by JournalStone
IV.
Gagged with silk handkerchiefs and bound in Prosperian chains, Mack and Stretch were awakened, stood up, and presented to the commander. When they had their gags removed, they angrily cursed their captors and all of their ancestors before Hamlet finally slapped them to get them to stop. They reeled from the blows, so weakened and humiliated were they from their recent ordeals.
“So,” Hamlet scoffed, once they were alone together in the room, “you are the ones attempting to halt Prospero’s conquest of your Earth, are you?”
“Yeah,” said Mack, “only we don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Then understand this, children.” The irony of his having to look up to their taller bodies to say this was entirely lost on him. “We of the planet Prospero are in a difficult social and economic situation and we intend to use your Earth as a means of….replenishing the treasury, as it were.”
“And you think we’re gonna help you?...‘cause we’re sorcerers and we can fight off your men and we got strength and brains and all that?” argued Mack dismissively. “Well, forget it dumbass! Stretch and I don’t work for no one except ourselves. Right Stretch?”
The taller girl grunted a non-verbal assent to her friend’s claims.
“Oh, we do not require your assistance!” Hamlet said icily. “We merely want to destroy both of you, since you are the principal obstacles towards gaining our goal!”
“WHAT?” Mack and Stretch both shouted.
“Yes ladies!” Hamlet continued. “It would seem that your liquidation is now required. So you had best be saying your prayers—or whatever it is you Earthlings do before you meet your maker—since it will shortly be that time.”
“The hell it will!” shouted Stretch, objecting violently, as were most of her objections. “I’m gonna bust these chains and free Mack and me. And then you’ve had it!”
“She’s not lying!” Mack warned, as Stretch began straining every muscle of her body to achieve that superhuman feat. “I’ve seen her do stuff no other girl can ever do! Why, in only one minute, she can in two minutes…five minutes…ten…half an hour, for sure!” Then, in sotto voce to her partner, she pleaded: “Come on Stretch! Put it all in there! Show him what you can do!”
“I…can’t Mack!” Stretch whined as her strength began to wane and the chains grew tighter. “This stuff is…unbreakable! Nobody can do it!”
“What?” Mack said out loud, angrily. Then to Hamlet: “How dare you! You humiliated her! Nobody does that to us and gets away with it, understand? Nobody!”
“She is far from the last strong person who has been humiliated by the chains of Prospero,” Hamlet intoned. “You will find there are many more who tried resisting us by those means and found them difficult, if not impossible to resist.”
He picked up a wand and a sugar bowl-shaped dish and uttered a short, inaudible chant as he tapped the wand against it.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mack demanded.
“You will find out soon enough!” Hamlet countered.
Indeed they did. Jets of blue flame covered Mack and Stretch’s bodies and shook them around the room like rag dolls. Then, when they had seemingly survived this most violent and unladylike of treatments, both experienced severe pains in their abdomens which threw them firmly to the ground.
“What did you do to us?” Stretch demanded.
“I merely rendered you incapable of ever casting a spell again,” Hamlet pronounced. “That is particularly true for Ms. Mendelson, seeing as it is she who is the more advanced in the sorcery department. And, now you are both powerless and robbed of your individual strengths. You pose no further threat to me and will now be terminated at my discretion, within ninety minutes of my command.”
“You MONSTER!” Mack shouted. She attempted chanting to produce a demon, to free both of them but only succeeded in producing a fart, which reddened her cheeks and forced her to apologize. Like Stretch, she had been robbed of her greatest gift.
His patience with them now exhausted, Hamlet called for the guard and had the offending Earthlings removed from his presence.
V.
At blaster point, the two Earth girls, now helpless and nearly on the verge of tears, were sent off to the brig at the bottom of the ship. The chains were removed from their bodies but they were warned, viciously, in words that stung them as hard as metal fresh from the blacksmith’s fire, that in the unlikely event they were to escape confinement, they would be placed in the chains again. Including on their necks; which as the consequence would cause them to die almost immediately. Having now said their piece, the guards left and harshly slammed the heavy wooden door behind them as a further warning. Mack and Stretch were completely helpless, weak and cowed in what was surely intended to be their home—at least until the ship returned to Prospero. And then who knew what would become of them?
Mack sat down on the reinforced stone floor while Stretch, who was on the verge of tears since being robbed of her strength, ran to a far corner of the room and began sobbing softly.
“Well,” Mack said, as if it was only a matter of time before they were picked up to go home by their parents, “what now?”
Stretch, infuriated by what she thought was her friend’s flippant response to the desperate situation they were both in, immediately stopped crying, her sadness replaced by a sudden, heated fury. Whirling around, she faced Mack with a burning intensity the latter had never seen upon her face—and which served the purpose of rendering Mack silent for once in her life.
“What now?” Stretch shouted as she advanced viciously towards her friend, completely altering the meaning of what had just been said. “WHAT NOW? Is that all you can say? WHAT NOW?”
“You keep a civil tongue in your mouth, Cunningham!” Mack sprung to her feet immediately and threatened her friend with her fists. “We may be pals and you may be stronger than me, but….”
“SHUT UP!”
The words exited from Stretch’s lips as if they were a jet of flame from the largest and most fearsome dragon ever known to exist on planet Earth. As if she had been burned by this jet of flame, Mack fell to the ground, whimpering. She’d heard Stretch use this tone only—only—when either her honor, intelligence, or power, or Mack’s—or indeed, Mack’s body and life—was threatened by some capricious assailant at their middle school. At those times, Stretch had threatened the offender with a vicious beating that would leave him or her on the verge of death. Though Stretch was not of a nature that allowed her to actually act on many of these threats, would-be assailants were cowed enough by her size and implied strength alone that they immediately backed off.
But now it was Mack who was the butt of Stretch’s purple-faced rage. Would she now be destroyed at her friend’s hands?
“You listen to me, McKenna Mendelson, and you listen good!” Stretch growled viciously. “I am tired of being played for a chump! Do you hear me? TIRED! You and everybody else in our backwater hometown, and now everyone in the goddamned universe by the looks of it, but especially by YOU! You put me down constantly for being a stupid idiot but my brain’s the only weak thing about me—or it was, until now! It was your goddamned fault we got caught in the first place!
“If you had only cast one of your precious spells when that bunch of no-brains that caught us had first come on the scene, then we’d be back home and enjoying ourselves! But NO! You had to go and show me up! You should have found some weak spot in those chains so I could break ‘em but you wanted me to make a fool of myself in front of those aliens. Just like I supposedly made you look like a fool in front of my cool athlete friends at UND! That was the only reason we got caught and you know it! Well, this is the end for me with you, get it? I will find some dark spot in this rusted metal crap-hole, lock you inside it and sit on it until you die for all the crap you put me through today! YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, MACK?”
Mack did understand. Fearlessly and as menacingly as she could appear under the circumstances—and given her short
stature—she walked forward and began using the same low, almost masculine tone her friend had just used, in order to countermand her.
“All right Melissa! You’ve had your chance to insult my integrity and character—now I’m gonna insult yours!”
Stretch hated being addressed by her given name (except by her beloved father of course) and this did the trick, as Mack had expected, of refueling her angry fire. Stretch bared her lips back in a snarl, giving her the appearance of an enraged or spooked horse but otherwise did nothing for the time being as Mack spoke back to her in the same manner she had just used.
“You’ve had enough of my crap, have you?” Mack blazed. “The pot can’t call the kettle black, Cunningham! You’ve annoyed me as much as I apparently have you! THANKS FOR TELLING ME HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT ME, BY THE WAY! Do you know how much trouble I’ve gotten in because of you? How they tried to drum you out of the Triple W for being such an incompetent witch that I had to threaten to resign in order to keep you in? Know how many guys won’t ask me out because they’re afraid Stretch the Giant Killer will smash them into the Earth with her thumbs if they do? No, you don’t!
“You don’t know much of anything do you? Except where it happens to be stuff that involves bouncing and throwing and hitting things! You think, now we got female leagues and tourneys for every sport imaginable you can get away with being the dumb jock huh? Well, you can’t! Don’t forget who the brains in this relationship is, Stretch old girl.
“And especially don’t forget I helped you pass tests that you needed to pass in order to get to the next grade! Plus making sure that you could do those basic spells to pass the Triple W examination. You have speed and brawn aplenty Stretch—but you’re not smart enough to realize you need your grey matter to help you out in this world. But I am smart enough, so if you listen to me we’ll get out of this! If you don’t want to, then you’re dooming yourself to changing the light bulbs of every Prosperian chandelier for the rest of your life. Is that what you want Stretch? Seriously? Or do you still want to stay a loser without my help?”
“You bitch!” Stretch shouted. “You goddamned little bitch!”
“Well, we’re even then,” retorted Mack, “’cause you’re a goddamn big bitch!”
“I’ll kill you!” Stretch screamed.
“Not if I kill you first!” shouted Mack.
They bellowed and screeched like the wild animals they were descended from, launching themselves at one another.
VI.
The fight raged for several minutes and, by the end, the sparsely furnished room was a complete shambles. The two friends knew each other well, and so, fought in a manner designed to take advantage of each other’s weaknesses. Knowing she was not in any way equal to her friend in size and strength, Mack concentrated her efforts on her gymnastic skills. She rolled and tumbled away from Stretch, as the latter foamed at the mouth in frustration. Her efforts to injure Mack with her fists became futile.
They stalemated at opposite ends of a wooden table and chair set in the center of the room, leering threateningly at one another other as they gripped either end of it. Mack acted fast and upended the table so that it fell legs first on top of Stretch. She then added the chairs as a form of counterbalance to weaken Stretch further, while she searched for an exit.
This search did not last long, as Stretch promptly regained her formidable strength and reduced the pile of wood on top of her to useless kindling. Mack, witnessing the explosion of the wood, tried to get away, only to have Stretch abruptly corner her and stomp a giant foot on top of her own. Using this time to her advantage, Stretch painfully ripped a lock of hair out of Mack’s head and waved it under her nose. Mack, sensitive to anything in her nasal cavity, sneezed and fell back against the wall.
“Stretch, please!” Mack cried, knowing full well she was doomed, as the bigger girl prepared to throw one of her powerful arms in her face, while continuing to grind into Mack’s foot with her heel. “I’m sorry! Everything just came out of me at once after you blew up at me….”
“It’s too late for that Mack!” Stretch snapped. “Now I’m gonna do to you what I used to threaten to do to everyone who tried to hurt you when I wasn’t looking. And believe me; you’re not going to like it!”
Stretch threw Mack into the wall again with her leg and prepared to advance on her, the heavyweight champion mercilessly confronting a cornered opponent who was smaller and weaker. But when Stretch’s super-powered fist finally connected, it wasn’t with Mack’s face….
VII.
“Holy cow, Stretch! Look at that!”
Mack had managed to duck Stretch’s blow just in time, so when the taller girl’s fist hit something solid, it was, in fact, the wall that she drove through. Though made of seemingly impenetrable steel (as their captors had boasted), the shock of connecting with Stretch’s muscles caused the wall to come tumbling down—and expose a previously unknown avenue of escape for the girls! They gaped in astonishment as soon as that realization came to them.
“Geez!” Stretch exclaimed as she held her fist, showing signs of injury from the impact, but not an awful lot. “That hurt!”
“It hurt the wall more than it did you!” Mack pointed out. “The thing fell like it was made out of paper! Now we can hopefully find some way to get out of here, and back home.”
“No,” said Stretch, backing away as Mack tried to grasp her other hand.
“What gives Stretch?” Mack asked concerned.
“We can’t be friends anymore now Mack,” said Stretch. “I mean, I nearly killed you! Can you still trust me after that?”
“Are you kidding?” Mack answered, embracing her. “I need your help now more than ever, pal!”
“But after what I said to you…and what you said to me….”
“That only happened because there were quite a few things we clammed up about regarding each other, because we didn’t want to hurt each other’s feelings. We need to do that more Stretch. You know—let each other know there’s some stuff we gotta work on as people. I know we spend a lot of time together but we still can’t possibly know everything about each other, any more than we can our alien buddies. You gotta understand that I can take criticism, just like I expect you can too. Just like your games, you know—they throw you out if you won’t play by the rules. Remember that?”
“Yeah,” Stretch agreed. “I need to be more open with you I guess,” she held up a hand like a Girl Scout reciting a pledge. “Look, Mack—if you can forgive me, I can forgive you and then I promise I won’t ever try to kill you again….”
“You don’t need to say all of that, Stretch,” Mack said simply. “I know. And you do, too.”
They hugged and then, walking proudly together, went off to explore what was in that hole created by Stretch’s feat of strength.
VIII.
The hole, it turned out, was actually a crude, forced entranceway into the ship’s ventilation system—which was not unlike those of the buildings of Earth, but, as the Prosperians were always facetiously putting it, theirs were better. From their understanding of how the things worked (Mack’s more than Stretch’s obviously) they determined that, if they crawled through the ventilation system, they would likely find some way to escape the confines of the ship. If the ship had taken off, it was simply a matter of stealing a small, portable vessel to return to Earth. If not, they could just escape by running away, if, by the smallest miracle, they ended up being undetected when they quit the scene.
Mack served as the advance trooper for the march through the ventilation shaft, being that she was the smaller and more mobile of the two of them in the confined spaces. Stretch, for once, was the one at a disadvantage, for her massive frame could barely be contained by the system’s narrow causeways. Consequently, she either got stuck for long periods of time or got her head stuck in holes it had been responsible for creating. In both cases it was only through an assertion of her power, and the occasional assist from Mack, that Stretch was able to brea
k this confinement and follow Mack through the limited space of the ventilation tunnels. As she had earlier, Stretch endured these indignities stoically, certain she and Mack would find a way out of their difficult predicament.
Finally, Mack came to a stop, rather abruptly, causing Stretch to create yet another hole in the pipe with her head while trying to prevent herself from running into Mack.
“Ssh!” Mack said to her friend, when Stretch got her head out of the next hole she had inadvertently created.
“What is it Mack?” Stretch whispered.
“There’s a grate in front of me!” Mack said. “If we both get on it together it won’t support us and we’ll fall down onto whatever’s below us.”
“What’s down there?” asked Stretch.
Mack went forward slightly and examined the contents of the room below. She backed up into the tunnel and reported.
“Looks like it’s the laundry,” she said. “All I could hear and see were the machines running.” Then abruptly, she got an idea. “I think we’re in luck Stretch.”
“How so?” Stretch asked.
“Well, we need to get out of here and get our magic mojo back, don’t we?”
“Uh huh.”
“So, we’re beneath the laundry room aren’t we?”
“Yeah?”
“And what do they keep in the laundry room?”
“Washing machines?”
“Besides that!”
“Dryers?”
“Well, obviously! But this is a military vessel Stretch! The laundry room is where they clean the uniforms!”
“Okay. But what has that got to with us?”
Mack felt a burst of rage coming forward, as she sometimes failed to see how Stretch—or anyone else for that matter—could be as stupid as she was. But this feeling quickly passed and Mack continued.
“We can drop down through the gap in this pipe and snatch a couple of the uniforms,” Mack explained. “Then we fall in with the others. Sooner or later we’ll get a chance to present ourselves in Hamlet’s chambers. When that time comes, we steal that little vessel he’s using to keep our magical powers in and we get ‘em back. Then we threaten to turn him into a toad or something unless he releases us and then we get to go home.”
