Game Over?!
"Wake up! Wake up!"
"Bzzzz... guuuuhhh... hu huh?" I grunted, unable to comprehend why my friend Karl was jabbing me in the back of the head with his foot.
"Uuuurrrrhhh. Why, Karl?" I asked as I sat up, grabbing him by the neck, "Why do you hate breathing?"
"Urk! Put me... down!" he gasped.
"Why, Karl?! Hasn't breathing been kind to you?!"
"Why are you..." and then I paused to pull him close to my face so I could lick my lips and mess with him more. "Why did you just wake me from my thousand year slumber?"
"Uhhh... Huuuh! Second... second challenge! Must... race!"
A light suddenly went on inside my head. Worried that it might damage the ant colony living there, I put it out and dropped Karl to the floor where he proceeded to gasp and draw political caricatures on the floor with crayons.
"I... Karl! Karl, is it time for the second challenge already?!"
"Yeah. But I'm not going to help you now."
"Come on, Karl! You know I don't... hey, how did you get into my house in the first place?" I looked over to the window near my bed, and noticed for the first time the broken glass. "Did you break into my house?!"
"That depends on how you define 'house' and 'break into.'"
"Karl..."
"Do you want to win or not?! Because, you moron, I've got a training session in a half hour! Do you think I enjoy morphing?!"
"What?"
"I'm a sorcerer, you fool! You can't even begin to understand the things I go through with each day to put food on the table!" He started screaming at me. "When I was your age, we didn't even have challenges. We had rocks. Rocks and dirt. And we were just fine, you think so! Glorp!"
I've seen this kind of incoherent ranting twice before; Karl must have seen something that freaked him out to the point of insanity. There was only one cure.
"Karl, would you like to have your atomic structure destroyed and recombined into a hovercycle?"
He waited a moment, looking down at his feet and muttering. Then he walked right over to me, turned his face up to the ceiling, and started drooling. It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. Then he whipped his head back and made a humming noise.
"Okay, Karl. I'm going to get the atomic deconstructor."
"Too late," he burbled as I pulled The Machine out from behind my alarm clock. "too late..."
"What is it too late for, Karl?" I asked innocently as I prepared to convert the mass of my friend into a hovercycle.
"The race started already... you are toooooo late..."
"No, Karl. Not with my... new... hovercycle."
It's extremely fuel-efficient.
***
"You're late," said Private Hudson as he worked his way through a bucket of Ham-Flavored Bubble Gum. "Race is... almost over. Game over. For you." and he pulled out a bowl of creamed corn on the cob.
"It's not over 'til the fat lady sings," I told him. "And you know as well as I do that I couldn't be here earlier."
"Why not?" he barked, putting down the gum. If there was one thing Hudson hates more than something separating him from eating things that taste like ham, it's excuses.
"The communists were after me."
He just stood there for a second, then went back to the gum.
"So. The race started, huh?" I remarked as I walked over to the hovercycle I would be using.
"Yuh, in the thing."
The man has the soul of a poet. I snapped my protective goggles over my eyes and reached for my driving gloves.
"So... Hacknor. Is the sky always this mauve?"
"No."
I watched him chew. He scratched the back of his head twice. This was starting to bore me.
"So where exactly does the flight path take me?"
He sighed. Then he angrily threw his bucket of corn on the ground and walked over to the icebox. When he got there, he pulled out a map of the planet, crisscrossed with red lines.
"You start here," he grunted, "and end here. Go."
"Okay, Private. And may the merciful-"
"Game over! Game over! Game over! Game over!"
Game over! Game over! Game over! Game over! With sideburns!
I waited about forty more seconds. He kept repeating that phrase while he paced back and forth. At this point I've gotta assume that he saw the same thing Karl did. Karl...
***
The Coral Reef of Madness wasn't all that great. When I rode over there, I immediately got off the hovercycle and walked up to the concierge. I was all, "Hey, I have a few questions for you. Have you seen any of my fellow gladiators? They're mostly under the age of four billion and all of them weigh more than one ounce." To which the bellhop replied, "They all checked out days ago. You should have been more attentive."
That got my blood boiling. I walked right up to the kid and started telling him off... in French. Well, technically I don't know French, but I assume that if you just start randomly yelling gibberish that eventually you'll hit on some French words. And I had French on the mind, as the Coral Reef of Madness is located right next to the one part of Canada that speaks French. It's not a very good reason for national bilingualism, anyway. I mean, why force an entire nation to learn two languages when one of them is spoken in secret? I mean, that would be like going into a convenience store and saying, "Yeah, I'd like to buy a copy of PC World, but only if you agree not to give me a receipt." You've gotta think with your head.
On my way out of the hotel, I asked if I was likely to run into some of the dangerous monsters that were supposed to live around the reef. The concierge was all, "No, zere are no monsters in zee reef. Zey were all destroyed when zee hotel was built." That allayed a lot of my fears regarding organized crime and congressional oversight, but I was still dismayed over the bill I got stuck with. $400?! I was only there for an hour! I got into a heated argument with the concierge. It turned into a brawl, and long story short, the hotel was condemned.
ElectroBob says, "Such is the way of the concierge."
***
I've gotta say, the whole Fire Island thing was a farce. I mean, the name was completely misleading. They were isthmuses. When I first arrived at the Lagoon of Danger, I was highly prepared to defend myself against all manner of creature large and ginormous. The task was Herculaneum; great beasts roamed the valley, with all kinds of pointy appendages ready to destroy a robot such as myself. But just as I was about to cross that final frontier, I spied with my inner eye a machine half-buried in the sand.
A teleporter! What luck; soon I would be more than caught up to everyone else. I flipped the green switch (and that's key), and all of a sudden my hovercycle was barreling toward the Old Gladiator's Home.
"Hello there, Sony!" came a raspy voice that made Tom Waits sound like Bill Gates.
"Who are you? And how could you mistake me for an electronic goods corporation?" I asked with childlike awe as a misshapen old man strolled out from under the Home's shrubbery.
"Want to hear about the good old days while I eat bran?"
Then it hit me: this old codger was exactly what I'd been warned about in the letter thing describing the race.
"You shan't tell me about the quote 'good old day' unquote!"
"You sound just like my grandkids."
"One of us has to."
"Okay..."
He looked a little sad. Walking over to him, I put my robotic arm around his neck and said something along the lines of "if you want to see your grandkids, I can make it happen." I can't be certain of what I actually said, as the solar radiation was strong that day and the nanites responsible for my memory pathways replaced all my vocabulary with dialog from "That 70's Show."
"How can you take me to my grandkids? They live so far away..."
"Burn!"
Clearly I would be unable to communicate the location of the teleporter in this manner, so I used high-speed telepathy to relay the Cartesian coordinates of the device. He licked his lips in the weird way that old people do.
"Oh, that. Yeah, I know all about that teleporter."
Dumbfoundation! How did he know?!
"I said good day?!"
"I was the science manager of AT&T for forty years; that teleporter was a failed product that we disposed of. It teleported ya through space, yeah, like it was supposed to. But it also sent you a month into the future. Unmarketable."
Sweet senator Bentsen! A month in the future?! But that would mean... the whole race...
"Game... over...?"
That's when the sun expended all its nuclear fuel and became a red giant, engulfing the inner planets. Curse you, Modena, Utah!
"Bzzzz... guuuuhhh... hu huh?" I grunted, unable to comprehend why my friend Karl was jabbing me in the back of the head with his foot.
"Uuuurrrrhhh. Why, Karl?" I asked as I sat up, grabbing him by the neck, "Why do you hate breathing?"
"Urk! Put me... down!" he gasped.
"Why, Karl?! Hasn't breathing been kind to you?!"
"Why are you..." and then I paused to pull him close to my face so I could lick my lips and mess with him more. "Why did you just wake me from my thousand year slumber?"
"Uhhh... Huuuh! Second... second challenge! Must... race!"
A light suddenly went on inside my head. Worried that it might damage the ant colony living there, I put it out and dropped Karl to the floor where he proceeded to gasp and draw political caricatures on the floor with crayons.
"I... Karl! Karl, is it time for the second challenge already?!"
"Yeah. But I'm not going to help you now."
"Come on, Karl! You know I don't... hey, how did you get into my house in the first place?" I looked over to the window near my bed, and noticed for the first time the broken glass. "Did you break into my house?!"
"That depends on how you define 'house' and 'break into.'"
"Karl..."
"Do you want to win or not?! Because, you moron, I've got a training session in a half hour! Do you think I enjoy morphing?!"
"What?"
"I'm a sorcerer, you fool! You can't even begin to understand the things I go through with each day to put food on the table!" He started screaming at me. "When I was your age, we didn't even have challenges. We had rocks. Rocks and dirt. And we were just fine, you think so! Glorp!"
I've seen this kind of incoherent ranting twice before; Karl must have seen something that freaked him out to the point of insanity. There was only one cure.
"Karl, would you like to have your atomic structure destroyed and recombined into a hovercycle?"
He waited a moment, looking down at his feet and muttering. Then he walked right over to me, turned his face up to the ceiling, and started drooling. It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. Then he whipped his head back and made a humming noise.
"Okay, Karl. I'm going to get the atomic deconstructor."
"Too late," he burbled as I pulled The Machine out from behind my alarm clock. "too late..."
"What is it too late for, Karl?" I asked innocently as I prepared to convert the mass of my friend into a hovercycle.
"The race started already... you are toooooo late..."
"No, Karl. Not with my... new... hovercycle."
It's extremely fuel-efficient.
"You're late," said Private Hudson as he worked his way through a bucket of Ham-Flavored Bubble Gum. "Race is... almost over. Game over. For you." and he pulled out a bowl of creamed corn on the cob.
"It's not over 'til the fat lady sings," I told him. "And you know as well as I do that I couldn't be here earlier."
"Why not?" he barked, putting down the gum. If there was one thing Hudson hates more than something separating him from eating things that taste like ham, it's excuses.
"The communists were after me."
He just stood there for a second, then went back to the gum.
"So. The race started, huh?" I remarked as I walked over to the hovercycle I would be using.
"Yuh, in the thing."
The man has the soul of a poet. I snapped my protective goggles over my eyes and reached for my driving gloves.
"So... Hacknor. Is the sky always this mauve?"
"No."
I watched him chew. He scratched the back of his head twice. This was starting to bore me.
"So where exactly does the flight path take me?"
He sighed. Then he angrily threw his bucket of corn on the ground and walked over to the icebox. When he got there, he pulled out a map of the planet, crisscrossed with red lines.
"You start here," he grunted, "and end here. Go."
"Okay, Private. And may the merciful-"
"Game over! Game over! Game over! Game over!"
Game over! Game over! Game over! Game over! With sideburns!
I waited about forty more seconds. He kept repeating that phrase while he paced back and forth. At this point I've gotta assume that he saw the same thing Karl did. Karl...
The Coral Reef of Madness wasn't all that great. When I rode over there, I immediately got off the hovercycle and walked up to the concierge. I was all, "Hey, I have a few questions for you. Have you seen any of my fellow gladiators? They're mostly under the age of four billion and all of them weigh more than one ounce." To which the bellhop replied, "They all checked out days ago. You should have been more attentive."
That got my blood boiling. I walked right up to the kid and started telling him off... in French. Well, technically I don't know French, but I assume that if you just start randomly yelling gibberish that eventually you'll hit on some French words. And I had French on the mind, as the Coral Reef of Madness is located right next to the one part of Canada that speaks French. It's not a very good reason for national bilingualism, anyway. I mean, why force an entire nation to learn two languages when one of them is spoken in secret? I mean, that would be like going into a convenience store and saying, "Yeah, I'd like to buy a copy of PC World, but only if you agree not to give me a receipt." You've gotta think with your head.
On my way out of the hotel, I asked if I was likely to run into some of the dangerous monsters that were supposed to live around the reef. The concierge was all, "No, zere are no monsters in zee reef. Zey were all destroyed when zee hotel was built." That allayed a lot of my fears regarding organized crime and congressional oversight, but I was still dismayed over the bill I got stuck with. $400?! I was only there for an hour! I got into a heated argument with the concierge. It turned into a brawl, and long story short, the hotel was condemned.
ElectroBob says, "Such is the way of the concierge."
I've gotta say, the whole Fire Island thing was a farce. I mean, the name was completely misleading. They were isthmuses. When I first arrived at the Lagoon of Danger, I was highly prepared to defend myself against all manner of creature large and ginormous. The task was Herculaneum; great beasts roamed the valley, with all kinds of pointy appendages ready to destroy a robot such as myself. But just as I was about to cross that final frontier, I spied with my inner eye a machine half-buried in the sand.
A teleporter! What luck; soon I would be more than caught up to everyone else. I flipped the green switch (and that's key), and all of a sudden my hovercycle was barreling toward the Old Gladiator's Home.
"Hello there, Sony!" came a raspy voice that made Tom Waits sound like Bill Gates.
"Who are you? And how could you mistake me for an electronic goods corporation?" I asked with childlike awe as a misshapen old man strolled out from under the Home's shrubbery.
"Want to hear about the good old days while I eat bran?"
Then it hit me: this old codger was exactly what I'd been warned about in the letter thing describing the race.
"You shan't tell me about the quote 'good old day' unquote!"
"You sound just like my grandkids."
"One of us has to."
"Okay..."
He looked a little sad. Walking over to him, I put my robotic arm around his neck and said something along the lines of "if you want to see your grandkids, I can make it happen." I can't be certain of what I actually said, as the solar radiation was strong that day and the nanites responsible for my memory pathways replaced all my vocabulary with dialog from "That 70's Show."
"How can you take me to my grandkids? They live so far away..."
"Burn!"
Clearly I would be unable to communicate the location of the teleporter in this manner, so I used high-speed telepathy to relay the Cartesian coordinates of the device. He licked his lips in the weird way that old people do.
"Oh, that. Yeah, I know all about that teleporter."
Dumbfoundation! How did he know?!
"I said good day?!"
"I was the science manager of AT&T for forty years; that teleporter was a failed product that we disposed of. It teleported ya through space, yeah, like it was supposed to. But it also sent you a month into the future. Unmarketable."
Sweet senator Bentsen! A month in the future?! But that would mean... the whole race...
"Game... over...?"
That's when the sun expended all its nuclear fuel and became a red giant, engulfing the inner planets. Curse you, Modena, Utah!
posted by Gyrobo at 6:00 PM
11 Comments:
HUH?
I don't know if you've quite captured me with that picture. For starters, I'm not blue. I was once, but that was when I spent too much time in the bathtub, but I can't elaborate on that.
Dang you Gyrobot!! The more I hear your tales the more sense you make to me. If this keeps up I will shortly have a complete understanding of you and a total loss of my grip on reality.
And Donna is pretty
Gyrobo, my question is, what kind of drugs do you take before you post and where can I get them?
The nanites are in the mail, Lord High Executioner. But before you use them, consider the cost to the mass of the universe.
Gyrobot are you implying anything by suggesting that you "rode" Karl for a month? Not that there's anything wrong with that!
I thought you Imperials had a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
I have no idea wht's going on
Neither do I, Vegeta!
AOC :O
Xavier LOL
okay I am speechless
All I meant to imply is that I have the ability to turn my friends into furniture. It comes with the territory.
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