But for those of you who want to dive right into the "deep" end of this story: It's just before Xmas. Nick is our hero. He has had multiple versions of him arrested for writing poetry, while he himself was hiding out in the basement of his house inventing Printable Monsters or whatever I've decided to call them. Meanwhile, his old nemesis, Sexy Cop, has just done something with satellites. Let's let our narrators take over:
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Other Sexy Cop surveyed the damage. She pointed to a few spots here and there.
"See?"
The detective working with her nodded. "Uh huh," he said. After a moment, he added, in a serious tone, "Um, no, I don't see."
"Look," said Other Sexy Cop. "Look." She pointed again.
The detective said: "Oh. OH! Okay. Got it now."
"Do you?" Other Sexy Cop said. "Because I don't have time for this. Right now I've got my husband down at the station, arrested for the gravest crime against humanity ever, writing poetry, and facing expulsion into outer space, and as if that's not enough, I've also got a second, third, fourth, and fifth identical version of my husband arrested for that very same thing, plus I had no idea that the narration was coming from our attic in my very own house, and so if you wouldn't mind doing your job and figuring out who killed the narrator of this story so that we can get on with saving the entire world from whatever it was that made that
The detective sighed, and looked at the couch, which had crept up the stairs and watched the entire proceedings timidly from the door.
"I don't suppose you have any idea what she was talking about," the detective said, kicking aside a few stray pine needles and branches as he looked for clues to help solve the murder of the narrator of this story.
The couch shrugged and gathered up its comic book collection and left.
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MEANWHILE IN ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD ENTIRELY:
The two men paddled slowly along in the warm ocean current, the sun beating down on them, the water stretching off to the horizon, their mouths dry from the salty heat.
"Do you suppose we'll ever be rescued?" the first man said.
"We'll have to be," the second man said. "Why would they leave us out here in the middle of the ocean?"
"Maybe they don't know where we are?" the first man asked. He tended to be a pessimist that way, always looking at the down side of things. He knew he shouldn't do that; he knew, as his wife frequently told him, that he should be more upbeat, more cheery.
"Look,' she'd said to him just before he'd left for his latest tour of duty. "Don't be so glum all the time! I mean, look at this," and she'd showed him a news story on the HUBNews that everyone read these days because it focused almost entirely on human-interest stories and never bored anyone with talk about politics or finance or health care. For almost a week, HUBNews had done an investigative story on whether manufacturers had been deliberately holding back the technology to create new, more wonderful marshmallows in one's cereal. The fabled "100-calorie marshmallow," the story had said, was possible but Big Cereal wouldn't let it be made and so people had to struggle along with the same old regular-sized, ordinary-level-of-deliciousness marshmallows they'd always had. But that day, HUBNews had done a story on how UFO Makers around the world had all lost their jobs recently, because the UFO business had gone under entirely as people no longer wanted UFOs. It quoted one person as saying "UFO maker? Really? That's a job?" The impact on the global economy, it was estimated, was 0.0000000000000000000000001%, as there was only one person working in the UFO industry that time and he was sort of a loser anyway.
"See?" his wife had said. "You could be that guy. Instead, you've got a great job. Sure, it's a job working for some sort of shadowy organization that wants you to go to a remote island somewhere and monitor something for a signal in order to make sure that at the precise time you can use mind-controlling phasers to make sure something or other goes someplace or other instead of just mindlessly rampaging, but it pays well and you've got some job security, all you have to do is just pay attention for a few minutes, hit the green button and everything is fine! Plus, me and the kids will send you an early Christmas present. So smile once in a while, will you?"
The man thought about that now, floating in the middle of the tropical ocean where he and his coworker whose name he could not remember had been tossed, and decided to look on the bright side of things.
"I guess we will be rescued," he said. "Besides,what are the odds that something that terrible could happen to us again?"
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Nick watched the couch creep up the stairs, and took advantage of the disarray on the scene to sneak back downstairs, where he figured he could at least gather up all the monsters he'd created and store them carefully while he figured out what to do. He could hear Other Sexy Cop yelling two floors above him, but immediately lost track of that when he got back down to his workroom and saw that all the paper monsters were gone.
"I could've told you they'd be gone," said the mysterious voice behind him again, which is when both Nick and the author of this story remembered that someone in the house had been talking to Nick when we last left him, so let's just pretend that speaker followed him downstairs.
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Sexy Cop watched on all her monitors as beams of light stabbed out of the sky, into the oceans below. At first, nothing happened, but then there was a strange glow, and a bubbling, and then there was a
and then three more:
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Other Sexy Cop slammed on the brakes to her car at the first of the BLOOP!s (I told you, the picture is getting annoying and I probably won't do it anymore) and stared up into the sky.
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Everyone in the world, just about, stopped and looked up at the sky, when each of the BLOOP!s occurred.
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Nick did not look up. Nick was staring at the person who'd spoken to him, because the author is not going to forget THAT person again, but also the author is not sure where he is going with that part yet.
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The couch stopped checking through its set of of Captain America vs. The Aliens Whose Name Was Used In The Last Book In This Series But I Can't Remember It Right Now first issues and paused at the sound of the BLOOP!s and shuddered. It knew what those meant.
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Down at the police station, all the cops in riot gear stopped hustling all the various copies of Nicks into the special holding cell created just for poets and looked up at the sky, not noticing that none of the Nicks they were arresting for writing poetry looked up at all, and that they seemed indifferent to the BLOOP!s.
They also didn't notice that Frankie, the tiny green paper doll,was edging along the hallway towards the collection of Nicks. Those riot police are very good at breaking down doors and arresting people with extreme prejudice and putting them into cells but they are not detail-oriented, as you've probably guessed.
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MEANWHILE IN ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD ENTIRELY the first man, settling into his newly-decided optimistic lifestyle smiled at the horizon, kicked his legs with a little more vigor, and told himself "It's going to be a great day," immediately after which they heard the worldwide collection of BLOOP!s and underneath him the water boiled and burst and he found himself and his partner, whose name he'd never be able to ask now because they'd been working together for three weeks and how do you just turn to a guy and say "Hey,we've been working together for three weeks so uh what was your name again?" lifted up into the sky and staring into an eyeball that was easily 20 feet tall, a dark black hole surrounded by an almost translucent rippled eyeball, terrible in its size and dead-glare, and next to it was another one just like it, and above those was a third one that was just like the first two only a little more horrible-er.
"Don't eat me! My name is Templeton Freeney and I only took this job to get a present for my wife for Xmas!" yelled his coworker, dangling from the claw with him.
The man said to himself "See? If you just keep a positive outlook, things will work out for you. I guess my wife was right."
Click here to go on to the next part.
Like what you read? This is actually the third Nick & Other Sexy Cop story, a series that started last year on Xmas in
1 comment:
You know, I don't think I have any idea what's going on any more.
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