I was in- you may recognize this part- a dimly lit cave, lying on a slab of metal with two half-duck half-octopus creatures.”

“I do recognize that part.”

“All prisoners on the Deathbird go through the same series of events.”

“All? You mean there are more?”

“Yes. I’ve met quite a few. I’ll mention them in my story. Now where was I? Ah yes, the creatures put a burlap sack over my head and dunked me onto another metal slab, which then started moving, then tilted and I dropped off and hit my head on a hard stone floor. When I came to I was in what I refer to as ‘the containment room’ with the display case where I was introduced to the Military Exus Leader, but rather than bringing me to the roof room, like he does with most prisoners, he tossed me into the blue pit. The next thing I knew he was tossing prisoner after prisoner into the blue pit with me, expecting me to devour them. Instead, I led them to the many escape pods. Normally I stay behind, but the reason I came along with you is I figure sooner or later they’ll figure out I’ve been sending prisoners into the escape pods and I want to be far far away when they figure that out.”

I was wondering when he would get to the point. “Go on,” I said impatiently.

“No need to get huffy,” purred the lion. (You may note that big cats like lions and tigers can’t actually purr, but somehow this lion did it.) “I suppose you’re wondering when I’m going to get to the point.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, the real point of this story doesn’t come for a while, so why don’t I tell you something interesting in the meantime. Right before you were tossed into the pit, there was another boy that I let out. His name was Ruth.”

“Ruth what?”

“Ki-something. Reminded me of Africa.”

“Kazembe?”

“That was it. How’d you know?”

“Ruth Kazembe is in my fourth grade class. Just to make sure- sort of tall and thin, black hair, green eyes?”

“Yes. Well, anyway, as I led him to the escape pod, he was murmuring, ‘Drake. This is Drake’s fault.’ I presume you’re Drake?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course, I know it wasn’t your fault. The Military Exus Leader steals creatures from different planets all over the galaxy, seeing if they are fit to undergo genetic mutation and become one of the super creatures in his army.”

“Super creatures?” My ears pricked up at that. “Can you tell me more about that?”

“Check your watch first.”

When I checked my watch I was surprised to see that it was actually 11:40 at night.

“What time is it?” said the lion.

“11:40.”

“We should get to sleep. I’ll tell you the rest of the story in the morning.”

I yawned, nodded, and lay down on the co-pilot’s seat and drifted off to sleep.

As I crawled into the lion’s den, I realized that it was in fact, bigger than I expected. As I crawled along, the tunnel got wider and wider until I could stand up inside it.

“I thought lions were native to Earth,” I murmured to myself.

“They are.”

I was so started that I stood up and ran as fast as I could down the corridor. I was staring behind me and not looking where I was going until I tumbled off a ledge. Wherever I was, if it was even a room at all, was pitch black with twinkling stars everywhere and huge turning gears and cogs above me. Just when I though that I was somehow breathing in space and had fallen out of some sort of hatch, I hit my head with a thud on the floor.

I didn’t get knocked out, but it ws sort of hard to see. When I could see clearly I surveyed my surroundings. I went over to the nearest star speck and tried to touch it but my hand when right through, which gave the impression that this room was some sort of holographic image. Suddenly a shooting star went whizzing past me. Startled, I stepped backwards and kicked some kind of level with my foot. Suddenly the stars around me fizzed and crackled and vanished.

The room was a large, rust encrusted iron room with gears and cogs whirring up on the wall. As I stepped backwards even farther in amazement, I touched something. Instinctively I reached backwards to feel what it was and I landed my hand on something soft and furry. I felt it more and realized it was long hair. As I turned around I found myself staring face to face with the Alabaster Lion.

“GAAHHH!!” I said, more like shouted.

“Calm down, no need to get startled,” said the lion. Wait. Said the lion? How could the lion be talking?

“Your translator.”

“How did you know I was wondering about that?”

“The look on your face, kid.”

“Earlier you said, ‘they are’ when I said ‘lions are native to Earth’. How did you get here?”

“Long story. I’ll tell you sometime. In the meantime, I’ll show you the escape hatch.”

“Wait, what?”

“The escape hatch.”

“There’s an escape hatch? Wouldn’t we need space suits or something? Because I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a lion space suit.”

“The escape hatch to the escape pod,” he sighed impatiently.

“There’s an escape pod?”

“Look. I’ll answer your questions later, but for now I’m just going to show you where it is,” he said with a frustrated tone, “follow me.”

So I did. He led me back down the den, the tunnel I had thought was a den at first, then kicked a square panel in the wall of the main pit with his front paw. At first it didn’t do anything, than I heard a soft clattering which got louder and louder until a huge ladder smashed down on the floor with a loud clang.

“Up this way,” said the lion.

Staring in amazement at the volcano of light around me, I followed.

As you can tell, there wasn’t really all that much in that room. After my several hours in the room ended, the Military Exus Leader and several ductopi came and took me down several levels on the elevator platform. We went down farther and farther and when we came out I could see a catwalk above us. In front of me was a ring of large gears and a blue glow.

I was back in that room when we had first left the containment area. The Military Exus Leader and the ductopi walked me around the ring of gears until we came to a space where the volcano of blue light was visible. One of the ductopi walked away for a couple of minutes and came back with a pair of goggles for me. The Military Exus Leader flipped down sunglasses from the bottom of the bill of his military cap and the ductopi shielded their eyes with their feathers.

It was hard to see through the goggles but it got easier to see as we approached the volcano of blue light. We approached the edge. I was about to ask what we were doing here when they tossed me in.

The last words I heard from the ductopi were, “you should be glad we gave you the goggles.”

I hit my head on the wall on the way down and was knocked out for what I presumed to be at least an hour. I woke up to something wet and scratchy on the top of my forehead. My eyes were blinking a bit and for a couple of minutes I couldn’t see well. The blurry white form that had been licking me retreated to the shelter of a black circle.

When I could see clearly, I could see that the black circle was a hole in the wall. The area was well lit due to the volcano of blue light above, which, for some reason did not stretch all the way to the bottom of the pit. I went over to the hole in the wall and peered inside. It was shaded from the light by a small overhand at the top of the entrance, so I couldn’t see all the way in. From what I could tell, it was maybe thirteen to fifteen feet long, just a tube that didn’t lead anywhere- kind of a den.

Den. That reminded me of something. What had one of the ductopi said when they had first let me understand what they were saying?

“He looks like Ringo”

“what is he doing here”

“We should feed him to the . . .”

No. I couldn’t remember- not then, anyway.

I toyed with the idea for about an hour when I passed out from sheer exhaustion. When I woke up (again) I saw a form in the den that I had seen earlier. It looked gray in the dark, but I could tell it would be white if it came out of the den into the light.

SNORT.

A spurt of flame came out of the den.

SNORT.

A tremendous fireball.

SHHHHHHHOO!

A huge blast of blue flame spurted out of the den and blasted up out of the pit, creating the volcano effect I had seen above. Plumes of smoke came out like rhythmical breathing. Too startled to move, I could only watch as a tremendous white shape came out of the den. The tremendous shape that was in the den was a lion- a white lion- an alabaster lion.

“The equivalent of a ‘president’ on your planet,” his voice sunk lower when he said “president”. “In any case, I lead my soldiers into battle.”

“What the @$% are you?” I shouted.

“Calm down,” said one of the ductopi lined up on the left wall. One of the ductopi slunk over to me and pressed a button on the chair I was in. It slid out from under me, revealing a large black square on the floor out of which came what looked like handcuffs, only more high-tech to bind my hands (duh, ’cause I mean, handcuffs).

One of the ductopi coiled a tentacle around my neck and pulled me towards the door where another one of the ductopi gagged me.

“Come,” said the Military Exus Leader to the ductopi, “we’ll show him the ship.” The door slid open and the ductopi led me out of the room. The room we were in looked somewhat like an engine room. It had huge rusted gears all over the place and even worse lighting than the last room. The only lighting, in fact, was a blue glow coming from the center of the floor. I couldn’t see where it was coming from since the source was hidden from view by a ring of large gears.

The ductopi led me across a catwalk above the center of the floor and I saw the source of the blue glow. There was a large hole in the floor with an intense volcano of blue light flowing out of it. I tried to ask, “what’s that?” but with a gag on it came out more, “Mmphf, pmphf.”

The next room I was led into I vaguely recognized- I realized it was the cave I had been in earlier when I first met the ductopi.

“What is this place?” I wondered to myself. By now I had the impression that the whole ship was very old, due to the dim lighting, use of gears and mechanical stuff instead of electricity and everything being rusty. Yes, there was some electricity, like electric lighting and sliding doors, but most of it was powered by gears with little electricity.

They led me to a circular platform in the middle of the floor, which as soon as they stepped on made a loud “clunk” and some handrails came up from the floor and the platform started to rise. The electric lift took us up through several more rooms, some empty and some full of different ductopi with all the colors I had ever seen in their tentacles, plus more that didn’t look like anything I had ever seen.

We finally stopped in a room with average lighting, a bit stronger than the dimly lit lights in the other rooms but still not quite as bright as average lighting. For the first time, I saw a window. In fact, the whole roof was a glass dome with some of the windows fogged up and cracked and metal framework spiderwebbing its way across. It was nighttime, or so I assumed, because there were stars out. I was led over to the window to look down when I realized there was no real proof whether it was night or day or whether we were near a star at all. There was no ground near the structure, just empty space. The only things I could see aside from the wall of the structure were loud rusty clanky gears turning around near the bottom of the structure.

The Military Exus Leader came over and took off my gag and for the first time I was able to ask, “where am I?”

The Military Exus Leader answered, “you,” he paused for dramatic effect, “are in the deathbird.”

The third thing I noticed was a giant glass display case full of odd trophies. By trophies, I don’t mean trophies you get when you complete a sport, I mean trophies of war. There were skulls of creatures I recognized, like rats, birds and cats, and even one or two human skulls. There were some that looked nothing like skulls I have seen before- they were white, and you could tell they were skulls, but aside from that they bore no resemblance to the other skulls in the case. One of them had two tiny eye holes, a half-broken jaw bone and more horns than I could count. Another had eye sockets that could fit basketballs and jaws the size of a single computer key.

Others were very interesting, and I would love to put them here, but they were too difficult to describe. Let me put it this way: it was like being asked to explain in detail the difference between both ends of a symmetrical piece of wood.

The other things in the case were things like spiky horns, feathers and broken war shields and spears. Rusty pistols, photographs of broken trebuchets were near the end of the display. The final thing in the case was probably the strangest. On the far end of the case, farthest from me, was a tattered flag with the Nazi symbol on it.

Then all of a sudden I nearly passed out from the noise. It was like a hundred turbines turning big metal hammers smashing into the side of a wall of rock combined with constant loud humming combined with buzzing. Without warning it stopped and made a loud clack sound which sent a small vibration through the room. The doors at the fall end of the hall slowly slid open and in came three of the ductopi I had seen earlier.

One of them was holding a headband-like ring. They started talking to each other in their cardboard-swallowed gurgling sound and the ductopus creature slid the headband onto my head. The gurgling slowly melted away to give way to human sounding voices. It sounded more like a rusty French horn had been learning to speak English and wasn’t all that good at it.

I couldn’t make out whatever they were saying. The ductopi stopped talking, if can even call it talking, and turned a knob on the headband. Now it sounded more like a somewhat quieter French horn that was all shiny and new with no rust on it was endowed with perfect English speech. The ducktopi started murmuring things to each other. . .

“he looks like Ringo.”

“why is he here?”

“we should feed him to the alabaster lion”

Then the ductopi responded as if to some unheard signal and lined up in military fashion against the left wall. The door slid open and in came another ductopi. Rather than having purple tentacles, they were pale forest green and it wore a blue camouflage style military cap on its head. Its bill was jet black and its eyes were old and weary, but certainly not kind in any way. Most of its feathers were still left, but in some places you could see patches where there weren’t any, and you could see coarse white skin.

“Who are you?” I said, making my first attempt to speak to the ducktopi.

“I” the voice of the ductopus said, as gruffly as a talking French horn could possibly sound, “am the Military Exus leader.”