“It’s a fishing rod,” explained Pete in a monotone.
“Okay genius,” began Dink, “if this is a fishing rod, then you won’t mind if I do this?!”
That said he starting thwacking Pete over the head with his rod, as though he was nothing more then a stubborn boiled egg that needed more tea-spoon bashing application in order to achieve its golden goodness within.
“Ow, ow, ow,” yelped Pete as the rod hit his head.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Petunia interrupted, “lethal sword wielding psychotic girlfriend right here you know.”
“Sorry treacle,” Dink apologised unconsciously.
“Look I don’t care if you two want to kill each other, in fact, I rather hope you do,” began Petunia, “what does bother me however is this mess of a Co-leen, who persists in hanging around my home and sticking his chin into my business, when it’s none of his concern.”
“I think she means you buddy,” said Pete.
“What do you mean your home?!” Dink replied, “we’re both named on the habitation deed!”
“Oh is that so,” she said sharply, retrieving from a desk drawer the deed in question.
She held it up for Dink to read, and he could quite clearly make out the names “Petunia Framer & Kramer Framer”.
“Who is Kramer Framer?” Dink asked in earnest.
At this, his boss, (the massive, bed-ridden jelly) started wobbling as he imagined the most wobbly thing in the universe would if it was placed in the wobble tunnel at Wobbleland.
“Oh I see,” he said cottoning on, “and…”
“We’re married,” she interrupted him, “four rotations now, we had our honeymoon when you were away with work.”
“I see,” said Dink slowly, a million neurons all firing at once in his already overworked brain.
“We think you should leave.”
“Yeah come on buddy,” added Pete, “let’s leave these two lovebirds to it.”
As Pete finished his sentence, having added possibly the most redundant wink of all time as he pronounced the word “lovebirds”, something seemed to crack in Dinkle Mormid. All he could suddenly think of, was how satisfying Pete’s face would look as a front door rug, outside a particularly unhealth and safety conscientious glass shard factory. Having decided almost immediately upon his next course of action, he had one last thing to ask of his ex.
“Mind if I borrow this?” he asked pointing at her sword.
“Actually yes, it’s my sword now,” she replied.
“Then I’ll kill him with my bare hand!”
And so Dink set off after Pete, who had already left the room after feeling like a gooseberry. Petunia and Kramer were left alone at last, and she turned to him and said:
“Hungry? Let’s get ice cream!”
Kramer Framer said nothing, but a slight rippling across his viscous brow, seemed to wholeheartedly concur.
40.
The Orderlies were the so-called police force for the planet Spank, though if Pete were to make a comparison, they were more like the SS of the Nazi regime during the war years. Efficient to a point of ruthlessness, after reversing the term “innocent until proven guilty”, they then went a step further with the following amendment “guilty despite proven innocent”. It is therefore a terrific stroke of bad luck that the cyber-secretary had pushed the alarm bell, as they also possessed an unnerving knack of arriving at the scene, just in time to arrest literally anyone and everyone.
“He’s gone mad!” stated Slip, “you can’t use a rod like that!”
Dink was currently chasing the Renegade trio around the gardens of his living unit, attempting to hook them with his new fishing hand.
“Don’t make this any worse Slip,” warned Crinkle.
“We’ve gotta get outta here,” said Pete, “hang on, looks like the cavalry’s here!”
And that said, so the Orderlies arrived.
“This could be bad,” remarked Crinkle to herself.
The Orderly transportable pulled up right in front of them, the bumper nudging Slip noticeably in his belly. Then two Orderlies got out, both were dressed from top to toe in luminescent yellow uniforms, with matching hats (much like the beefeater hats worn by the Queen’s guard on earth), it seemed that yellow was the old black on Spank, well that is how Pete imagined it anyway. This alone would be no reason at all for the quite palpable fear that the gang suddenly felt, this instead was due to the devices that hung at random from their belts. Slip and Crinkle initially spotted death rays, mutation grenades, and a pulse saw with vein extraction targeting. Pete likened the pair to a couple of evil dentists, and shuddered when he thought about the devices and their function.
“So what have we here then?” asked the meaner looking Orderly.
“Oh nothing,” Slip replied innocently, “just a simple misunderstanding.”
“Silence!” barked the other one, slapping Pete squarely round the face.
“Ow!” Pete whimpered, not daring to protest.
“Those lunatics gave me this!” put in Dink, waving his broom-rod-fishing-handle hand at them, “and they just lost me my job!”
“Silence!” the violent Orderly shouted again, punching Pete casually in the stomach, “we will have order!”
Pete bit his tongue and made no pained sound, instead he backed away, so that he now had Slip positioned between the angry Orderly and himself.
“Your employment status is of no concern to us,” the mean looking one went on, “we are here because we were called, and now that we are here, arrests must be made.”
“ARREST THEM!” shouted Dink, who was clearly a bit unhinged now, “TAKE THEM DOWN!”
“Silence!” shouted back the Orderly, diving past Slip as he spoke, and kicking Pete cleanly in the shin.
Pete took the blow as best he could, cursing Slip for not being a formidable enough obstacle for the Orderly who had clearly taken a dislike to him. Next he could see that Crinkle was about to protest, and took the opportunity to hide in the Orderly transportable, locking all the doors behind him.
“Hang on a minute,” she protested, “you can’t arrest us, we haven’t broken any laws!”
“What about my career, what about my hand?!” Dink wailed.
“Silence!” bellowed the violent orderly, drawing his pistol and shooting out the windows of their transportable, before reaching in and flicking Pete neatly in the eye, “we are the law!”
“My colleague is absolutely right,” agreed the mean one, “we decide whether you have broken the law or not, and it is my considered opinion that…”
He paused to send a text on his communicator.
“Well?” ushered Crinkle.
“Sorry what?” asked the Orderly looking up.
“Have we broken any laws or not?”
“Oh yes of course,” he remembered, pressing send, “absolutely, countless ones.”
“Oh really,” drawled Slip unconvinced, “like what?”
“Like questioning an Orderly,” he replied deadpan, “utterly illegal that.”
“Oh come on,” said Slip, “you can’t be serious?!”
“Doubting the solemnity of an Orderly, that’s two in two clicks.”
“This is a joke, come on Pete back me up here buddy.”
But Pete had long since decided to leg it, and was already half way up the road, running scared from the trigger-happy Orderly.
“I’ll get him,” growled the Orderly, retrieving from his belt, a self-guiding atom dispersal missile.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said the other one, staying his hand, “you’re all under arrest, all of you, in the transportable.”
The violence-loving Orderly looked crestfallen as he watched Pete make his escape some distance down the road now.
“Right step on it,” he continued once they were all in the vehicle, “we’ll run him over!”
This returned the smile to the Orderly’s face, as he set the acceleration to max, and
allowed himself a moment to imagine what pretty patterns Pete might make all over the road ahead.
Clearly the Renegade gang were in a spot of bother, and as the brutal Orderlies bundled Pete into the vehicle, having just narrowly missed running him over, (to the angry one’s profound dismay), they wondered if there would ever be another time, when the most of their worries involved having to pop to the shops for more milk, or deciding whether it was okay to wear the same shirt for three consecutive rotations. It looked like they would be going to jail for a long time, and jail on Spank was no picnic at all, not even a processed cheese sandwich and some stale crisps kind.
41.
Fendel the Tiny swam about the castle grounds determined to make sense of the events that had taken place the other night. It had all seemed so very real when he had mesmerised the King and looked back into his forgotten past. However, the King had certainly never been a disc-jockey and even more worrying was why he remembered himself as that weird creature, with four appendages that certainly were not fins, standing aloft on the ground in the air, not the sea, with the King-tank nowhere to be seen. It occurred to him that he had unlocked some colossal mystery and that he stood on the brink of revealing some almighty truth that would change everything. He decided he would have it out with his larger brother and went back into the castle to look for him.
He found him in the kitchen tucking into a toasted maggot sandwich.
“Brother,” he addressed Fendel the normal-sized, “what happened the other night when I was reading the mind of the King?”
“Best not to think on it,” replied his brother, taking a bite from his sandwich as he spoke.
“But how can you say that?!” he responded, obviously annoyed at his flippant candour, “you and I both know that something’s going on here, none of this feels right!”
“I’ll tell you what does feel right though,” replied Fendel finishing his lunch, “a nice little nap, right about now, night.”
“Stop ignoring the question will you!” he shouted, increasing annoyed by his brother’s flightiness, “sometimes I think we aren’t related at all!”
“Because we’re not.”
“What?!” he replied quite taken aback at this sudden revelation.
“You and I are not related.”
“But we look exactly the same! Okay you may be a little bigger, but we’re virtually identical, how can even say such I thing?!”
“Oh you and I are identical, in every respect, except size.”
“So what, we’re brothers, big deal.”
“For the last time, we’re not brothers, we’re exactly the same person, but from different dimensions,” said Fendel, totally seriously.
Fendel the Tiny’s mind started to swim much like he had been doing himself in the castle grounds earlier. What was his brother going on about? Different dimensions, exactly the same person, all of this was make-believe, surely?
“Different dimensions! What are you on about?! Have you been smoking kelp again?”
“Look little brother,” began Fendel in earnest, “tell me what you remember about our childhoods, about growing up together.”
“Well,” he replied turning his eyes to his past, “it was like any normal childhood I guess.”
“Oh yeah,” said Fendel unconvinced, “what was normal about it?”
“There was that time we went camping on the grand barrier reef, and you ate too many plankton and was sick for the entire week.”
“Never happened.” replied Fendel gruffly.
“And what about the time we performed for King Slip and Queen Crinkle, and then I looked into the King’s mind?”
“That was just yesterday little brother.”
“Okay, okay, I’d admit that there’s something definitely a bit weird about that, but just because I can’t remember anything prior to yesterday, does not mean that we are in fact the same fish, but from different dimensions!”
“If what I’m thinking is correct, then we’re not even fish!” declared Fendel dramatically.
“But this is crazy, what proof have you got?”
“It is my considered opinion,” Fendel began, “that everything here is a distortion of reality, so much so, that we should not even begin to consider this place, or indeed anything that happens in this place, as real or as having actually happened.”
“But surely that’s impossible, our actions have got to have meaning, or we could do anything we wanted, nothing would have consequence anymore!” he replied dramatically.
“Exactly!” Said Fendel, producing a harpoon gun from beneath his cloak.
“What are you doing brother?!”
“Something I should have a done a long time ago,” snarled Fendel, raising the weapon so that it was now level with his brother’s gaze.
“You’re gonna kill me?!” he shrieked.
“I’m gonna set you free little brother,” replied Fendel, pulling the trigger.
The harpoon shot from the gun and lodged itself only moments later in his diminutive counterpart’s brain. Fendel the Tiny instantly died, and at that exact point in time, popped quite completely out of existence, as though the whole murderous affair may have never even occurred.
“One down, three to go,” he said quite calmly to himself, as though he had just removed a carpet stain, rather than just shot his brother in the face with a harpoon.
“Right, where was I?” he asked no-one in particular, “oh yes, about here as I recall,” he answered himself, before closing his eyes and falling sound asleep.
42.
Pete awoke to find that he was on fire.
“Arghhh!” he screamed, clearly being on fire was not something he was enjoying.
“Hang on,” shouted Slip above his cries, “this’ll work.”
Slip had grabbed a fortuitously positioned fire extinguisher, and aiming the nozzle at Pete’s burning body, then pulled hard on the trigger.
“Arghhhhh!” Pete screamed even louder, as he was suddenly showered with an assortment of deadly snakes, which then also set on fire and started biting him with flaming jaws.
“Oh, the extinguisher has some small print here,” replied Slip apologetically, “caution, may contain snakes.”
“Help me!” he yelled, oblivious to Slip’s discovery.
At that instant, Crinkle appeared out of nowhere, wielding a large bucket of water, and without stopping to say hi, subsequently poured the bucket over Pete, putting him out with a large hiss of smoke.
“Snakes, biting,” said Pete, who was still obviously in an amount of pain.
“Oh stop being such a big girl,” she replied, kicking the last few smoking snakes away from his torso.
“Thanks,” huffed Pete, “Crinks.”
“Where did you get the water babes?” asked Slip.
“Oh, I was drowning in it when I awoke,” she replied nonchalantly.
“Yeah this place sucks,” declared Slip, “where are we anyway?”
At that moment, a previously unnoticed door flew dramatically open, and from it stepped Dinkle Mormid.
“Where are we you ask,” he began, “of all the idiotic non-sequiturs to ask, you are the reason that we are here, and for the life of you, you have no idea where we are! You disgust me! You are nothing more than a bumbling oaf, who careens through his life, crashing into other people, causing them suffering and pain, while you go on your merry way, oblivious to your trail of wanton destruction!”
“Hey buddy,” replied Slip, taking literally nothing to heart.
“So where are we then Dink?” asked Pete, who had recovered his wits enough to wonder where they all were.
“We’re in prison,” he answered, “mind prison to be exact.”
“Mind prison?” queried Crinkle.
“That’s right,” he replied, “well in fact we’re not really here at all, instead we’re in one of Spanks holding facilities, where we are all strapped up and plugged into the Sentencer.”
“The Sentencer?” querie
d Slip.
“The Sentencer is how the guilty are punished. The idea behind it was to re-educate the prisoner in the most cost-effective way. What this ultimately boiled down to was, jacking every felon into a mighty super computer, where they then served out their sentence being virtually tortured, by anything nasty that the programmers devised.”
“That explains the snakes,” remarked Slip.
“And my almost drowning,” put in Crinkle.
“Doesn’t explain the penguin though,” said Pete pointing at a cute little penguin that had suddenly appeared in the doorway from which Dink had just stepped.
“Fishy?” asked the penguin in a squeaky, childlike voice.
“Everyone step away from the penguin!” ordered Dink in a terrified voice.
“But he’s only a little fellow,” Slip replied, taking a step toward the apparently harmless penguin.
“Fishy?” it repeated, with big, innocent eyes.
“I’m warning you,” stressed Dink, “that penguin wants nothing less than to harvest our souls for his dark penguin purpose!”
“No fishy?” squeaked the penguin, with sadness breaking in its voice.
“I’m sorry lil’ guy,” said Slip, bending down to tap the bird reassuringly on the head, “we haven’t got any fish for you.”
The penguin looked confused for a moment, then distraught, then something seemed to occur to it all of a sudden.
“FISHY!” yelled the penguin, and suddenly lunging quite ferociously between Slip legs, then bit him.
Renegade T.M. Page 18
