Drillbot nodded. The bear said this same thing to nearly every member of the army at one point or another. Thus far, Drillbot had been unable to prevent many of them from entering the undead puppetry of the pink army. But that would never stop him from trying.
And with that, the blue bear waved his arms. Cosmic white bubbles sprang forth from the ether and whisked the Army of Life from this reality.
And this earth remained at peace, at least for a while.
However, if Ginny Rex and Artkylosaur knew what was to become of their home, they would likely never have agreed to accompany the Blue One. For though the Pink One’s utter destruction is an awful predicament for a reality, utter life is just as bad.
Over the years and generations that followed, old age crept upon no one, sickness and infirmity overtook no one, and as the population swelled in size to overtake the amount of food production that this earth was capable of producing, the peoples merely ate the planet barren. But they neither died nor thinned out.
Thus, these peoples lived the same lives for eternity, told the same jokes for eternity, and existed the same existence for eternity. Eventually, they longed for the Pink One to return. Though permanent destruction was equally final, at least it was not quite as tedious.
Chapter 8
A NEW, PINK PLAN
Regular-Ginny tumbled ever downward in the expanse between realities. Her connection to the Pink One had been momentarily severed when the B.I.T.’s weapons had successfully hit the Pink One.
When it happened, her heart had begun to cease beating as the pink stopped flowing through her veins. She had thrilled at the feeling, believing that she—and the Multiverse—was finally free of the beast and that she could finally know peace. However, before the life fled from her reanimated corpse, the familiar itch in her brain returned, and with that came renewed flowing of the pink in her veins, and with that came the all-too-familiar constant sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.
“Me coming back soon,” whispered the Pink One’s falsetto voice inside Ginny’s brain, a sound like cotton candy sprinkled generously with cyanide. “But B.I.T. think they winned and Me be dead. Ginny must make Me powerful once more, but no cause widespread destruction that alert B.I.T. to Me aliveness.”
Ginny shrugged. “Fine,” she whispered back. “But how do you want me to do that? We are stuck out here without any way to escape.”
The sound of the bear’s giggling filled the inside of Ginny’s brain. It felt as though someone had strapped her brain to a bottle rocket and set it off to bounce all around her skull. Ginny slapped herself on the forehead, hoping to make it stop. The action achieved nothing more than giving her a dull headache, and she hated the cursed pink bear more than ever. If the Pink One could detect her hatred, the bear ignored the emotion and instead said, “Ginny no stuck. Ginny merely need use Me pink gift to swim to next reality and there make Me stronger.”
Before Ginny had the chance to express confusion in how she was supposed to accomplish such a task, a Claymation scene sprang to life in her mind’s eye. The pink bear seemed overly fond of these animated scenes when Ginny had a hard time comprehending her messages. Ginny hated them.
Ginny watched a clay version of herself inside a clay pink blob. The blob launched tentacles out of itself to grab the remains of the Pink Marauders tumbling around her in the clay void between realities. Thousands of tiny flagellae then formed from the blob and wiggled back and forth. Ginny watched the clay version of herself stop tumbling aimlessly and instead accelerate in a single direction. The scene then zoomed over to a clay version of Arthur the Putrid, who was dangling by his right foot from one of the tentacles. His hands were glowing green, and he was firing beams of light in different directions.
The viewpoint zoomed out so that Ginny could understand: the horrible man would act as the rudder of their horrific pink life raft, while she would act as the oars. A few seconds later, after the image of the pink blob gained sufficient speed, it turned and crashed into a floating oval formed from blue light upon which green lightning danced. More clay appeared above this shape to form the words Earth 789,012.
The Claymation scene abruptly disappeared from Ginny’s view, and she was glad. She glanced around her. Her tumble through the infinite abyss was accompanied by nearly four hundred others—approximately a quarter of whom were members of the blue army who had been caught in the pink bear’s cosmic black bubbles. They had been summarily executed when stranded with the Pink Marauders in this space between realities. Ginny took a few minutes to reanimate them as puppets.
She locked eyes with Arthur the Putrid, who was floating near the rear of the tumbling army. When he nodded at her, she knew that the Pink One had entered his mind to inform him of the plan. She rolled her eye at him and got to work.
*
Regular-Ginny tried to remember what life was like before she saw everything through a bright pink lens, but she could not recall, and she hated that fact. She had absorbed most of her great pink blob back into her skin so that she would be less conspicuous on this new reality. She now wore a much smaller membrane of pinkness that she had formed into a knightly suit of pastel armor. She had hoped the side effect of this change would have resulted in a less extreme pink tint to the world, since she now stared through less volume of the cosmic goop to see the world about her, but to her dismay, this was not the case. She shrugged. She knew enough about the Multiverse at this point that she had not actually allowed her hopes to grow too high.
She sat silently in the dirt above the entrance to a cave, raising an enormous rock above her head, a rock bigger and heavier than any two men on this author’s home reality could raise. She waited for any native creatures to emerge. She glanced up and glared at Arthur the Putrid, who was similarly squatted above the entrance to a different cave with a similarly large rock held in his glowing green hands, his single eye trained dully on the ground below him.
As she glanced around her at the rolling hills that stretched across the barren, rocky terrain, members of the Pink Marauders hunched above caves entrances in a pattern that stretched well past the horizon. They were all crouched at the ready with their own rocks, the sizes of which varied from puppet to puppet. If she had not been so full of pink, hateful scorn, she may have recognized a kind of beauty to the pattern and the patience. The army had remained in these same positions for nearly three weeks, neither eating nor drinking, but rather dropping rocks down on hapless creatures that emerged from the dirt at seemingly random intervals.
Movement in her peripheral caught her attention. She watched a three-foot long and two-foot tall snakelike creature with four short flippers for legs writhe forth from a crack in the ground below her, just inside the entrance to the cave. It grunted with effort as its tiny flippers swiped at loose dirt. Its head looked nearly human, and its tiny forked tongue stuck out of the side of its mouth as it strained to emerge from the crack. It eventually succeeded in freeing itself from the crack. It then pulled itself out of the cave entrance and into the dim morning light.
Ginny could not help but smile in wonder, because she knew that she was witnessing a momentous occasion on this reality. These creatures were evolving and emerging from their current habitat—the nutrient-rich soil of this earth—to live upon the planet’s surface. The Pink One had assured Ginny that in millions of years, these creatures would evolve to become sentient and would dominate the surface of this planet as they had the interior. But the cute little face on the creature below her seemed somehow wise, like it already housed some sort of consciousness. She wondered whether the Pink One might be wrong in this instance, if maybe these creatures were already sentient.
But then the pink inside her squeezed her heart, pumping hatred through her veins to overwhelm her. She dropped her rock down upon the creature and smirked as blood and gore spattered in wide arcs to congeal in thin puddles on the dusty ground.
Ginny sighed. Over the course of the last few weeks, she had been forced to
endure more of the tedious, pink-induced Claymation visions so that the Pink One might answer questions that she did not ask. Through these visions, Ginny had learned that the Pink One was unconcerned about drawing the B.I.T.’s attention to the genocide being committed on the creatures of this earth—a concern that would have been present on most other realities, since one of the duties of the B.I.T. is to investigate genocidal anomalies to ensure they are not caused by Multiversal hijinks. This lack of concern was because evolving is always dangerous work on any reality, and the murder of a few hundred thousand of these snakelike creatures so that the Pink One might feed off their deaths would be no different than the expected death-rate these creatures would experience in the natural process of moving onto the surface of this earth, anyway. Thus, there would be no spike in unnatural genocide to draw the agency here.
The Pink One floated into view above Ginny’s shoulder. The teddy bear had reformed to the point that it was a head, a torso, and two tiny legs. With each passing second, the bear pulled in more of its body from the vast corners of the Multiverse, and with each passing murder on this planet, it grew stronger.
“Me am no happy,” muttered the bear, frowning.
Ginny shrugged. She gestured to the surrounding army of puppets. “So? You think any of us are?”
The bear ignored her. Another of the native creatures writhed into view from the cave below Arthur the Putrid, but before he could smash it with his rock, the bear swooped down and snatched the creature in her mouth. The bear bit down, tearing the reptile in two. Half of it fell to the ground, blood arcing from it to soak into the dark soil, while the bear swallowed the other half.
The bear turned back to face Ginny. Blood had spattered the fur of its face and torso, and gristle lay wedged between its blue teeth. “Nothing carnage shall not make better.”
Ginny smirked. She again gestured toward the surrounding remnants of the Pink One’s army, all the while wondering inanely if she knew any other gestures, since she seemed to repeat the same ones over and over. “This is some carnage you got going here.”
“Me know Ginny sarcastic. But Me also see in Ginny brain, and Me know Ginny prefers this to big time, big show murdering.”
Ginny stared down at her feet. The hole in her torso itched. She remained silent.
The bear floated over and patted her on the shoulder. Onlookers may have thought this looked a bit odd—since the bear currently had no arms, she patted Ginny with her feet—but the only onlookers were mindless puppets, a one-eyed sorcerer-yes-man, and random reptiles that were not long for this world. “Me know Ginny no natural killer. But that mean Ginny’s sacrifice even more bigger, and that make Pink even stronger. Me appreciate.”
“Great,” Ginny muttered. “I’m receiving platitudes from cosmic Hitler. That makes it all better.” Normally the pink inside her flowed hatred through her veins, but Ginny did not need the pink to feel hateful and angry just now. She despised herself and despised the Pink One. She shrugged the bear’s foot from her shoulder.
“Me no cosmic Hitler,” replied the bear in her singsong voice. “Cosmic Hitler lived on Earth 45,545, and then again on Earth 1,000,000 after he died on his home reality and was reincarnated there as dwarf. But tiny version of you murdered this reincarnated version long, long, long ago and ate his brains.”
Ginny sighed and felt her stomach go queasy, as it always did when she remembered the tiny version of herself who had kidnapped her from her home so long ago.
Arthur the Putrid cleared his throat. Both Regular-Ginny and the Pink One looked over at him. The jeweled “Arthur” on his eye patch shone in the morning light. He set his rock aside and knelt on one knee, head bowed. “I appreciate you, oh Pink One. If Ginny no longer wishes to be thy Right Hand of Destruction, I will happily take her place, for I am your willing and loyal servant.”
The pink bear giggled. “No, no, no. Putrid Man no Right Hand to me. He cunning and disloyal, and he kill because he enjoys. That no sacrifice, and sacrifice is food to make Me stronger. Nope, nope. Ginny my choice. She no want power. Putrid Man want all the power. This useful, but not inspire trust.”
Arthur the Putrid shrugged, a thin smile upon his lips. However, his eye never left Ginny, and its wrathful gaze would have terrified her if she were the same young fool that she had been years and years ago when she first started this adventure. Instead, it simply filled her with contempt and hatred. Arthur the Putrid said, “That’s probably smart. You’re so smart, Oh Pink One. Hopefully someday you realize that I am your one true servant, and you trust me as you do Ms. Longfellow.”
The pink bear did not reply. Instead, it giggled in delight when its right arm zapped into existence with an audible pop. “Oh, good, good. We almost ready!”
Ginny frowned. “Ready for what? The B.I.T. has our number with whatever the hell those new weapons were that they were shooting at us. We can’t simply shrug off their attacks anymore and invade at will. They wiped out most of us, and will surely wipe out the rest, too, if we aren’t careful.”
Arthur the Putrid tsked at her. “No faith, you poor, lost soul,” he said.
Ginny launched a pink tentacle from her back, and with blinding speed it reached across to him, wrapped around his mouth, and held him aloft in the air. He struggled and moaned, but Ginny could no longer comprehend the words. He fired some green energy bolts from his hands, but they merely bounced off her pink armor and caromed into the distance. “Quiet,” she demanded. “The cosmically-powerful adults are talking, and you were not invited to the conversation.”
The Pink One giggled once more, and Ginny sighed, for the umpteenth time wishing to fall deaf. Instead, she heard the Pink One say, “Me already thought that through. Me and you and Putrid Man, we three go recruit Arts and Ginnys from across Multiverse, and soon make army hundred times as big as last. No other mayhem in these realities, just grab and murder and puppetize and go.”
“OK, but how does that help? These new ones will just get wiped out by the B.I.T. the next time they locate us.”
The Pink One replied, “Yes, yes, yes, many or all will when next Me face off against B.I.T.”
The pink bear stopped speaking. She was obviously fishing for Ginny to ask why such a scenario would be any different from the last B.I.T. encounter or to balk at the idea that the entire army they were to recruit would be naught but short-lived cannon fodder. Instead, Ginny rebelled in one of the few ways still available to her: she remained silent.
However, from the end of the tentacle, Arthur the Putrid refused to miss a moment to grovel before the Pink One. Though his words were incomprehensible through the muffling of the tentacle, Ginny knew he was asking what would be different this time.
The pink bear’s giggles grew maniacal. Her left arm popped into existence, and the bear then rose into the air above Ginny and Arthur the Putrid, a fierce pink god with murder in her eyes. “When we three grow army to big, big, big size, we shall invade B.I.T. home reality and destroy it. Me wipe them from Multiverse, and then nothing can stop Me from destroying realities unto infinity. Teeheehee!”
Ginny sighed as dread filled the pit of her stomach. She dropped Arthur the Putrid nonchalantly to the ground. She knew that she was having a bad day—as every day had been since her she left her home with Tiny-Ginny a decade ago—but the Pink One had found a way to make it worse by reminding her of the infinence of her commitment to the primal force of death and destruction. Before Ginny could express any sort of frustration, the Pink One launched three black bubbles from her paws, one of which engulfed each of the trio. Ginny cursed under her breath, and as she had so many times, resigned herself to her fate.
Chapter 9
A B.I.T. OF A TRANSITION
Agent 27142 had spent the last four days sending bodily remains of newly dead agents across the Multiverse and back to the home realities to which they belonged. For the agents for whom no remains had been located, he coordinated the effort to send a letter and a folded B.I.T. flag back to
their loved ones.
This duty was the most tedious aspect of Agent 27142’s command, and he grew happy when it was interrupted by a transmission from Field Officer 111199, who told him that a battalion of B.I.T. marines had finally found and collected the specimens that Agent 27142 sought.
Agent 27142 stood from his workstation and ordered Duty Officer 765789 to ready a transport shuttle to the planet’s surface. Agent 27142 left command of the ship and his post-battle notification duties to the elven-faced-left-half-goateed Agent 90909. Agent 27142 nodded in acceptance as Corporate Ethics Officer 32090 logged a demerit for his abandoning the duties of an admiral—a demerit that concerned Agent 27142 little, for he knew that the High Commander cared little for demerits so long as you produced results.
Soon, the Duty Officer returned to tell Agent 27142 that the shuttle had been prepped. Agent 27142 ordered his Second, Agent 29333, to accompany him on this outing and to bring the prisoner, Art. Soon after that, Agent 27142 ascended the ramp onto the transport shuttle with his two companions. As they crossed through the hold on their way to the bridge of the shuttle, they passed twelve platoons of B.I.T. marines already strapped into harnesses and ready to descend to the earth below.
Agent 27142 climbed a ladder at the far end of the hold that led up to the bridge of the shuttle. His eagle leapt from his shoulder and landed on a metal pole that hung from the ceiling. Agent 29333’s eagle followed his to the perch. The birds rubbed the sides of their heads together and cooed. Agent 27142 grunted a jealous grunt. Then he sat behind the controls and mentally ran through the preflight safety checklist. Satisfied that the ship was ready to go, he sat impatiently tapping his palm against the side of his chair as he waited for the prisoner to climb up the ladder. Because his hands were encased in plaster, the buffoon had to hook his elbows around each rung to haul himself up while Agent 29333 pushed him up from below. When he finally made it onto the bridge, he lay on the cold, metal floor, exhausted and out of breath. Agent 29333 did not wait for the prisoner to catch said breath, instead grabbing the prisoner by the collar and hauling him up into an open chair, where she strapped his crash harness tight. She sat down, engaged her own crash harness, and nodded to Agent 27142. He nodded in reply. He pulled back on the stick to lift off the ground and then engaged the thrusters, blasting the shuttle out of the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah and into the sky above Earth 616,000.
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 8
