by Paul Gamble
Trudy looked at the seals. “I don’t think so.” Trudy pointed to the far side of the Plexiglas wall. “That’s where the gate is. If they wanted out, they’d be gathered around that. They’re pointing out to sea.”
Then it clicked for Jack. “Of course they are; that’s where I saw the wrinkled version of Regina Maris walking out to.”
“Then that’s where we go.” Trudy ran quickly over to the gate in the far side of the Plexiglas wall, undid the bolt, and threw it open. The seals barked loudly and clapped their flippers in thanks68 before scooting through the gate, across a small plateau of rocks, and into the sea.
Trudy and Jack ran through the gate and walked over to the rocky outcrop that led to the sea. They watched the waves below them. Jack and Trudy took off their blazers and shoes. Jack looked at Trudy. For once she looked nervous.
“You okay?” asked Jack.
“We need to shock ourselves enough to take our breath away—and it’s got to be shock, not panic—otherwise we might drown. I’m not good at this. I’m not easily shocked.”
Jack smiled and then pushed Trudy incredibly hard, causing her to tumble into the waves.
Jack couldn’t believe what he’d done, and he jumped in after her.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
SEALS
THEIR ABILITY TO PLAY PARTY GAMES
The evolution of the seal has rendered it relatively poor at many parlor games. Their flippers mean they are poor at charades. Their lack of manual dexterity also means they struggle at tiddlywinks. This, along with the fact that they are hard to buy presents for (socks and gloves being almost definitely out), means that seals are rarely invited to Christmas parties.
If you want a game that you can play safely with a seal, Monopoly is generally a good bet. They can roll dice with their noses and move the little metal iron with their flippers. Having said this, no matter how many times you explain the rules to them they spend almost all the game trying to buy the Waterworks and then, once they have it, they just look pleased with themselves and bark loudly.
For this reason seals will almost always refuse to play the Star Wars edition of Monopoly, which lacks a Waterworks square.
* * *
39
WHAT’S IN STORE?
Jack’s instinct had been right. After years of being called Moody Trudy and making people terrified, the one thing that was going to shock her more than anything else was someone being brave enough to deliberately push her into the sea.
Jack’s idea had worked perfectly. He was so shocked that he had been brave enough to actually go through with his plan that it had taken his breath away too. Once underwater Jack realized that the look on Trudy’s face was less than pleased. Jack suspected that once they were back on dry land he would be getting a severely punched shoulder. However, in the meantime they had other business to take care of. Jack pointed in the direction he had seen Regina Maris walking into the sea. Jack swam ahead with Trudy following.
It was a strange feeling, swimming under the sea with no need to breathe. Jack tried not to think about it too hard. He knew that the value of the shock would only last for so long and he wondered when the effect would run out. More important, he wondered if, when the shock did wear off, he would have enough time to swim to the surface before drowning. He really wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer.
Luckily they did not have to swim that far—two hundred meters offshore Jack felt Trudy tugging at his ankle. He turned around to make a face at her—his ankle was still sore from where the seal had bitten it—but Trudy was pointing at an old, rusted, massive anchor abandoned on the seabed. It took Jack a few seconds before he realized that anchor looked a bit like an enormous arrow.69
As they swam closer to the anchor it became apparent that hidden behind it was a small, dark hole. Jack looked up at the surface of the water, nervously wondering when his shock would run out. Trudy kicked her feet and swam into the blackness.
The underwater tunnel was truly terrifying. Without any sunlight it was impossible to tell how far they were swimming. It was also impossible to tell when the tunnel turned, and Jack was continually scratching his hands or face on small outcrops of sharp rock, causing him to flinch in pain. After three or four minutes there seemed to be a dim light up ahead. Trudy kicked hard and broke the surface seconds ahead of Jack.
They bobbed in a pool of water in the middle of an enormous cavern. It was a strange experience. Anytime Jack had seen anything like this in films the heroes always breached the surface of the water panting and gasping for breath. Because of the Ministry technique they had learned, not only did they not feel out of breath, they hadn’t even started breathing again.
They hauled themselves out of the water and sat on either side of the pool.
“Have you started breathing again yet?” asked Trudy.
Jack looked down at his chest, which still hadn’t started to rise or fall. “I don’t think so. The shock can’t have worn off yet.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Oh! There we go!” Trudy smirked. “Just started breathing again.”
Jack had obviously been considerably more shocked than Trudy, as it was several minutes more before he started breathing again. “That feels weird now.”70
Trudy stood up and started walking back into the cavern. It was much bigger than they had first realized. Jack almost hurt his neck rotating it to try and take in the full view of a cave the size of an aircraft hangar. He should have been filled with a sense of awe, but actually found himself wondering how they managed to keep it all clean. The cave was filled from top to bottom with bladed weapons and armor made out of seashells.71
Trudy picked up a large trident and weighed it in her hand. “These are weapons. For … for some kind of invasion army.”
Jack found several large cartons filled with sea sponges and starfish. “And these sponges must be what they sell in the shop. Not sure what the starfish are for…”
Unsurprisingly, Trudy was much more interested in the weapons. “Regina Maris must have some kind of aquatic army of an undersea people.”
Jack thought about what kinds of creatures lived under the sea. “Maybe mermaids and mermen. Are they real?”
Trudy shrugged. “We can ask Grey when we see him next.”
“Okay, so if it is angry merpeople, they’re going to invade the land but…”
Trudy threw the trident at the cave wall, where it cracked the stone and stuck fast. “But what?”
Jack shook his head to clear it. “It can’t be as simple as that, can it? I mean, if it’s creatures from the sea, then why were the seals pointing them out to us? There must be something more to their plot.”
“Like what?”
“Umm, I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
Trudy tutted disapprovingly. “That seems to be happening a lot to you lately. Maybe you’re losing your touch.”
Jack really hoped he wasn’t. The key thing he was bringing to their partnership was his ability to think in strange spirals. If he lost that, there really wasn’t much else he could bring to the party. “We can figure this out back on the surface. This is obviously some kind of a giant storeroom.72 Someone will come back to get this stuff at some stage.”
Trudy was still wandering around. “Just a few more minutes.”
Jack realized that Trudy was looking for any clue that her mother may have been held captive in the room. He helped her look for fifteen minutes before he knew that the search was hopeless.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything; we need to go,” Jack said reluctantly. Trudy hung her head and walked back over to the pool, where Jack was waiting for her.
This time she approached him cautiously. “I won’t be shocked if you push me this time, so how do we take our breath away?”
Jack thought hard. He looked at the hole in the ground and wondered if there was an easy way he could shock himself breathless. As usual, when
you concentrate on one thing really hard, it allows the sneaky thoughts in your brain to creep up and catch you unawares.
While Jack was staring at the pool of water and thinking about how to surprise himself, a thought crept up on him that stunned him. His jaw dropped and he looked at Trudy. “I know what the fracking is about!”
“What? No … you can’t—you weren’t even thinking about that.… How did you manage?”
Trudy’s jaw dropped at Jack’s revelation. The pair were stunned into silence. Complete silence. You couldn’t even hear the sound of breathing in the cave.
Jack and Trudy smiled at each other and dived into the water.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
GIANTS
BEANSTALKS
Many people have assumed that Jack from the story of Jack and the Beanstalk was an early Ministry agent. In point of fact, that Jack was not a Ministry agent—rather he was a fugitive from Ministry justice.
Although that Jack has been portrayed as a hero, he was a villain. He broke into a castle (trespassing), stole a bag of gold coins (burglary), and abducted a goose that laid golden eggs (kidnapping).
Jack then proceeded to cut down the beanstalk, murdering the giant.
Possibly the worst part of the story is Jack’s obsession with money. If he hadn’t been bothered about stealing the gold coins, Jack would still have been the possessor of the world’s largest beanstalk. Not only would this have made his fortune, but with the enormous beans he could easily have solved the problem of world hunger.
You may wonder, if Jack did all these awful things, why the stories about him are all so positive. The answer is simple. Golden eggs can be used to bribe journalists and buy an awful lot of enthusiastic press reviews.
It is also interesting to note that Jack made up a lot of the giant’s dialogue himself—the giant, being dead, was not in a place to contradict him. However, Jack was rather slipshod in some of his claims, which should prove that he was lying. For instance, Jack claimed the giant shouted, “I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.”
As we all know, giants are all excellent bakers; in fact, it has been suggested that it is their love of baking that causes them to grow to such enormous sizes, swollen by their colossal yeast intake.
As an excellent baker, a giant would never use bonemeal to make bread—bonemeal would not cause the bread to rise like yeast does. So if the giant was using bones to make anything, it must have been a flatbread.
Therefore we can assume that the giant said something like, “I’ll grind your bones to make tortilla wraps” at worst.
* * *
40
THE HORN OF A DILEMMA
On the way back Jack didn’t find the tunnel as scary. He knew that the darkness would only last so long. As long as you knew something would end, it was never that bad.
As he turned the corner he could see Trudy shadowed against the light at the end of the tunnel,73 pulling her arms against the water faster. Jack churned the water with his feet but struggled to keep up. He saw Trudy up ahead, swimming out of the tunnel and into the sea. Reaching the end of the tunnel, he adjusted himself, ready to swim up, and felt Trudy’s foot kick him in the head.
Jack looked up and made a face, ready to complain, but he quickly saw that Trudy had accidentally kicked him while dodging a deadly predator. Trudy had missed being skewered by a long, spiraling horn by mere inches. The horn was the length of two men and was connected to a huge, gray-and-white speckled74 whale-like creature. Jack recognized it from one of the aquarium posters. It was a narwhal. It was sometimes called the unicorn of the sea. Jack was therefore suspicious of narwhals, as Grey had previously told them that unicorns were known to kill bunny rabbits for amusement.
The narwhal circled and came charging back toward them with its deadly looking horn. Jack needed to think quickly. He wondered whether it would be more unpleasant to die from drowning or skewering. Then Jack briefly thought about how often his thoughts weren’t either helpful or constructive.
Trudy dodged behind the large anchor that marked the tunnel’s entrance. Jack kicked hard off the seabed and just managed to float up as the horn swished underneath him. Jack looked down and saw Trudy mouth “GUARD” at him. He nodded in agreement. Obviously this narwhal was working for Regina Maris.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
NARWHALS
WHY UNICORNS ARE ALMOST EXTINCT
Many people are amazed that both the narwhal and the unicorn share an incredibly similar horn. In fact, many scientists claim that in the olden days people only imagined unicorns and assumed they existed because they found narwhal horns on the beach. Of course, this is typical of scientists, who are always mouthing off regarding things about which they know nothing. There are three reasons why the narwhal tusk/unicorn horn suggestion is ridiculous.
(a) Because we all know unicorns used to exist.
(b) Just because someone finds something on a beach, they don’t automatically jump to the conclusion that it must have fallen off a horse. If this were the case, most people would spend their holidays wandering around the place looking for a horse that had lost a single flip-flop.75
(c) If people had assumed that narwhal horns were from unicorns, they would have had to imagine a strange and magical creature existed that really, really enjoyed beach holidays. None of the legends about unicorns involve sunbathing for a while and then wandering up to the arcade for a round on the bumper cars and a game of skeeball. Therefore the narwhal tusk/unicorn horn hypothesis is patently ridiculous.
As always, the truth is considerably more intriguing. The fact is that the reason that narwhal tusks resemble unicorn horns is simple. Narwhals used to be unicorns.
As you know from Unicorns: Why They Are Evil, unicorns love killing bunny rabbits and skewering three or four on their cruel, spiraling horns. For a long time the bunny rabbits were few in number and were easily overpowered by unicorns. The bunnies’ only defense was being able to nibble unicorns a bit. But very few creatures ever die of a fatal nibbling.
Then one day a particularly intelligent and interspecies-lingual bunny rabbit called Fluffy Bubkins was having a chat with a well-traveled parrot. The parrot, called Tony (because not all animals have to have ridiculous names), was telling Bubkins about having seen a shoal of piranha in a river in Venezuela eat a cow (who was a friend of his) in a matter of seconds. Bubkins swiftly realized that nibbling could be used as a deadly form of attack, but only if you had enough creatures all nibbling at the same time.
Bubkins therefore spoke to all his rabbit friends and told them to have as many children as possible. That way they could form rabbit “shoals” and when a unicorn attacked, they could swiftly nibble him to death.
This approach worked, and soon there were tens of thousands of bunnies across the countryside forming themselves into bunny defense leagues. The bunnies were so successful in their nibbling tactics that land-based unicorns became almost entirely extinct. The only unicorns that survived were those that took to the water and eventually evolved into narwhals. Bunnies don’t follow unicorns into the water, because when their fluffy tails get wet they become frizzy and positively unmanageable.
Fluffy Bubkins decided that, in honor of the cow that had died and inadvertently inspired the idea of bunny shoals, they would name all future bunny houses after him. The dead cow’s name had been Warren.
* * *
41
AN INCONVENIENT TOOTH
Jack bent his back and avoided being skewered by the skin of his teeth.76 Moving underwater was tiring and slow. Every single move felt as if he had weights tied to his arms and legs. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could dodge, and his muscles were beginning to ache. He needed to come up with a plan.
Trudy already had put into action a plan that was working extremely effectively. The last time the narwhal had tried to skewer her she had dodged under it, waited until it was almost past, and grabbe
d hold of its tail. Without any kind of a neck the narwhal couldn’t turn and attack Trudy. She actually seemed to be enjoying herself being pulled around by an enormous, fishy, underwater Jet Ski.
Jack looked around to see if he could find something to use as a sword to battle the narwhal’s tusk. Jack fancied himself as a pretty good sword fighter, as he had attended his school’s fencing club for almost three weeks. He would have stayed for longer but they made you fight sword battles while wearing a mask instead of wearing a large floppy hat with a ridiculously ostentatious feather in it. And surely half the fun of sword fighting was the big, feathery hats?
The narwhal passed him again. This time the horn caught the edge of his shirt, tearing a hole in it. Jack nearly gasped, but stopped himself in the nick of time. Gasping is generally considered a good way to show surprise. However, gasping underwater was generally considered a good way to drown. Jack gritted his teeth and tried to concentrate in spite of the danger—now was the time for him to come up with a brilliant plan.
The last pass of the narwhal had been too close for comfort. Jack decided to use The Speed. Even if he was underwater, the extra boost it would give him would be helpful.
He searched his memory for a sad thought, and his mind seized on the pain he had experienced when he had lost his first tooth. So many adults had told him it wouldn’t hurt, but, as was frequently the case, they weren’t telling the truth. The memory was especially sad now, because not only did he remember the pain of losing the tooth, but also the fact that he now knew what the Tooth Fairy really did with the teeth.77
Jack felt The Speed descend on him. But this time it was not only The Speed, but also a brilliant idea. A brilliant idea inspired by the loss of his first tooth.
The narwhal was circling, preparing itself for another attack. Jack kicked his feet and windmilled his arms, propelling himself toward the huge anchor that marked the entrance to the underwater tunnel. He knew that the narwhal was following him and only hoped that he could make it in time.
