“I’ve got an idea.”
I rolled my eyes. With Stan, that was never a good start to a conversation.
“Let’s hear it then.”
“Alright. Do you remember when the cube broke down in the 1800s, and we sent ourselves the replacement part from the future?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I’ve adapted that program to run automatically. The cube will go back a random amount of time into the past by itself, grab a random object, and bring it back.”
“Like the classic 1974 Doctor Who serial, ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’, you mean?”
Stan hates it when science fiction beats him to a good idea.
“Well, yeah. Except you know how you’re always telling me I need to be more spontaneous? I’ve got a plan for some pranks we could pull.”
“Stan, planning your pranks isn’t exactly being spontaneous. Just juvenile.”
“Nonono, see, the time period is random! So we have no idea what we’re going to get!”
“Stan, if I end up with a bitter brontosaur on my breakfast table-”
“Don’t be stupid. We’ll do it in the street.”
“-or a savage stegosaur on my street-”
“Or downtown.”
“-or a distraught diplodocus downtown-”
“Or, I don’t know. Anywhere.”
“-or an angry ankylosaur in my anywhere, which I have to somehow deal with...”
“Stop it.”
“...I will be one pissed pterodactyl.”
“And that doesn’t even alliterate properly!”
Stan plays his pranks. I play mine.
Fictitious Casual Fridays
Showing posts with label humour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humour. Show all posts
10.11.11
9.10.11
Rite of Passage
or; Maximillian J. Caliver, Reluctant Thief.
I slammed the vault door behind me, and stomped angrily though the passageway out of the bank. Charges, check. Fingerprints done. Security footage wiped. I casually flicked the switch on a remote detonator as I strode out of the building’s revolving door, and asked myself not for the first time how the hell I got myself into this line of work.
Oh yeah, that’s right. I didn’t.
--
Fourteen years earlier.
“Happy Birthday, Max!”
The whole family was there, even Nanna. I was excited. I mean, hey. Who wouldn’t be? Balloons, streamers, silly hats... the whole deal.
I hurriedly blew out the candles on my towering chocolate monstrosity of a cake, and grabbed for my first present.
“This one’s an extra special one, Max. It belonged to your great-grandfather”
So not a Transformer then. I kept tearing, a little less enthusiastically. Jeez, did this thing have a lot of paper. At the bottom of a small nest of the stuff rested a wooden case, about four inches long. I opened it carefully, and stared. Sixteen bright metal lockpicks stared back. I looked up quizzically at the assembled family members. They seemed to have got a lot more out of this than I had.
“Cool. Thanks”. I reached for the next present, only to feel my Nanna’s talon-like fingers grasp my wrist.
“‘Cool’? You get handed a thousand years of heritage and you say ‘cool’? Why, in my day-”
“Calm down, Esme. Nobody’s explained any of that to him yet”
“Noone- Noone’s explained? You are a shame to this family! You-”
Needless to say it all went downhill from there.
We stood around the kitchen bench ten minutes later, having sat Nanna on the sofa with a cup of tea, into which I’m sure she slipped any number of stronger concoctions of your own. My dad got down on his knees, and looked at me.
“Max, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I knew this one.
“An accountant.”
Dad gave a wry smile. Last week it was a real-estate agent, or something equally asinine.
“What if there was something more exciting, which you could do with all of us?”
I looked confused. “What, like, start a cor-por-ay-shun?” That was my new favourite word. I’d learned it yesterday, though where exactly escapes me.
Dad looked at mum. This clearly wasn’t going to plan.
“Um, sure. A family corporation.”
I looked even more confused.
“Look, Maxie. You know how sometimes people expect you to do what your parents did, and what their parents did?”
“Yeah?”
He took a deep breath. “Well, the deCaliver family has one of those. We’re theives. We always have been. The lockpicks on the tenth birthday, the locked chest on the twelfth, the passageway on the fifteenth and the mask on the twentieth.” He recited it like a chant. “Come on, Max, you’ve seen your cousins do it all. Don’t you want to join in?”
Even as a ten year old, I picked up that I wasn’t really being offered a choice here, and that if I persisted with my current weekly dream of accountancy, there would be Consequences.
“Awright. Can we have cake already?”
--
That’s how I ended up here, I thought to myself as detonation charges blew the sides out of a skyscraper behind me. A ten-year-old who wanted cake, and a twelve-year-old being heckled that even his Nanna could pick locks faster than that, and a fifteen year old not knowing whether to rebel against his family or the rest of the world, and a twenty year old with no other life skills, sunk too deep in to do anything about it now.
I dusted explosive residue off my hands and threw the takings into the getaway car, driven my my cousin Stefan, the best getaway driver in the business, who would take them to my Uncle Nate, who could flog anything to anyone.
I got my cake. I kept my Nanna happy. I was upholding tradition. And I was making a killing doing it. And if that meant postponing my dreams of cost-analysis accountancy, well, so be it.
I slammed the vault door behind me, and stomped angrily though the passageway out of the bank. Charges, check. Fingerprints done. Security footage wiped. I casually flicked the switch on a remote detonator as I strode out of the building’s revolving door, and asked myself not for the first time how the hell I got myself into this line of work.
Oh yeah, that’s right. I didn’t.
--
Fourteen years earlier.
“Happy Birthday, Max!”
The whole family was there, even Nanna. I was excited. I mean, hey. Who wouldn’t be? Balloons, streamers, silly hats... the whole deal.
I hurriedly blew out the candles on my towering chocolate monstrosity of a cake, and grabbed for my first present.
“This one’s an extra special one, Max. It belonged to your great-grandfather”
So not a Transformer then. I kept tearing, a little less enthusiastically. Jeez, did this thing have a lot of paper. At the bottom of a small nest of the stuff rested a wooden case, about four inches long. I opened it carefully, and stared. Sixteen bright metal lockpicks stared back. I looked up quizzically at the assembled family members. They seemed to have got a lot more out of this than I had.
“Cool. Thanks”. I reached for the next present, only to feel my Nanna’s talon-like fingers grasp my wrist.
“‘Cool’? You get handed a thousand years of heritage and you say ‘cool’? Why, in my day-”
“Calm down, Esme. Nobody’s explained any of that to him yet”
“Noone- Noone’s explained? You are a shame to this family! You-”
Needless to say it all went downhill from there.
We stood around the kitchen bench ten minutes later, having sat Nanna on the sofa with a cup of tea, into which I’m sure she slipped any number of stronger concoctions of your own. My dad got down on his knees, and looked at me.
“Max, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I knew this one.
“An accountant.”
Dad gave a wry smile. Last week it was a real-estate agent, or something equally asinine.
“What if there was something more exciting, which you could do with all of us?”
I looked confused. “What, like, start a cor-por-ay-shun?” That was my new favourite word. I’d learned it yesterday, though where exactly escapes me.
Dad looked at mum. This clearly wasn’t going to plan.
“Um, sure. A family corporation.”
I looked even more confused.
“Look, Maxie. You know how sometimes people expect you to do what your parents did, and what their parents did?”
“Yeah?”
He took a deep breath. “Well, the deCaliver family has one of those. We’re theives. We always have been. The lockpicks on the tenth birthday, the locked chest on the twelfth, the passageway on the fifteenth and the mask on the twentieth.” He recited it like a chant. “Come on, Max, you’ve seen your cousins do it all. Don’t you want to join in?”
Even as a ten year old, I picked up that I wasn’t really being offered a choice here, and that if I persisted with my current weekly dream of accountancy, there would be Consequences.
“Awright. Can we have cake already?”
--
That’s how I ended up here, I thought to myself as detonation charges blew the sides out of a skyscraper behind me. A ten-year-old who wanted cake, and a twelve-year-old being heckled that even his Nanna could pick locks faster than that, and a fifteen year old not knowing whether to rebel against his family or the rest of the world, and a twenty year old with no other life skills, sunk too deep in to do anything about it now.
I dusted explosive residue off my hands and threw the takings into the getaway car, driven my my cousin Stefan, the best getaway driver in the business, who would take them to my Uncle Nate, who could flog anything to anyone.
I got my cake. I kept my Nanna happy. I was upholding tradition. And I was making a killing doing it. And if that meant postponing my dreams of cost-analysis accountancy, well, so be it.
2.9.11
The Pentagon
September 11, 1941. Midnight.
A titanic crash echoed through the virgin Pennsylvanian forest. Zombie Abraham Lincoln straightened his hat and holstered his revolver with a steely glint in his eye.
“Ooh, boy. She’s angry alright. We’re going to need something a mite bigger this time around.”
He motioned to the man next to him.
“Ronald... bring me Tabitha.”
Ronald Reagan gave a curt nod and sprinted into the darkness. Lincoln stood in the clearing, stock still, and silent. He was good at standing still. It was one of many advantages of being undead. The unholy symbol draped around his neck pulsed with an unearthly light, drawing the creature closer, like bait in a trap. Exactly like bait in a trap, since it was, in fact, the bait in a trap.
Any second now...
The trees in front of him exploded into splinters, and from a hundred feet in the air there was a tremendous roar. Lincoln stood his ground, drawing both this silver revolvers and emptying twelve alchemical iron rounds into the beast’s towering form. The creature roared, less with pain than with annoyance. He placed his hand on the thousand-year-old katana on his back. If Reagan didn’t hurry, he was going to have to get medieval-Japan on its reptillian behind, and that would just ruin his suit.
“Abraham!” came the shout from across the clearing. In the split second it took Lincoln to glance his way, the beast struck, swiping at him with a claw the size of a stagecoach, sending him flying into the air. As he came down, he drew the katana and, performing a perfect backflip, landed on the beast’s scaly head
“NOW, REAGAN!”, he roared, as he brought the blade down ineffectually against the enormous skull. On the ground, Ronald Reagan let out an animal yell, which was only marginally less terrifying than the whine of Tabitha, Lincoln’s vorpal minigun, spinning up to four hundred thousand RPM. In a blaze of eldrich energy, Reagan opened fire.
The effect was almost instantaneous. One of the creature’s seven limbs was liquified to a gooey paste of bone and sinew. With a screech of genuine pain this time, the creature thrashed its thousand ton mass from left to right, leaving Lincoln clinging to the handle of the katana, whose steel blade embedded in the creature’s skull was the only thing preventing him from being thrown to his re-demise. “AGAIN! HAVE AT HER!”, he bellowed.
Reagan’s second burst of sustained fire struck true. Half a million shards of depleted Neptunium bored a perfectly cylindrical hole in the creature’s chest. With a quiet groan, it keeled ponderously over and landed on the ground with a ground-cracking crash. Lincoln stepped calmly off the beast’s head, wiping the viscera from his katana. “That won’t stop it for long. We need the containment field ready, as soon as possible. Get Edison out here on double. Tell him we have her down.”
“No need, Mr. President.”, said a voice from the shadows. Thomas Edison lurched out of the forest and, with a curt nod to Abraham Lincoln, offered one cloth-wrapped mummified hand to Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan. The late Thomas Alva Edison, at your service.” He turned to the shadows again. “Bring out the generators!”
A rustling and squeaking came from the surrounding forest. As the three looked on, thousands of bats, each tied to a tiny harness, dragged out five massive engines, each bolted to a pair of copper coils which, in turn, was atttached to a parabolic dish. The creature on the ground began to stir feebly.
“No time to lose. Everyone out of the pentacle!”. Edison handed Lincoln and Reagan each a pair of goggles, and then pulled down hard on a lever on the side of the closest generator. In unison, five bolts of lightning lanced across the clearing, trapping the waking creature at the centre of a perfect five-pointed star.
“Reagan. The incantations.”, said Edison.
“You have no idea the lengths I went to to get this. I had to rob the library of congress. Me, the President- well, the president one day at any rate-”
“Quiet! Just do it!” Lincoln turned one eye to the horizon. “Dawn is coming.”
Ronald Reagan pulled a surprisingly small but exceptionally old grimoire from inside his trenchcoat. He uttered fourteen guttural syllables, and snapped the book shut as they watched the creature flicker into invisibility.
As the sun rose, the three headed out of the forest. Lincoln turned to the other two. “Right. Our work here is done.” Checking his pocket watch, he turned and nodded gravely at each of the men in turn. “I shall see you at the End of the World.” As Lincoln returned to his grave, Edison to his flying pyramid space zeppelin, and Reagan to his stolen time machine, each one of them saluted the secret service men, who were just beginning to arrive. They were here as part of a far larger plan. A far more difficult, and complex, and dangerous plan. A plan to contain the beast, not just temporarily, but permanently, within a specially constructed pentagonal building, whose shape could channel away and safely earth the arcane energies which surrounded the beast and whose construction would be supervised under the watchful eye of the Department of Supernatural Defense of the United States of America. A building which would come to be known as...
The Pentagon.
A titanic crash echoed through the virgin Pennsylvanian forest. Zombie Abraham Lincoln straightened his hat and holstered his revolver with a steely glint in his eye.
“Ooh, boy. She’s angry alright. We’re going to need something a mite bigger this time around.”
He motioned to the man next to him.
“Ronald... bring me Tabitha.”
Ronald Reagan gave a curt nod and sprinted into the darkness. Lincoln stood in the clearing, stock still, and silent. He was good at standing still. It was one of many advantages of being undead. The unholy symbol draped around his neck pulsed with an unearthly light, drawing the creature closer, like bait in a trap. Exactly like bait in a trap, since it was, in fact, the bait in a trap.
Any second now...
The trees in front of him exploded into splinters, and from a hundred feet in the air there was a tremendous roar. Lincoln stood his ground, drawing both this silver revolvers and emptying twelve alchemical iron rounds into the beast’s towering form. The creature roared, less with pain than with annoyance. He placed his hand on the thousand-year-old katana on his back. If Reagan didn’t hurry, he was going to have to get medieval-Japan on its reptillian behind, and that would just ruin his suit.
“Abraham!” came the shout from across the clearing. In the split second it took Lincoln to glance his way, the beast struck, swiping at him with a claw the size of a stagecoach, sending him flying into the air. As he came down, he drew the katana and, performing a perfect backflip, landed on the beast’s scaly head
“NOW, REAGAN!”, he roared, as he brought the blade down ineffectually against the enormous skull. On the ground, Ronald Reagan let out an animal yell, which was only marginally less terrifying than the whine of Tabitha, Lincoln’s vorpal minigun, spinning up to four hundred thousand RPM. In a blaze of eldrich energy, Reagan opened fire.
The effect was almost instantaneous. One of the creature’s seven limbs was liquified to a gooey paste of bone and sinew. With a screech of genuine pain this time, the creature thrashed its thousand ton mass from left to right, leaving Lincoln clinging to the handle of the katana, whose steel blade embedded in the creature’s skull was the only thing preventing him from being thrown to his re-demise. “AGAIN! HAVE AT HER!”, he bellowed.
Reagan’s second burst of sustained fire struck true. Half a million shards of depleted Neptunium bored a perfectly cylindrical hole in the creature’s chest. With a quiet groan, it keeled ponderously over and landed on the ground with a ground-cracking crash. Lincoln stepped calmly off the beast’s head, wiping the viscera from his katana. “That won’t stop it for long. We need the containment field ready, as soon as possible. Get Edison out here on double. Tell him we have her down.”
“No need, Mr. President.”, said a voice from the shadows. Thomas Edison lurched out of the forest and, with a curt nod to Abraham Lincoln, offered one cloth-wrapped mummified hand to Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan. The late Thomas Alva Edison, at your service.” He turned to the shadows again. “Bring out the generators!”
A rustling and squeaking came from the surrounding forest. As the three looked on, thousands of bats, each tied to a tiny harness, dragged out five massive engines, each bolted to a pair of copper coils which, in turn, was atttached to a parabolic dish. The creature on the ground began to stir feebly.
“No time to lose. Everyone out of the pentacle!”. Edison handed Lincoln and Reagan each a pair of goggles, and then pulled down hard on a lever on the side of the closest generator. In unison, five bolts of lightning lanced across the clearing, trapping the waking creature at the centre of a perfect five-pointed star.
“Reagan. The incantations.”, said Edison.
“You have no idea the lengths I went to to get this. I had to rob the library of congress. Me, the President- well, the president one day at any rate-”
“Quiet! Just do it!” Lincoln turned one eye to the horizon. “Dawn is coming.”
Ronald Reagan pulled a surprisingly small but exceptionally old grimoire from inside his trenchcoat. He uttered fourteen guttural syllables, and snapped the book shut as they watched the creature flicker into invisibility.
As the sun rose, the three headed out of the forest. Lincoln turned to the other two. “Right. Our work here is done.” Checking his pocket watch, he turned and nodded gravely at each of the men in turn. “I shall see you at the End of the World.” As Lincoln returned to his grave, Edison to his flying pyramid space zeppelin, and Reagan to his stolen time machine, each one of them saluted the secret service men, who were just beginning to arrive. They were here as part of a far larger plan. A far more difficult, and complex, and dangerous plan. A plan to contain the beast, not just temporarily, but permanently, within a specially constructed pentagonal building, whose shape could channel away and safely earth the arcane energies which surrounded the beast and whose construction would be supervised under the watchful eye of the Department of Supernatural Defense of the United States of America. A building which would come to be known as...
The Pentagon.
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