They had been walking for hours.
“We’ve been walking for days,” Grebok said, wholly inaccurate.
Though, the inaccuracy might be forgiven; in the few hours that the Son of Drogmar and the Avatar of Good had been walking, they’d seen more than their eyes could handle. This was a mad world, that much was clear. Minotaurs. People humping each other in pleather masks. Other people yelling at each other. A small dog watching a TV screen, and on the TV screen was a bigger dog watching a TV screen all his own, and on that TV screen was a struggling cat in a pillowcase drifting up a mall escalator.
Silvery webs lay draped over everything. Little pin-prick spiders danced up the silken threads, and from their fat thoraxes dripped gooey star-ooze, like that which brought the heroes here to begin with.
Little made sense. Rules did not seem to exist. It was dizzying.
They paused atop a great mounded hill, a heaping cushion of swaying grass. Chuckles and Grebok sat beneath a great, gnarled tree whose branches extended upwards into the sky, a sky where clouds passed before kinky pipes and hinky tubes, where microbursts of light called to mind flashes of lightning or the firing of synapses.
Out beyond the hill, the lunacy continued to play. People appeared suddenly, beamed into existence by greasy threads of oily black, and they disappeared just as quickly, sucked up into the sky by the same tar-slick tendrils.
A goblin fought a washing machine. A camouflaged attack helicopter was selling t-shirts with glib sayings and in-jokes (”Don’t Forget To Wash Your Donkey!”). Dozens of individuals stood on rickety soapboxes, loudly opining about politics and cats and religion and sitcoms and serialized fiction and superheroes and cats.
A little bluebird with a comical, too-big-head, alighted upon Chuckles’ shoulder.
“I’m going to the mall,” the bird tweeted. “I need to buy tampons.”
“Jesus Christmas!” Chuckles barked, and punched the bird. It exploded in a rain of blue feathers and beak-colored pixels, laughing and chirping as it went. “That scared the shit out of me. This planet is driving me to drink. It’s crazier than a shithouse owl.”
“An owl in the shithouse would be crazy,” Grebok said, nodding, thinking too long about it. All that hooting. The flapping. The stink. He put it out of his mind. “I don’t think this is a planet.”
“Looks like a planet. Somewhere in the ass-end of the Storyverse, probably. Just floating there. Like a big middle finger. Covered in poop and red ants. I really want to go down there and unleash the blade, you know? Swing for the fences. Chop off the tops of some heads. Run through that goblin down there—“
As soon as he said it, the goblin at the base of the hill vacuumed up in the sky, siphoned by another gooey, star-glittered tubule. It left the washing machine alone. The washing machine looked forlorn.
“I don’t know,” Grebok said. He wasn’t the smarter of the two, but he was a bit worldlier. He’d been around this carousel a couple-few times. And this was all new to him. “I’ve never seen nothin’ like it. I’ve seen some shit, and this shit isn’t that shit which I’ve seen so shittily.”
He was worldly, just not articulate about it. But Chuckles grokked his lingo.
“You might be right, old friend.”
Grebok pointed up. “That sky. That don’t make sense. It’s just like how we came to this place. Tubes. All those goddamn tubes. The Storyverse doesn’t have a sky made of tubes. Am I right?”
“Right again.”
“And look at these people. Or that washing machine. They’re here for five seconds, maybe five minutes. They yell and do things, but then, poof, zip, foom, they’re gone.”
“I like your sound effects.”
Grebok waved it off. “I practice in the shower. Anyway. Everybody who’s here, it’s like they’re temporary. And the place keeps changing. You see that mountain over there, with the city atop it, poised like the cherry on a sundae?”
“I do.”
“Wasn’t there two minutes ago.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. I notice things.”
Chuckles scrunched up his nose. “Well, no, you don’t. Not usually.”
“Okay, no, not usually. I’m not really a, a ‘details’ guy, no, but once in a while I see something by accident and I remember it for more than five minutes.”
“That’s pretty good for you.”
“Thanks.”
They sat in silence for a little while longer. As if to mock them, the city atop the mountain in the distance suddenly warped, blown out like a gum bubble, before becoming a zeppelin that floated up into the clouds, disappearing in a flash of light.
The bluebird appeared again, this time hunkering down in Grebok’s dreadlocks.
“OK,” the bird tweeted. “I went to the mall! I can haz tampons? Pillow Cat is watching your vagina bleed! LOL! Girls are fun! See you in math class!”
“Fuckin’ bird!” he yelled, swatting it off his shoulder. “Make sense, bird! And stop sharing intimate details with me!”
The bird laughed, and dissipated into a pinwheel of 1s and 0s.
“Speaking of girls, or sort-of-almost girls,” Chuckles began. “You think there’s any chance that R.T. will come zipping in here and pick our butts up?”
Grebok shrugged. “Shit, I hope so.”
They hadn’t seen her in days. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual. First, she was a woman. Women were mysterious. They did all kinds of shit and didn’t tell anybody about it. A woman was a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a slice of ham.
(“Mmm, ham,” Chuckles said.)
(“Ham, indeed,” Grebok agreed.)
Second, R.T. wasn’t just a woman—she was a biomechanical construct created by gnomes, a human-spaceship hybrid, a creature able to shift between a star-faring speedboat and a sexy chick with a steely glint to her eye with naught but a thought. So, any time she wanted, she could just zip across the wide expanse of the Storyverse to go pick up shoes from Podopolis-9, or grab some baklava from Pan’s Bakery out on Mythopoesy.
“You bang her, yet?” Chuckles asked.
Grebok blinked. “Bang? What? Who? R.T.?”
“You think I’m talking about the bluebird or that washing machine? Yeah. R.T.”
“Uhh. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“So you did.”
“Really, shut up about it.”
“When you have sex with her, I guess it really is banging, because she maybe has a metal uterus. Clang, clang, clang went the trolley.”
Grebok rubbed his eyes. “I’m uncomfortable, now. Great. I feel queasy. Don’t think I won’t punch you to make myself feel better.”
“I know. I’m just slapping your nuts. Sorry. It’s just—it’s R.T., is all.”
“Who is Artie?” came a guttural, mechanical voice from behind them.
Chuckles wheeled, whipping out his sword, which promptly flung out of his hand because his hands were dewy from the wet grass. The sword coptered down the hill somewhere.
Grebok didn’t even bother turning. He just massaged his temples. “Who is it?”
“It’s a robot,” Chuckles said. And it was. A short, stumpy robot with rusty elbows and a dented paint-scraper of a head.
“Who is Artie?” the robot—Denthead, if you really care—asked again.
“It’s R and T,” Grebok mumbled. “Two letters. Her name’s not Artie. That sounds like she’s a fat guy eating a pizza. And I didn’t bang any fat guy eating a pizza. Though I might fake it, just to get the pizza.”
“You two,” the robot said. “You’re—“ He pulled out some files, narrowed his ocular sphincters to scrutinize them. “—Lord Chucklehead and Grobak the Key-Keeper.”
The Avatar rolled his eyes. “Close enough for punching.”
“What?” the robot asked.
Chuckles punched the robot.
Except, he didn’t. His hand whiffed through Denthead’s dented head as if it wasn’t there at all.
He tried again. Whiff.
“Okay, what?” Chuckles asked. “That’s annoying.”
“I’m just an avatar,” Denthead said.
“No,” Chuckles clarified. “I’m just the Avatar. Capital ‘A,’ rustnuts.”
Grebok finally stood. “You. Robot. Can you tell us how to get out of here? Wherever ‘here’ is?”
“I can,” Denthead said, but then didn’t.
“Go on,” Grebok said, turning his index finger in a have-at-it motion.
“It’s not my job.”
“So… what is your job?”
Denthead explained nothing—instead, a spectral keyboard appeared in front of him. His piston fingers pumped against the ghostly keys with an echoing clatter.
“I’m sorry,” the robot said, sounding genuine. “They paid me to do this.”
“To do what?” Chuckles asked. He was too busy asking to see the ground beneath him turning to a soupy morass of fat pixels and swirls of flashing 1s and 0s and green, glowing IF-THEN and GOTO statements. His feet began to sink. “Hey. Hey!”
Grebok suffered a similar problem. He tried pulling his feet out, but it was like grabby mud.
“Good luck,” Denthead muttered with a shrug of his squeaky shoulders.
The two heroes suddenly were sucked downward. Shwoomp.
The grassy ground of the knoll re-hardened.
“Enjoy Friendmonger-dot-com.”
Denthead winced, and tottered off.
