by Tammy Hobbs
Space Hippie
By Tammy Hobbs
Copyright 2012 Tammy Hobbs
All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
Not As I Do
ATTENTION READER:
Please. For the love of Fettucini, please don't do any of the exciting but dangerous things that the characters in this book do!
--Don't sleep while driving. Duh!
--Don't play with flamethrowers.
--Don't modify your vehicle to fly using rockets. You'll crash. Probably.
--Don't trespass in an old place you find in the woods or a cave that says "Danger: Do Not Enter."
--Be careful not to fall into machinery that turns living things into goop.
--Don't cause explosions or destroy dams.
--Don't split any planets in half.
--And DON'T try to destroy all life in the Universe!
Thank you for your cooperation.
Hugs and kisses,
The Author
P.S. Also, don't torture puppies, kittens, or bunnies. It's just wrong, man. Wrong.
CHAPTER TWO
Mystery Character
OUTER SPACE
The stars flash by at blinding speed, then begin to slow down.
Deep in space, a tall, grass-green, glowing weed is floating leisurely along.
He lounges face-up with his hands folded behind his head. His root-legs wearing sneakers are crossed at the ankles.
He grins and sweeps his long, green, leafy hair to one side. He adjusts his mirrored sunglasses, then does the backstroke.
He passes lazily by three planets in succession. They begin to look greener. He rolls over on his belly and looks purposefully forward. Stars streak by.
He zips over to Earth and halts for a brief moment, gazing at her lovingly. Grins. She's already green. He does a front flip and takes off.
Stars streak by.
CHAPTER THREE
The Boy, The Man
PETROL'S STORY
Narrator says: No one starts out really bad. Not as a baby.
Age 10 months: Night. Firetrucks and an ambulance stand outside a large burning house. A firefighter hands a screaming baby off to a paramedic. One side of the baby's blue clothes and hat appear badly burnt... Day. A young man in a business suit carries the swaddled baby into a big brick building. The sign in the yard reads "Greenville Foster Home."
Age 5 years: A boy sits arranging blocks into a mansion. The left side of his face is permanently disfigured. A bully pushes him hard into the blocks, knocking them over.
Age 10 years: The boy with the odd face stands in a dark corner of a room sulking, watching five other boys playing together.
Narrator says: It's hard to go bad. Regular pain can't do it.
Age 15: A baby in a stroller drops her doll. The boy kindly picks it up and hands it to her, smiling.
Age 20: The boy is now a man- tall and skinny, but still disfigured. He wears a lab coat. He watches with keen interest as the physician across the table from him cuts open a human corpse.
Age 25: The young man stands in a lab tinkering with machinery.
Narrator says: Take Petrol, for example. He was raised in an orphanage, unusual and unloved. But he still wanted to help people.
Age 26: Same lab. The man puts weeds in a hopper. The machine begins to spit out black liquid. He punches the air and whoops for joy.
Narrator says: Gas was getting expensive. So he invented a machine that made very cheap petroleum. He got very rich this way. People nicknamed him "Petrol." Of course, some people tried to stop him.
Age 27: Petrol looks out of his lab window to see protestors hold up picket signs. He shakes his head.
Age 28: Petrol flirts with Tina, a beautiful woman in a lab coat. She's standing behind a folding table that has a solar power banner on the front.
Narrator says: But that didn't turn him bad, either.
Age 29: At a restaurant, Petrol on his knee proposes to Tina, holding out a ring.
Narrator says: No, very few things are powerful enough to produce true evil.
Age 30: Petrol and Tina work side by side in his lab. She points something out to him on her computer monitor. He smiles and nods.
Age 31: At the doctor's office, pregnant Tina is glowing. Her wedding ring sparkles on her finger. She holds an ultrasound picture of a fetus, and talks to Petrol enthusiastically. He smiles into her eyes, clearly lost in admiration.
Narrator says: Only love could hurt Petrol bad enough to make him evil.
Age 32: Angry picketers surround Petrol and a very pregnant, wobbly Tina as they try to enter the lab. In his face, they begin to push and shout. Petrol, angry, pushes back.
Slow motion: One of the picketers pushes Petrol again. He stumbles back into Tina, who topples backwards. She hits her head on a large rock in the yard. The rock has been spray-painted "Save the World."
Tina is clearly dying. Petrol holds her, tears streaming. She goes limp. The crowd panics and disburses.
Narrator says: Only love made him want to hurt others.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Desperado
LAB
Petrol carries Tina's body and sets her down tenderly on a table.
He works quickly, tears streaming. He desperately hooks her up to wires and adjusts knobs.
A room with a large glass window stands behind him. Puppies, kittens, and bunnies can be seen through the window.
He lifts a lever.
The puppies yelp, the kittens screech. Metal grinds. Machinery buzzes.
A green aura gets sucked from the animals' room, through a machine, across wires, and into Tina.
Inside her uterus, the fetus glows green.
Instead of reviving her, however, all of the life force goes straight into the baby.
Her body shakes. Her belly contracts hard, then she goes limp. Petrol is horrified.
Petrol holds his dead wife and strokes her hair. He ignores the green, crying infant she has just delivered.
TOWER
Dusk. An adorable green toddler in only a dirty diaper sits crying on the floor of a round grey room. Petrol is just exiting the room.
She toddles over and tries to open the door, but the handle won't turn. Defeated, she plops down and begins sobbing harder.
A few seconds later, a songbird flies in through the same window. It hops close by looking sad and holding a berry in its beak. Two bats fly in. One carries a moth; the other, some flowers. They land unnaturally close to her.
Together, the three animals arrange their gifts on the floor beside her.
She stops crying and giggles.
She toddles over to the window and peeks out. Two deer are standing at the base of the tower looking up at her.
TOWER STAIRS
Petrol finishes climbing a flight of stairs. A poodle is already there, sleeping at the door to the tower room, waiting for the child. Petrol listens at a door, hearing the child's muffled giggles coming from the other side.
He booms, "Hey!" and pounds the door with his fist. The toddler's laughter is replaced with terrified sobbing.
Satisfied, he smirks, kicks the dog, and walks away.
The yelping dog stays behind.
LAB
Petrol tinkers with a large machine in his lab. A frantic, frazzled bunny sits in a cage in the corner.
On the table nearby sit schematics for the machine. At the top is the title "Paradise Generator." A photograph of Tina is paper-clipped to it in the upper right corner.
About 100 scared-looking white bunnies hop around in an enclosure at one end of the machine.
He flips a switch. The bunnies begin to turn brown. They look like they're fadin
g. The machine sounds like it's powering up. A life force generation gauge on the side of the machine points to red and then just barely makes it into yellow, but it stops far short of green. The bunnies disappear. The lab lights go out. The machine powers down.
Petrol sits in the dark looking disappointed.
The remaining bunny digs frantically at the floor of its cage.
Petrol makes a note on the schematic: "Needs more power."
LIBRARY
Petrol sits at a library, an enormous, dusty, ancient book in front of him. He reads greedily:
"...legend of a mysterious weed-like creature who was said to be connected to all life in the Universe."
The book shows a hand-drawn illustration of our tall, plant-like, and handsome space friend. The caption below the picture says, "Mystery Character."
Petrol frowns a little. This Mystery Character must be the largest source of life force in the Universe. But...
How could Petrol bring Mystery Character to him?
CHAPTER FIVE
The Monster
OUTSIDE THE LAB
The building looks clean, brown, and boring. The lawn is lush, green, and very tall. The tower's long shadow crosses the lawn.
Muted whimpers come from above. Two deer, a squirrel, and a bunny are assembled at the base of the tower. They stare upward.
The tower forges upward with an ugly peak. Through the tower window near the top: the green toddler in a cage. The toddler's green hair is matted. Her filthy face is streaked. She wipes away an emerald tear with the torn sleeve of an expensive dress.
As Petrol trudges up to the front door, he notices the animals at the bottom of the tower. He opens his mouth, about to give an angry yell; then he stops. An ugly smile mars his already ugly face. He has a plan.
TOWER STAIRS
Below a lab coat, business shoes stomp slowly up stairs.
A metallic rattling follows. Chains with padlocks drag behind.
TOWER
The door bursts open. The girl shrieks.
Petrol stands in the doorway. He throws the heavy chains forward into the room and they clank, collapsing into a heap.
He drags one toward the cage.
OUTSIDE
The sun crosses the sky.
THE LAB
Something that looks like a large telescope protrudes from the top of the tower.
The girl's cage is attached to it with chains.
She crouches on the cage floor. The back of her hair is matted.
Her father stands on the other side of the contraption. He flips a switch.
She screams!
Narrator says: He created a device to magnify her power and focus it into space.
OUTSIDE
The screaming continues, and Petrol's triumphant evil laugh begins to mingle with it.
A beam of green light reaches upward from the tower toward the first star of the evening.
The screaming and laughing gradually get quieter... And eventually disappear. As they do, the sunlight slowly fades and more stars pop out.
The star at the end of the beam of light slowly gets larger and greener. It becomes Mystery Character, who follows the light beam to the tower. Petrol laughs again...
But as Mystery Character comes closer, Petrol's smile falters and disappears, then turns to shock. Mystery Character is so large that he hovers over the entire building and lawn at once.
Big green eyebrows narrow and disappear under reflective shades.
LAB
Petrol recovers from his surprise and pulls a lever with deep concentration. A man-sized machine near him lurches into action. A red beam of light stretches through an opening in the roof. At Mystery Character's heart, the red light beam attempts to pull a bit of green aura toward itself.
As Mystery Character shakes and attempts to pull away, the machine shudders more and more strongly. Mystery Character struggles with increasing intensity; the machine shakes and rumbles violently.
As Mystery Character trembles and begins to emit a green glow, the machine makes a high-pitched whine.
The green glow gets increasingly bright, until--
A burst of green light fills the lab. The percussion of the burst is followed by silence.
Everything in the lab turns different shades of green.
Petrol stumbles back into the hopper of a nearby working machine. He screams noiselessly for a second as he is dragged into the machine.
Sound returns. Machinery rumbles. The machine he fell into cheerfully churns out black Petrol goop.
The goop quivers, then it is still.
Narrator says: Petrol died holding one desire: to bring back his wife.
OUTSIDE
Silence.
A meteor seems to be going the wrong direction, speeding away.
The silhouette of the little girl in the cage shows through the window of the tower. She lies limp and quiet.
Everything goes black.
Narrator says: But now, our hero's story...
CHAPTER SIX
The Girl
SPACE HIPPIE'S STORY
GREENVILLE FOSTER HOME COURTYARD
Nighttime. A woman wearing a business suit walks across the courtyard reluctantly holding a two-year-old girl's hand.
The sweet-looking girl has an odd green tinge to her skin and hair.
As they walk, the grass grows a little. The woman doesn't notice, but looks very uncomfortable.
When they get to the main doors of the foster home, she gratefully lets go of the girl's hand, distancing herself from her as much as possible to hold the door for her and usher her inside. She shoos away a stray dog that has followed them.
Later...
The same dog is standing on the steps waiting. The woman exits the building looking relieved and walks quickly away. The dog does not follow her, but waits resolutely at the door.
GRASSY AREA BY PLAYGROUND
Springtime. Five year old Space Hippie wears mismatched clothes that are far too large for her. Trying to run to a butterfly, she holds her shorts up with one hand to keep them from falling down. The butterfly flies to her and lands on her nose. She laughs happily and sits. A strange blue bubble seems to glow around her for a split second. It disappears.
Behind her, a row of daisies grow and bloom. An oak sapling beside her doubles its height.
All of the other children are playing on the playground except for a boy who is watching her secretly from behind a tree.
She notices him and smiles, but he's wide-eyed and frightened.
He runs away.
PLAYGROUND
Eight year old Space Hippie looks desperately up from the ground. A bully is looming over her. Children are gathered around to watch the fight.
The bully has her by the collar. Her face is smudged and dirty, with old bruises and fresh red marks.
The bully spits on her face. "Green Face! I bet your parents were aliens!"
Space Hippie sobs a little.
He taunts her again, "Space Face!" and looks to the crowd for approval.
She struggles.
The bully and the other children chant, "Space Face! Space Face!"
GREENVILLE FOSTER HOME COURTYARD
Bruised up ten year old Space Hippie steps off a school bus at the courtyard gate.
A child's voice comes from the direction of the bus. "Space Face!"
A half-filled pop can hits Space Hippie's head, spraying her with sticky liquid and making her stagger.
As the bus pulls away, a flower blooms on a nearby tree. Animals begin to gather toward her. She sighs sadly, picks up the can, and empties it onto the ground.
A stray cat and two birds begin to follow her into the courtyard. The grass grows a little as she walks across it.
Another flower nearby opens a little as she opens the front door. As she enters, she deposits the can into the clearly marked, bright green recycle bin outside the door.
FRONT LAWN OF ORPHANAGE
The lawn is crowded with kids and adults sitting on blankets. They are listening to a band play.
Thirteen year old Space Hippie has fresh bruises. She sits down onto a blanket with 5 other kids her age. Two girls near her look at her nervously and get up and move away.
She and all the other girls in the audience are gazing at the handsome young guitarist. His long hair is neatly pulled back into a pony tail. He's dressed like a hippie.
During the song, a bird, bunny, squirrel, and mouse gather very close to Space Hippie in the slowly-growing grass. Two butterflies flit near her.
The other kids on the blanket lean as far away from her as they can. She doesn't notice. She's too busy watching the guitarist.
TEACHER'S LOUNGE
A small potted plant sits on a desk.
Two teachers sit chatting nearby. The pudgy one begins to look distractedly around. She shifts uncomfortably in her seat.
The thin one stops talking. "What?"
The pudgy one raises her eyebrows and cocks her head, like she's listening for something. "It's... Uh... Do you feel that?"
The thin teacher squirms a little, too. "Yah... What is it?"
Just outside the door, 15 year old Space Hippie gathers books at her locker with a guitar swinging on her shoulder. She sports a fresh black eye. Her second-hand clothes are even more conspicuous than before because she has obviously modified them with markers and patches to be more hippie-like.
She balances her books, slams the locker, and strolls away.
The pudgy one says, "Never mind. It stopped." She sounds relieved.
Both teachers relax and sip their coffee. They don't notice that the potted plant has grown a little.
The view through the window shows a sunny day...
