 |
| On Earth Two people wipe their butts with LaserDisc copies of Spotlight. |
Richelle turned around to appraise the work of art in the doorway, a mystery more miraculous than a thousand universes combined, her girlfriend Amy Grace taking a hormone replacement tablet, wearing Star Wars pajama pants and a t-shirt that read "Keep Calm and Feel the Bern." Amy was actually the one who pulled the trigger on Richelle's werewolf sire. In the time since she had developed pet peeves she didn't have before and shouted at people for peeving her pets. They couldn't go back to the only record store in town because the clerk nearly peed his pants after saying Let it Be and Let it Be... Naked were "basically the same for all intensive purposes." She joined Richelle on the porch.
"Aren't you tired of looking at that thing yet?"
"No, I have yet to be bored by the inexplicable hole in the sky."
"Oh, it can be explained. Haven't you heard, it's here to punish us for our sins," Amy said.
"You know, for a few years there it seemed like they had given up on blaming us for everything."
"I meant murder."
"Hey, there was no sky hole for Stalin. There's no way the universe is falling apart at the seams because we put an end to that dangerous jerk."
On the other side of the sky hole Brian YonceBe watched Mortdecai with his family in their North Korean home. The earth shook under them and above them and all around them.
"Did you feel that?" Brian asked his wife, Beyonce.
"I can tell from the rate of vibration that it's no ordinary earthquake. It's the result of our universe clashing with another," she said. As one of the best magic users in the world Beyonce YonceBe had an innate understanding of the rhythms of the universe. That's how she was able to see the good in a strange wendigo and turn him back into a human. That and doing it on accident.
"Oh bother. Is there anything we can do about it?" asked Brian and Beyonce's son Chairack.
"As a matter of fact, your father and I, as a former wendigo and a current sorceress respectively, are uniquely qualified to save the world, but you are too young. Aunt Michelle is going to stay with you while we're gone."
"Yayyy! Aunt Michelle and Uncle Chairack are coming! All my friends are jealous because their aunts aren't chairs."
"It can wait until Mortdecai is over, right?" asked Brian.
"Of course."
"Good. I'd sooner see the world burn to flames than interrupt the impeccably paced Mortdecai."
When Mortdecai was over Beyonce called her best friend Michelle. She and her human husband Chairack came over as soon as possible.
"Did you guys see the giant hole in the sky that appeared after the earthquake?" Chairack asked.
"I don't think your sarcasm is called for, Michelle. I was just making conversation. You don't know, maybe they didn't see it."
"There's a hole in the sky? I love holes almost as much as I love the world not being threatened! This day just keeps getting better and worse! We've got to check out that hole!" Brian said.
"Good idea, honey. That's the best place to start looking into this 'worlds colliding' fiasco." Beyonce and Brian walked out the front door.
"Now, where do we go?"
"I don't know, do you see the hole in the sky?"
"No, I don't see the hole in the sky." Brian shouted over his shoulder back into the house, "hey Chairack, which way is the hole in the sky?"
"Up."
"Oh, there it is, directly over our house. That's convenient."
"I have an idea." Beyonce touched her left palm with her right pinkie and dragged it up. The two of them floated off the ground toward the hole. Brian flapped his arms wildly. "I love that you knew to do that without me having to tell you." Beyonce said. She had a point. The two of them were perfectly in sync.
"We even finish each other's"
"Suicides."
"Someday. But first we need to see what's on the other side of this hole," Brian said.
They went through the hole. Michelle's spell gave out and they plummeted to Earth, landing in the middle of a desert. Brian used the enhanced senses left over from his time as a wendigo to set them on course to the nearest town, then they went in another direction because the first town would have set the story back a ways. They wound up a few miles from Richelle and Amy's home.
"I smell something," Brian said.
"What do your wendigo nostrils smell, Brian."
"There's a supernatural being who lives in the vicinity."
Those are actual lines from Lord of the Rings on Earth Two. They tracked the smell to Richelle and Amy's front door. They knocked. No one answered. They sat on the front porch for an hour and 18 minutes. Then they stood on the front porch for two days. Then Richelle and Amy got back from their spontaneous vacation in India. The hole gave them a vision of the Taj Mahal with too obviously phallic architecture and it inspired them to appreciate the "real thing" in case the universe exploded.
"How was your trip?" Brian asked.
"Fine, thanks. Who are you?" Richelle asked with much more interest in the answer.
"We come from the universe on the other side of the hole in the sky. We're here to keep our worlds from destroying each other."
"And you're going to do that on our front porch?"
"I doubt it. My understanding of the story structure is that the four of us are going to team up and save the multi_verse together."
"Why us? Why you?" Amy asked.
"Because we're secret samesies and the guys from the other other universes are boring," Brian said.
"My husband and I are very experienced with the supernatural," Beyonce replied. I am a sorceress. Brian was a wendigo before I changed him. We can sense that you have also been touched by magic forces."
Richelle hesitated, then nodded and muttered "werewolf." After she pushed her feelings about that time in her life back down she asked "what about Amy? Why is she involved in this."
"She knows why," said Beyonce.
"Oh no. Okay, let me explain. I wasn't exactly upset that I killed a person as much as I was disappointed in myself for killing a person again. I come from a long line of vaguely mystical assassins. I was going to tell you but it never came up. Except for all those times we talked about murder but it never seemed like the right time."
Richelle took several minutes to take in what she had just heard. She wanted to get angry but she kept thinking of Amy pointing that gun at what amounted to a serial mauler. She considered that saving her life once or even twice didn't entitle anyone to a free pass. Her brain flooded with a hundred more ideas and implications. Then she thought of the pajamas and the T-Shirt. "Well, that's a lot to take in," she said, "but in the long run I guess it doesn't really matter. Just, you know, I'd rather you didn't keep secrets from me in the future."
"That's fair."
"Well, looks like we've got everything cleared up. Now can we get going on saving the universes?" Brian asked.
"Sure," Amy said.
"Fine with me."
Maybe we should start with our neighbor, Professor Disaster. He's pretty sketchy."
"I thought my ears were burning," Professor Disaster said as he turned the corner. "You guys talking about me?"
"Yeah, hey Todd," Amy said. "Quick question, did you set our dimension on a path of destruction with another dimension?"
"Yeah, sorry about that," said Professor Todd Disaster.
"Why?"
"I'm kind of going for a Doctor Doom brand of villainy where I just wreck stuff without a whole lot of motivation. I mean, I have a tragic backstory but you probably don't care about that. Do you guys want to hear my tragic backstory?"
"Not really."
"Actually," Brian said, "I'd like to hear it."
"OK, cool." Todd cleared his throat. "I saw the new Fantastic Four movie."
Brian, Beyonce, Richelle, and Amy agreed that that made sense. "So how do we stop you?"
"You can use the app I U2-ed onto everyone's phones, but you still need need the code," he pulled an index card with handwriting on it out of his pocket, "You'll have to pry it from my cold," Amy shot him, "living hands. I was going to say 'cold, living hands.'"
Beyonce pried the code from his cold, dead hands while Richelle opened the app. She put in the code and suddenly there were only two people standing there.
"What happened?" asked Rian Brolaine.
"I see, it's a four, not a nine. You accidentally combined our universes into one amalgamation," said Amonce YonceGre.
Richelle put in the code with all the right numbers. The universes separated and the hole disappeared from the sky. Our four heroes looked around to make sure everything was back to normal.
"Well, I guess we'll be going," said Beyonce. She took out her left shoelace and handed it to Richelle. "If you ever want to visit our universe just touch this and say 'I'd like to be elsewhere.'"
The heroes of Earth Two and Earth Seven went their separate ways.
The End.
Or is it?
"It is," said Beyonce. "That shoelace does nothing."
No comments:
Post a Comment