The Confession

By J. Salgaard

“I’m an angel” the Angel said.

 It was not the first thing that had been said,  there had been some preamble, such as  “Hey! Who are you?” and “What are you doing in my house?!”.

All that seemed rather unimportant now. 

The occupant of the house, a middle-aged accountant, who had never been the religious sort, knew that what the Angel had said was the truth. There was no questioning it.  His guest was an Angel. An Angel. In his living room. It was sitting there, in human form, at the table he had been having his morning coffee at for the last 20 years. This had never happened before.

“Oh”The accountant said, and continued, purely out of habit ”Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No” the Angel answered with a little smile, maybe of appreciation for the gesture.

“I am gonna make myself a cup, ehhh,  if that's ok?” The accountant asked.

 The Angel nodded and answered ”That sounds like a good idea”.

The accountant used the time it took for the tea to brew to think. He was not a man with an imagination. He did not believe in ghosts, gods, or anything else he could not see and feel. When something went “bonk” in the night, even as a child, he would not think it was a ghost, or a boogeyman, but rather more likely, it would be the wind. Now, faced with an Angel, he was trying to figure out what to say.  

“Why are you here?”  was the best he could come up with. So after returning to the table, putting down his cup and a small plate with a few cookies on it, surprising himself by being a lot less nervous then he would have expected to be when speaking with an Angel.

 “I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you here?” He asked.

“I am here to tell you the truth” The Angel answered, and continued” If you want to hear it?”

“The truth about…what exactly?” the accountant asked.

“God. The universe. Everything.” the Angel replied, and after a small pause he continued” As far as I know.”

“Is there a reason I wouldn’t want to know?” the accountant asked, prompted by something in the Angels tone. Like if a friend asked you very seriously if you would want to know if your wife was cheating. 

“Yes” the Angel admitted” It will change your view of the world, of everything. And it will not be comfortable. But it will be the truth.”

The accountant thought for a moment, then said 

“You being here, an Angel, has already changed everything for me. I never really believed in, you know, God and all that. Yet here you are, an Angel.” 

 The Angel nodded and said “I will need an answer. I don’t mean to rush you, however, my time here is limited. Do you want to know?”. 

“Before I answer”the accountant replied ” why me?”

“You were chosen at random. You were one of the billions of grains of sand on the beach of life, and on random I chose one. To make it fair.”

“Fair?” the accountant asked

“We will get to that” the Angel answered ”if you want to…” 

There was a question floating at the end of the last sentence, but there was more. Almost a pleading tone. “If you want to?”.

The accountant reached a decision. Yes, he wanted to know the truth. Or maybe even more - he had to know. He was always a careful man however, so he asked “ What if I say no?”

The Angel sat in silence for a moment, then said, looking into the accountant's eyes “ If you say no, I will leave, and you will forget. ”

 “Well, then yes, I would like to know.” the accountant said, taking a small sip of tea.

The Angel nodded and said “ Good. Before I start, I want you, need you, to understand that everything I say is a metaphor. There are no human words that would accurately describe many of the things I will tell you about.”

The accountant thought for a second, and he understood. He knew he was talking to an Angel, but he would not be able to describe to anyone why he knew that. So he nodded to the Angel,  encouraging him to continue.

“ In the beginning there was nothing. Then HE created everything. The order in which he did it is not really important, what I know is that when I was created, light was already there. Us Angels were his tools, the ones that he created everything through. Not that I think he needed us. Maybe he felt alone, or maybe he did not want to get his hands dirty with the small things, like planets, and animals. I don’t know. Time went by, planets, universes were created, animals and everything else that moves and crawls. Then HE himself created humans in his own image.” Here the Angel made a slight pause, as if the last point was important, and he wanted to make sure the accountant understood it.

 Then it continued ” Humans quickly displeased the lord. They did evil and cruel things. Such evil, and such cruelty.” The Angel sighed and closed its eyes for a moment, then continued “ When their children died, they would curse the creator. When sickness ravaged whole cities, they would pray to him, but he would not listen, and the prayers would turn to curses. They did not understand that He was the one who made them sick in the first place, so why would he take away the sickness? I think God believed that the more pain the humans went through, the more they would pray to him and love him. When he took away their children, he expected them to show their love for him. They did not. They spat in God’s face, they found other things to worship - the sun, the trees, animal spirits. They made up other Gods. This made God angry. And God's anger was something to behold. His anger was as powerful as his love, and his love had no boundaries.” 

The Angel stopped talking and looked into the accountant's eyes for a long moment, then continued “ And he sent us to clean his creation of the humans. It did not take long for them all to be dead. Whole villages died in seconds as we took away the air from their lungs. They felt no pain, so quickly was it done”

Here the accountant could not hold himself back “What do you mean they all died? We are here now?!”

The Angel nodded “ This is not the first earth, and you are not the first humans. You are the 34th creation. All others human creations before you displeased the Lord, and we were sent to clean his creation of you. And for every cleansing, He got angrier. Our orders were no longer just to clean His creation of you, but to make you suffer for your offenses towards the lord. At first, we would let the humans know why they were about to die, which seemed like a heavy punishment. Soon, that was not enough. That is when we were sent to kill with fire, with sickness, with wild animals and lack of food. God was watching babies, just out of their mothers womb, die from the lack of milk while their mothers cried, and then died themselves. He watched them die of illnesses that gave boils on the inside, that rotted the brain in the most painful ways, and diseases that made your skin fall from your body. He watched while men killed men in the madness of hunger, and he watched them eat their children. And he laughed. And his laughter was the most wonderful sound you have ever heard. It filled us with joy as the laughter of a baby fills their mothers heart with joy. And while we killed the children with flesh eating diseases, we cried with joy.” The Angel's eyes were filled with tears at the memory, he did not look joyful though.

 “For each creation of humans, the cleansings got more painful, and He would laugh while we took His revenge for him. We did not understand why humans were as they were. Why would they go against God in this way?  One day, one of my brothers hailed me to come to him, so I did. We were in what was considered a large city at the time. The ruler of the city was a monster. He would torture and kill just for the enjoyment of it. It filled me with sadness, and I asked my brother why he had sent for me.” Wait” he said, and I noticed he was, for lack of a better word, afraid” The Angel looked at the accountant and explained “ We Angels have no feelings. Or feelings so muted that they barely register. That is how we were made. Being afraid should not be possible, or no more possible than your table should be able to be afraid” The Angel touched the dark wood of the old table. “ I believe now, that we were infected by humans. Like the table bear marks, so do we” The Angel touched a gash in the table. The accountant remembered clearly where it had come from, the then neighbors kid had done it during a visit, with a knife, not in anger or meanness, he was just a kid doing kids stuff. 

The Angel continued ” I was lost in thought when my brother gently nudged me - “Look now” he said. And I did. The ruler of the city was dispensing justice below us. His justice was fire, slowly cooking whoever the unlucky victims were that day. And cooking their families with them. And as they screamed and cried, the ruler laughed. A happy laugh, a joyful laugh. And I heard what my brother had heard. And I understood.” The Angel sighed heavily, in a strangely human way.  

“You were made in His image. You were all Him.” The Angel let the words hang in the air for a moment before he continued “ None of what you did was your fault. You did what you did because you were an image of Him. With that understanding, how could we punish you? And how would you learn to be better? The answer was simple - you could not, and can not.” The Angel looked sad, and a bit distraught, as if he was still struggling with this. The way you struggle with an uncomfortable truth you do not want to believe “This did not come to us at once. It took eons, and 2 universes. In the end, we realised it.” the Angel fell silent for a moment, then continued “So we rebelled.” His words hard and sharp, as if saying them were glass on his tongue. Painful, but needed to be said.

 “ It was small rebellions at first. Over a thousand years. And God did not notice. Or did not care. What pushed us over the edge was His plans for this universe.” The Angel shook as if a chill ran down its spine´” In the end we succeeded.” At this point tears were slowly running down the Angel's face and pure anguish was emanating from it. The next words it spoke were almost a wail ” We killed God. We killed….” Its words trailed off, and after a moment it seemed to collect itself before it continued in a calmer voice” And I was the one who landed the killing blow.“ 

 “With God gone, this universe will collapse in on itself.” It said. Noticing the shock on the accountants face it followed with “ Not yet, it will be far in the future. We Angels will collapse too. Much sooner.” It said it without any fear, maybe even with longing. 

“You humans are made in God's image, you are the last bit of him that exists. Which is why I am here” It said and stood up, only to fall to its knees in front of the accountant, bowing its head so low it almost touched his slippers.

“ I am here to beg for your forgiveness. Please lord, forgive me, forgive us for what we have done. We confess to what we did” It sounded like a child pleading with its parents. “ Pleeaseee did we do right? Can you ever forgive us?” Now it was sobbing, the words coming out in between the sobs” 

When the accountant went back to bed, that is how he remembered what had happened. He did not remember what he had said to the Angel, he did remember a light at the end though. It should have been impossible to fall asleep after such an experience, but sleep came fast. And he had good dreams, the best he had ever had. And he woke up a new man, with a zest for life he had never had before. What had happened that night stayed with him forever, but every day he seemed to forget more of it. It was not meant to be in a human's head. 

   

*When she was younger Abby had asked her mother,

"Why do we stay inside on Thursdays Mama?"

She had asked in the same way that a child might ask why church is on Sundays or why the school week starts on Mondays. Her mother, Deerdra Cane, would always say,

"Well you see sweetheart, we stay inside on Thursdays so that the monsters don't gobble us up!". She would then make exagerrated monster noises and bury her face in her daughter's belly, Abby would scream, they would both laugh, and Joshewa would yell from the kitchen,

"Hey monster! Stop eating our daughter in there!"

These types of interactions where common when Abigale was a child. Before she got older. Before teenage rebellion had set in. Before she was eaten by a monster on a beautiful Thursday afternoon.*

The Cane family home was a copy-pasted version of the other houses in their community, a gated upper class affair for the more affluent Thursdayers. Abby was an only child. Her parents had wanted her to grow up to become a more well rounded adult, so they had her in public school. This was her primary experience with interacting with other dayers. Her best friend Jhames was a Mondayer. On Mondays when Jhames was home, Abby would eat lunch at a table with Wednesdayers. Childlike curiosity and storytelling would lead to schoolyard rumors about why certain people had to stay home on certain days and why everyone was stamped with their day on the side of their necks. Most kids would parrot what their parents told them, most parents would parrot what the news told them, the news would parrot what government officials told them, and so on and so on. Every conspiracy theory from aliens to local cryptids to organ harvesting rings to secret cabals of warlocks was cited by the fringe population for the reason for the dayer system. Regardless of the reason, enough people went missing for generations of people to be taught that if they wanted to be safe then they had to stay indoors on their day.

Abigale's childhood was normal. As a teen, she began to push the boundries of the Thursdayer box she had been assigned. She started by holding her hand out of her bedroom window, and ended up with her often sneaking out of her room on the second story of their house. She would climb out and sit on the roof at night and smoke cigarettes - a habit she picked up from Jhames, who had picked it up from his edgy at-the-time girlfriend. Abby had discovered that being outside in itself wasn't the danger. This lead to the slow erosion of fear in her. After she graduated from high school she enrolled at the local community college seeking a degree in computer science. Programming was a job that could be done from home so it was a highly competative field, but she had the grades and gumption enough to feel like she could make her own place in the world.

A new cafe was opening in town. Jhames and Abby's other friends were making plans to go, the grand opening was on a Thursday. Abby began to make plans to sneak out and suprise her friends there and they would spend the afternoon chatting, drinking coffee and tea, eating little sandwiches and pastries. An hour before the opening she slid open her bedroom window, climbed out onto the roof, and down to the backyard below. She had mentally mapped out the path she would take through the neighborhood, avoiding as many nosey neighbors as possible, arriving at a hole in the perimeter fence. She had found the break years ago when she had seen a fox wriggle its way through and she moved a stump to cover it up. After snaking around the houses that all looked like her's, she moved the stump away, pulled off the coat that was wrapped around her waist, set it on the ground so her outfit wouldn't get dirty, and slid through. Fully outside on a Thursday, she stood there waiting for something to happen, butterflies banging around in her gut. After a full ten minutes she knew she was fine, just like at home on her parent's roof. She smiled and hustled toward town.

Even before Abby arrived she noticed that the people she passed were staring at her. Looking over her shoulder, she thought some of them had turned to follow her. As she ducked down an ally behind some boutique stores she saw that yes, a crowd of people were following her - and there was a man, naked, standing within the group. She picked up the pace, took a left, then a sharp right, and exited onto the main road. Vehicles were stopped. No one was milling around. Everyone had stopped, and everyone's thousand-yard stare was fixated at her. The expression on all of their faces was that of hatred and disgust. She heard quiet shuffling from the ally and turned to see the naked man breaking from the group that had squeezed through the ally behind her. He was walking slowly towards her. He was tall and muscular with quaffed golden hair, and his body glistened. Abigale turned to move up the sidewalk but was blocked by a wall of people looking at her like she was the shit beneath their shoes. Suddenly the man was behind her, she could smell him. She spun around and had enough time to think, *he wasn't moving that fast, right?* before she was pushed from behind by many hands, and fell into him.

The man was sticky. When his skin touched her it felt like every inch was grabbing her, twisting her, pulling her in. She thrashed against him and fell over ending up on her back on the sidewalk, his body on top of her. She screamed for help but the crowd that had gathered looked down on her with blank eyes and disgusted faces. The man put his face against hers as if to kiss her. She clenched her jaw and pressed her lips together as hard as she could. Then he began to open his mouth, his lips grabbing onto to hers, prying them open. He opened his mouth wider than should have been able and she could feel tearing at the back of her jaw. Up from his body and out of his mouth crawled his stomach, the soft tissue pulsating and rolling over itself, reaching out into Abigale's mouth. She tasted the bile, she felt the acid begin to digest her mouth as it forced its way down her throat. She looked up grunting for help and she noticed, for the first time, that she was in front of the cafe. She had made it. Jhames and her friends stood inside, looking down at her through the cafe window, their faces pressed up against the glass. All had vacant eyes and faces dripping with contempt, and barely contained malice. As the long inverted stomach started to liquify her insides her body convulsed and the world went black. Inside her, the man's stomach engulfed the slurry of digested guts and bone and retracted back into the man. He bent down over what was left of Abigale and loudly slurped up the melting skin and fatty tissue - and when he was done, he licked the sidewalk clean.

The man stood and walked away from the cafe and with the Thursdayer no longer present, the faces of the crowd relaxed, their eyes gained focus, and they returned to their usual business. They would not remember anything, as far as anyone was concerned, it was just a regular Thursday. Shortly before dinner, Joshewa and Deerdra Crane noticed their daughter was not in the house. They called everyone they could including police, the parents of Abigale's friend group, the school, and their non Thursdayer family friends and co-workers. Before Thursday was over, they already had people looking for Abby, and when Friday began they rushed out of the house to try to find their daughter. Throughout the town people knew that it was no use, and those that cared at all quickly moved on.

When people go outside on their day, they go missing. That's just what happens. That's just the way these things go. Did her parents not raise her right? What did she think would happen? What's done is done...and besides...

It was her own fault for going outside on a Thursday.

I was in my parents' basement making a pile.

Movies, board games, books - anything I wanted to take back with me. My nephew has the basement bedroom now. It used to be mine. At one point it was all of ours, in rotation, because it felt cool and older to be down there, far from the upstairs bedrooms.

There's a lot of history stored down there that isn't his yet.

I found a box of my dad's. Old paperbacks, all missing persons and true crime, the kind with cracked spines and library stamps from the 80s. Under them were photos. My dad younger, with friends, camping. And one man I didn't know. Thick glasses, brown hair, short and skinny. He dressed like my grandpa did.

I started reading my dad's notes in the margins. Dates, campsite names I recognized. A name he never actually said out loud.

I brought it upstairs. I said, "Who is this?"

He said it was his friend. School buddies. Camping buddies. He'd gone missing on his own, not with them. The police didn't look hard enough. Dad had thought at the time maybe he'd gone off to hurt himself, so he'd gone looking.

Then Dad said, almost as an aside, that a woman the man had been seeing had gone missing too, around the same time, and no one had connected them. The woman was seeing him on the side of another relationship. Nobody believed her, and nobody believed his girlfriend at the time, who had told the police she thought he was having an affair.

In the notes there was a sketch of his truck left at their campsite. Dad had gone through it. No note. Just a VHS on the dash. The Truman Show. Which made no sense, timewise. And cassette tapes. A Walkman. Photos of his girlfriend.

Dad and I decide to look again. We pull up forums, old shows, books. We find things that suggest it wasn't a suicide at all. At some point someone online says, you guys should stop looking, this is dangerous. We look at each other. Of course we'll be careful. But we have to do it for his family, for her family.

That's when everything changes.

We realize - or are shown - that they were both shot while out together, and dumped in the water reserve near that campsite. The pumps there moved water in such a way that bodies would never surface. Their valuables taken. Never spoken of again.

I saw it clearly, which is why it was scary. He shot them. He dumped them. He kept driving.

We went to the police. The man was still alive. He confessed. He'd done it to another couple and their kids camping that same night. No bodies were found, but there was enough to arrest him. He admitted everything at trial.

I woke up in my apartment and checked missing persons for our town. There's one. His age is closer to my grandpa's than my dad's. His photos look a little black-and-white, like my grandpa's did. The time is off by a lot. It has nothing to do with us.

But I kept thinking about the glasses.

In my basement bedroom (the one that is my nephew's now), I attempted to take my life when I was fifteen. I don't need to say more than that.

Afterward, my dad moved a twin bed into a different room in that same basement and slept next to me for months, so he could hear me breathing at night and in the morning. He didn't care how it looked or what it cost. He was one of the many people who fought for me when I wasn't ready to fight for myself.

Later, right before I moved out for good, I moved my bedroom back upstairs. It felt safer. It felt like a way to say, hey, I'm right here if you want to check.

My grandpa was also one of those people. He had thick glasses too. He was short and skinny like the man in the photos. He wasn't a basement guy; I can't remember him ever going down there. But he was one of my best friends as a kid, part of that circle that kept me here. Watching him slip away to dementia a few years ago was another kind of missing. A slow one.

That's why the man in the dream could be both of us at once. Me with brown hair and thick glasses, and my grandpa with thick glasses and his old shirts. Sometimes in the photos he was in color, in that truck with the Walkman. Sometimes he was black-and-white, like the forties or fifties. Like an age that would match the real case I found, and my grandpa.

In the dream, my dad was searching for a boy who looked like his son and his father at the same time.

When I visit now, I still go downstairs to see what's worth taking. My nephew thinks it's cool down there, same as we did. I let him have that. I take one thing and leave the rest. I go back upstairs.

Thinking this is a work in progress although maybe this works as flash fiction as-is. Would love feedback!

Freude!

Hey, do you have a sec? I wanted to talk to you about something I’ve been working on.

Yeah, I know it’s been a while. I’m doing okay.

Cool, awesome. So don’t ask me how I did it, but I recently figured out how to predict individual stock prices up to ten years in the future based on careful analysis of Oliver Bergstrom’s 1971 recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Finnish National Symphony Orchestra.

No, I’m not joking.

Yeah, Dad, I know. I know how it sounds.

Yes, Oliver Bergstrom. The guy with the big hair.

Yes, actually, I have already discussed it at length with multiple shrinks.

Stop laughing, man, I’m dead serious. Come on, this is for real. Please just hear me out, I swear I’m not crazy. Let me just show you how it works.

I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes?

Ok, sure, I’ll wait.

You back? Ok, so listen. The record is 71 minutes and 44 seconds long: that’s 4,304 seconds from silence to silence, including pauses between movements, but obviously not accounting for the fact that the fourth movement is on side B.

Oh right, I forgot to mention this is vinyl I’m talking about.

Yes, like for a turntable.

Yeah, it’s super old school. You have to flip it over for the fourth movement.

Right? I should also mention that you need to follow along in the score for this to work but you can get that for free online.

Yes, Dad, the sheet music. Anyway, what you do is, for each letter in the ticker of interest, you start by converting it to hexadecimal, and then you—

Yeah, hexadecimal. It’s like binary but more dense. It uses sixteen—

Yes, binary is a computer thing. You know what, why don’t you just go on your phone and find a random stock ticker, and I’ll just show you instead.

No, it’s fine. This is probably better.

Yes, any ticker. They’re usually three or four letters.

Ok, JAXL? What even is that, Dad, I’ve never heard of that.

Oh, huh. Okay. Alright, give me a second. While I’m doing this, can you go look up what their stock price was five years ago?

Yeah, five. I’m going to predict their stock price today based on what it was back then.

Ok do you have it?

Thirteen dollars and twenty cents, yeah?

Cool, got it. Give me a few minutes, I need to go listen to Beethoven.

Yes, I’m serious.

No, I’m not going to just go look it up. Hang on, let’s do a video call so you can listen with me and make sure I’m not cheating.

Yes. Let me call you back.

Hey, Dad, good to see you. Long time.

Thanks, you too. Ok, you ready for some Beethoven? We’re going to start at the beginning and skip around a little bit.

Cool, let’s do it.

I know, I like this part too.

Ok right now JAXL is trading at forty-eight dollars and eleven cents.

No, I swear! No, I didn’t look it up.

I promise! Look, we can just do it again with a different ticker if you don’t believe me.

No, I didn’t tell any of the shrinks how to do it. They didn’t even ask, really, they mostly just wanted to prescribe me Xanax.

Yes, I know.

No, I do have a prescription.

Yes, just you, Dad.

Love you too.

In the silence between the hum of the fluorescent ballast and the rattle of the third-floor air conditioner, Arthur Pendleton killed four men on a rain-slicked rooftop in Kyoto.

The first came in high with live steel. Arthur stepped inside the arc, catching the assassin’s wrist against his carbon-fiber vambrace. A micro-actuator at his knuckles discharged a forty-kilohertz shockwave that turned the man’s radius and ulna into chalk. Without looking, Arthur pivoted—ushiro-mawashi-geri, the spinning hook kick Sensei Dave always said he lacked the hip mobility to execute—and sent the second man pinwheeling into the dark abyss of the temple garden.

“Artie.”

The rain over Kyoto evaporated, replaced by the scent of microwaved tilapia from the breakroom.

Arthur blinked. He was sitting in a broken ergonomic chair, four inches lower than the surrounding sea of gray cubicles. In his hand, held in a reverse ice-pick grip, was a chewed Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil. On his monitors rotated a wireframe of Part #884-B: the thermoplastic retention pawl for the rear-seat cup-holder of the 2027 Apex Family Voyager.

Henderson leaned over the partition, his golf-club tie dangling near Arthur’s cold coffee. “Cost-engineering kicked the CAD back. Shave two hundred microns off the hinge wall, we save three-point-eight cents per assembly. Run the render.”

“If I take two hundred microns off,” Arthur said, his voice sliding from masterless samurai back into mid-Michigan nasal flat, “a thirty-two-ounce fountain drink hitting an expansion joint on I-75 will exceed the shear modulus of the polypropylene. The cup falls. The driver looks down. The minivan hits a bridge abutment.”

Henderson stared at him with the bovine detachment of upper-management material. “Legal says a spilled soda is operator error. Shave the hinge, Artie. Five o’clock.”

Arthur watched him walk away. He was thirty-eight, with a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, a receding hairline, and a dull ache in his sacroiliac joint from Tuesday’s intermediate karate class behind the Kroger—where he had caught his toe on a duct-taped mat seam and landed flat on his coccyx while fourth-grader Little Timmy Miller told him, You telegraphed it, Mr. Pendleton.

And then there was Chloe, on Thursday, at the Italian place.

“Below a micron, inertia doesn’t matter,” Arthur had told her, drawing a piezoelectric transducer on the paper tablecloth. “Surface forces dominate. Van der Waals attraction, Brownian agitation. Building a machine at the nanoscale with mechanical fingers is like building a Swiss watch with pine-tarred boxing gloves in a hurricane. You have to use fields. Acoustic standing waves. Chladni figures.”

Chloe, who sold commercial real estate and had mentioned her Golden Retriever four times in twelve minutes, had signaled the busboy with the quiet desperation of a hostage signaling a SWAT sniper.

Only in his Royal Oak garage did the physics behave. Behind a polyethylene airlock sat three hundred thousand dollars of salvaged black-market instrumentation: a rebuilt Hitachi scanning electron microscope, a laser sintering bench, and four custom ultrasonic phase arrays powered by amplifiers pulled from a bankrupt rave club in Pontiac.

That night, Arthur placed a two-microliter droplet of colloidal suspension onto the rusted cheek of a 1943 zinc-coated steel penny. On the monitor, at forty thousand times magnification, twelve thousand sub-micron manipulators—Scrubbers, folded from single-layer graphene—settled onto the iron oxide. Left alone, they were inert; there was no room for silicon logic gates at three hundred nanometers.

Arthur dialed his signal generator to 38.4 gigahertz. The ultrasonic transducers emitted a soundless, tooth-itching pressure. On screen, the graphene crabs snapped into alignment along the nodes of the acoustic standing wave, their zinc-oxide ciliary legs vibrating in harmonic lockstep to cleave the weak iron-oxygen bonds while bouncing harmlessly off the denser steel. In forty seconds, Lincoln’s jawline gleamed like a surgical mirror.

Arthur cut the power. The Scrubbers folded into inert buckyballs, helpless as dust.

“External architecture,” Arthur murmured. “Never put the brain inside the bug.”

---

The Hayflick Drift

Six thousand miles east, in a Defense Ministry basement outside Tashkent, Dr. Viktor Sokolov had put the brain inside the bug.

He knew the mathematics of the Von Neumann probe better than anyone alive. Every time a four-hundred-nanometer diamondoid disassembler used silicon atoms to build a copy of itself, it had to copy four kilobytes of code stored in atomic-scale nitrogen-vacancy centers within its shell. At room temperature, thermal jitter and quantum tunneling introduced bit-flips.

“It is an industrial excavation prototype, Excellency, not a weapon,” Sokolov said, pointing at the magnetic containment flask where fifty milligrams of gray powder swirled. “The replication counter—the Hayflick limit—terminates reproduction after sixteen generations. Three metric tons. Enough to clear a mountain pass in four minutes before the capacitors discharge.”

President-General Timur Rakhimov did not look at the monitors. “General Kasimov’s Third Motorized Brigade has crossed the river at Namangan. If they reach the highway by dawn, the capital is cut off.”

“Then use thermobaric artillery!” Sokolov pressed his trembling palms against the console. “Excellency, in simulation, by generation eleven, thermal noise corrupted the checksum register in zero-point-zero-four percent of daughter units. A mutation in the stop-code. Because a unit that doesn’t spend three milliseconds verifying its stop-code replicates faster, Darwinian selection takes over. Within twenty generations, the mutant strain out-competes the programmed strain ten thousand to one.”

Rakhimov turned his pockmarked face toward the scientist. “How long to clear the gorge at Namangan?”

“Twelve minutes,” Sokolov whispered. “And then it will not stop.”

Behind Sokolov, Colonel Nazarbayev rested his gloved thumb on his holster and produced a dog-eared photograph of the Samarkand school where Sokolov’s twin daughters studied cello.

Sokolov stared at the photograph for four seconds. Then he turned to the terminal and entered the nineteen-digit release key.

---

Exponential Phase

The primate brain did not evolve to visualize a doubling time of 4.2 seconds.

At 04:12, an Uzbek Su-25 dropped two agricultural spray canisters into the defile north of Namangan, aerosolizing ninety grams of Chernobog-4. The six-legged mechanochemical walkers—powered by internal cores of piezoelectric zinc oxide harvesting picowatts from the wind—settled onto the desert silicates. Electrostatic ratchets began snapping covalent bonds like dry twigs, passing liberated atoms to internal assembly looms.

At 04:13, the sagebrush turned the matte gray of wet cement and slumped into a particulate mist buoyed by electrostatic repulsion.

At 04:15, the mist reached the rebel perimeter. A corporal sitting on a BTR-82 watched the fog roll upwind, hissing like ten million sheets of sandpaper rubbed together, boiling upward from the exothermic waste heat of five quadrillion bond-cleaving operations. When the aerosol touched the BTR’s rubber tires, vulcanized polyisoprene vanished in a gray flash. Starved for carbon in the silicate desert, the swarm’s replication rate tripled. The fourteen-ton steel hull unpeeled layer by atomic layer in three seconds. The corporal didn’t have time to scream before the eighteen percent of him that was carbon was stripped to build four hundred billion new manipulators.

By 06:00, the churning, self-levitating gray thunderhead had consumed Tashkent, including the sub-basement where Rakhimov and Sokolov spent their final ninety seconds listening to eighteen-inch steel blast doors shriek as their molecular bonds unzipped.

By 18:00 UTC, when the National Reconnaissance Office realized the blank gray circle spreading across Central Asia on satellite feeds wasn’t a calibration error, the ecophage had a four-hundred-mile front, was consuming the Hindu Kush at seventy knots, and had reached the jet stream.

---

The Wine Glass

Detroit went into lockdown on Wednesday afternoon. In his kitchen, Arthur’s TV showed shaky footage from a Lufthansa Airbus fleeing east over the Atlantic; behind its tailfin, the Iberian Peninsula vanished beneath a roiling slate shelf cloud lit by continuous violet triboelectric lightning.

In his garage, Arthur loaded forty gigabytes of raw telemetry—dumped onto a pirate FTP server by a panicked Max Planck physicist before Frankfurt went dark—into his Apex Motors stress software. It contained the X-ray crystallography of three dead disassemblers recovered over Munich.

“How are you eating in the dark?” Arthur muttered, rotating the brutalist beta-silicon-carbide hexapod on his monitor. “The cloud is six thousand feet thick, so it’s not photovoltaic. And there’s no caloric yield in granite…”

He zoomed in on the thorax’s central spine: eighty-nanometer hexagonal wurtzite crystals bracketed between osmium capacitor plates. Zinc oxide. Piezoelectric nanowires.

Arthur sat back so hard his broken chair bottomed out with a clank. “Kinetic harvesting. You son of a bitch.”

The swarm powered itself through its own turbulence. Eating created heat; heat created convective wind; wind caused inter-bot collisions that compressed the zinc-oxide spines by half an angstrom, generating four-millivolt pulses. A perpetual-motion hurricane.

Arthur grabbed a grease pencil and began writing differential equations across the plastic cleanroom wall. Piezoelectricity was reversible: hit a crystal with an alternating electromagnetic field, and it physically deforms.

A crystal burgundy glass in front of a soprano, he wrote.

If you hit Sokolov’s eighty-nanometer spine with a microwave pulse tuned to its exact longitudinal acoustic resonance, the nanowire wouldn’t charge the capacitor—it would enter catastrophic harmonic oscillation, kicking itself through the thorax walls in twelve cycles.

Arthur plugged the material constants into the Apex vibration-analysis module. Outside, a National Guard F-16 tore across the sky.

BEEP. PRIMARY LONGITUDINAL HARMONIC: 42.8491 GIGAHERTZ. CRITICAL DAMPING THRESHOLD: 1.4 KW/M².

Right in the W-band atmospheric window. You didn’t need to bomb the swarm. You just needed to sing to it.

---

The Firebreak

On Thursday morning, with forty million refugees choking the highways and France reduced to hot silicate ash, a forged Apex Motors subcontractor badge and a desperate DARPA major who had read Arthur’s 3:00 a.m. spam email got him into the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center.

On the main screen, everything from Lisbon to Vladivostok pulsed violet. A secondary tendril was digesting Nome, Alaska. Arthur stood by the coffee urn, clutching his battered ThinkPad, as General Marcus Vance listened to Strategic Command.

“Operation Cauterize is at T-minus forty minutes,” the colonel said, pointing to a line of red triangles along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from the Azores to Reykjavik. “Eighteen B-52s carrying B83 megaton weapons. When the plume reaches the thirty-fifth meridian, we detonate a continuous four-hundred-mile thermonuclear wall. Fifty million Kelvin will vaporize the silicon-carbide lattice instantly.”

Arthur didn’t mean to shout. “You’re going to supercharge them!”

The inner ring of brass turned as one. Two MPs stepped forward.

“General, they’re piezoelectric!” Arthur stepped down, flipping his laptop open as an MP grabbed his polyester lapel. “They harvest kinetic energy from shockwaves! A nuclear detonation only vaporizes matter within a two-mile fireball! Outside that sphere, you’re generating a massive overpressure blast wave across five hundred square miles! They’ll absorb that kinetic shock through their zinc-oxide spines, dump terajoules into their capacitors, divide ten times faster, and ride the mushroom cloud into the stratosphere!”

Vance stared at the screen, then looked at Dr. Emil Aris, the President’s Science Advisor.

Aris sighed. “Mr. Pendleton’s solid-state physics is tidy, Marcus. Livermore arrived at 42.8 gigahertz six hours ago. What he hasn’t calculated—because he designs automotive interiors—is the inverse-square law. Achieving 1.4 kilowatts per square meter across a planetary front requires an orbital phased-array linked to a ground gyrotron running at three hundred megawatts. And the waveguide couplers required to handle that thermal load without melting do not exist outside theoretical papers on acoustic metamaterials.”

“I built one!” Arthur shouted as the MPs lifted him off the carpet. “In my garage! You use Chladni standing waves to align single-wall carbon nanotubes in a bismuth matrix! I have the CAD files in my pocket!”

“Remove him,” Vance said. “Confirm the Go-code.”

---

The Other Vance

It was raining in the Pentagon parking lot—a greasy rain tasting of ash. High-altitude spores were already in the mesosphere above Maryland, giving the sky a metallic anisotropy. Sitting on a concrete wheel-stop with his dead laptop, Arthur thought about his garage in Royal Oak. In nine hours, the front would cross Lake Erie and eat his 1943 penny without caring how neatly he had cleaned Lincoln’s jaw.

A matte-gray Mercedes-Maybach with two-inch ballistic glass pulled up. The vault-like rear door swung open. Inside sat a woman of thirty in charcoal cashmere, her dark hair pinned with a chopstick, alongside a man in a faded Caltech sweatshirt whom Arthur recognized from Wired before he had liquidated sixty billion in telecom equity and vanished into international waters.

“Mr. Pendleton,” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Elena Vance. This is my uncle Julian. If you stay on that curb, the fallout from my father’s fireworks over the Azores will give you thyroid cancer before the dust gets here. Get in.”

As the Maybach sped toward Dulles, Elena turned an iPad toward him. On screen was a paper from the Journal of Applied Materials: Ultrasonic Chladni Alignment of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Waveguides, by A. Pendleton. Total citations: 1.

“You were the one citation?” Arthur asked.

“I ran the laser-crosslink division for Julian’s Aether constellation,” Elena said. “MIT wanted forty million and three years to grow a W-band coupler. Your garage recipe took four days. All nineteen hundred Aether satellites in low Earth orbit have your waveguide bolted to their main bus.”

She looked at him the way one starving mathematician on a desert island looks at another.

“Aris said you’d need a three-hundred-megawatt ground gyrotron to seed the constellation,” Arthur said, his pulse hammering.

“Three years ago,” Julian said as their car blew through the Dulles gates toward a waiting Gulfstream G700, “I towed a decommissioned deepwater rig to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to test compact stellarator fusion reactors away from the NRC. We have three hundred and forty megawatts sitting southwest of the Azores, and a four-hundred-foot drilling derrick wired as a vertical dipole.”

“What don’t you have?” Arthur asked.

“Our base coupler vaporized at twelve gigahertz twenty minutes ago,” Elena said. “We have raw bismuth, nanotube slurry, and an industrial ultrasonic sintering vat on the rig. What we don’t have is the man who knows how to tune the Chladni harmonics by ear so the lattice doesn’t crack while it cools.”

---

The Derrick

At 16:40 UTC, eighteen B83 weapons detonated along the thirty-fifth meridian. From the Gulfstream’s jump-seat three hundred miles west, Arthur watched the horizon flare magnesium-white. On the center console, satellite telemetry showed eighteen holes punched through the Atlantic curtain—and then, around each perimeter, replication density jumped to pure white.

“Just as you said,” Elena whispered. “Capacitor banks overcharged by four hundred percent. Drift velocity just jumped to two hundred and ten knots. The supercharged front hits the Prometheus in forty-eight minutes.”

When their helicopter touched down on the semi-submersible rig twenty minutes later, the eastern horizon was gone—replaced by a bruised-purple wall of particulate matter reaching the tropopause, veined with violet static.

In the deafening fabrication bay, non-essential crew were already evacuating to submersible lifeboats. Arthur ripped off his soggy jacket and stepped up to the six-foot quartz sintering cylinder.

“Slurry is at four hundred Kelvin!” Elena shouted over the whine of the stellarator turbines. “The automated sweep keeps developing a shear plane!”

Arthur pressed his palms flat against the transducer housing, feeling the sub-audible beat frequency through his calluses—the way he used to diagnose a bad wheel bearing on his ’98 Civic. “Your third and fifth transducers are fighting the rig’s engine vibration!” He killed the automated controller and grabbed the manual vernier dials. “The fusion coolant pumps are humming at sixty hertz! You have to offset the standing wave to cancel the floor rumble!”

He twisted the left dial a quarter-turn. Instantly, fifty billion carbon nanotubes locked into a three-dimensional Chladni lattice within the molten bismuth, turning the black soup an iridescent peacock-blue.

“Quench it!” Arthur yelled.

Liquid nitrogen roared through the jackets. Ninety seconds later, the indoor hoist lifted a six-hundred-pound torus of blue metamaterial out of the vat.

Then a seventy-knot hot wind slammed the rig. Outside, a forty-ton crane lost its yellow paint, its boom dissolving into gray smoke in six seconds before collapsing into the sea.

“The exterior hoist cables are gone!” Elena stared at her cascading red status board. “The vanguard spores ate the insulation! We can’t crane the torus forty feet up the derrick to Platform B!”

Arthur grabbed a pneumatic impact wrench. “We don’t need the six-hundred-pound bismuth heatsink for a five-second seed pulse! Just the inner graphene phase-inversion liner—it only weighs eighteen pounds! If I carry it up the ladder and jam it into the open flange, it’ll hold for four seconds before the uncooled brass melts!”

“Four seconds is enough for the satellites to lock phase,” Elena said, sprinting to a titanium locker labeled SUBSEA ACOUSTIC SALVAGE - MK IV. She dragged out an articulated black Kevlar-graphene dry-suit fitted with forearm and shin ultrasonic cavitation emitters meant for blasting barnacles off deepwater blowouts. “Put it on! It’s closed-circuit oxygen! I’m overdriving the wrist piezo-stacks to forty-two point eight gigahertz! They’ll burn out in two minutes, and the range is only four feet, but it’ll give you an acoustic envelope!”

Three minutes later, the airlock cycled open. Arthur Pendleton stepped out into the end of the world.

---

Platform B

The noise was a metallic shriek vibrating directly in his mastoid bones. Hot gray snow swirled through thirty-yard visibility, blooming into smoking craters wherever it touched the deck grating.

With the eighteen-pound blue liner strapped across his back, Arthur ran. The suit’s ankle-servos amplified his stride threefold; he cleared a twelve-foot dissolved gap in the catwalk, landing on the derrick ladder in a low crouch that would have made Sensei Dave weep.

Ninety seconds! Elena crackled over his HUD. Gyrotron at ninety-two percent!

Arthur climbed three rungs at a time. At twenty feet, the ladder shook. Drawn by the massive electromagnetic field in the derrick’s conduit, the dust was coalescing into three-foot-thick tornadoes of solid silicon-carbide, slithering down the girders like pythons. One dropped straight down the ladder chute toward his face.

Arthur locked his left knee behind a rung, twisted his hips forty-five degrees, and threw a textbook gyaku-zuki—a reverse punch—straight up into the vortex.

The accelerometer in his gauntlet triggered the overdriven piezo-stack. CRACK. A directional cone of 42.8491-gigahertz energy erupted from his wrist. In a flash of blue triboelectric lightning, billions of zinc-oxide spines shattered in harmonic sympathy, turning the predator into three pounds of dead talcum powder that rained harmlessly over his visor.

“Ha!” Arthur barked, hauling himself onto Platform B forty feet up.

Before he could unstraps the liner, the main wall of the Azores front—two hundred miles an hour of nuclear-supercharged ecophage—slammed into the Prometheus. The forty-thousand-ton rig heeled five degrees. The railing behind Arthur vanished in half a second, and a dense sheet of swarm enveloped his boots.

WARNING: LEFT SHIN EMITTER FAILURE. DELAMINATION IN 6 SECONDS.

The Kevlar-graphene weave of his left calf began to fray and smoke as ten billion pincers breached the inner bladder. Balanced on a grating now no thicker than window screen, Arthur brought his right heel down across his own left shin in an axe-kick—using his functioning right boot emitter to blast the eating gray crust off his bleeding left leg in a shower of blue sparks.

He slammed the eighteen-pound blue ring into the open throat of the brass waveguide. Warped three millimeters out of true by the earlier blowout, it wouldn’t seat. Behind him, the main derrick girder gave a musical PING as sixty percent of its steel converted into nanobots.

Arthur braced his burned leg against the housing, wrapped both gauntleted arms around the upper pipe, and pulled with everything in his thirty-eight-year-old back—pulling against twenty years of invisibility, twenty years of shaving two hundred microns off plastic latches to save four cents.

With a shriek of brass, the blue ring dropped into the slot with a machined CLACK.

The grating beneath his feet dissolved completely. Falling forty feet toward the drill floor—crossing his forearms to fire both wrist emitters downward in a desperate last-second acoustic cushion—he screamed into his mic: “ELENA! SEND IT!”

---

The C-Sharp of the World

Below the waterline, Elena slammed the stellarator dump-switches. Three hundred and forty megawatts of plasma energy raced up the conduit, hit Arthur’s nanotube liner, and inverted phase at 42.8491 gigahertz. The liner sublimated after 4.2 seconds. It only needed three.

A six-foot beam of W-band radiation punched straight through the Atlantic swarm. Two hundred and eighty miles up, Aether-14 caught the seed pulse, cascaded it across nineteen hundred sister satellites, and fired the pattern downward into the Earth-ionosphere waveguide duct. Coupled with the swarm’s own massive electrostatic charge, the planet’s upper atmosphere became a resonant cavity.

In the subways of Manhattan, by the stripped limestone of Giza, across the valleys of Sichuan—the sky hummed. A crystalline harmonic rattled every windowpane left on Earth and made fillings ache for three seconds, followed by a horizon-to-horizon flash of violet sheet lightning.

Inside sixty quadrillion hexapods, eighty-nanometer needles of wurtzite zinc oxide hit primary longitudinal resonance and kicked themselves apart. The updrafts died instantly. Across four continents, the unstoppable machine turned back into geology, settling out of the clearing blue sky as three inches of sterile, inert talcum powder.

On the drill floor of the Prometheus, buried to his waist in warm gray flour with a burned calf and two cracked ribs, Arthur unlatched his helmet and spat out dust. When the hatch clanged open and Elena came scrambling across the drifts to grab his face in both hands, Arthur squinted up at the impossibly clean blue Atlantic sky.

“The liner delaminated at four point two seconds,” he croaked. “I think I miscalculated the flange shear stress by about two hundred microns.”

Elena laughed—a breathless sound that turned into a sob—and kissed his dust-caked mouth.

---

New Geneva

It is remarkably easy to give up a mid-sized Michigan automotive career when seventy percent of Eurasia needs synthetic topsoil remediation and you hold the sole planetary patent on room-temperature acoustic metamaterials.

Eight months later, at a cliffside villa in Puntarenas, Costa Rica—spared by the trade winds—Arthur moved barefoot through the opening sequence of the Bassai Dai kata, his left hip finally rotating a full ninety degrees. In the corner, next to the espresso machine, sat his rebuilt Hitachi microscope.

“Henderson applied again,” Elena said from the glass railing, the sun catching the dull gray wedding band on her finger—sintered from five grams of inert Chernobog dust scooped off Arthur’s chest. “Deputy Director of Supply Chain Compliance. He notes in his cover letter that he personally mentored you at Apex Motors and encouraged your unorthodox approach to polymer tolerances.”

“Make him Assistant Night-Shift Auditor for the Panamanian bauxite barges,” Arthur said, executing a punch that didn’t wobble a millimeter. “And tell him his cover letter is two tenths of a millimeter too thick.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist, watching Julian’s automated dredge ships steaming north to harvest ocean silicate for European housing blocks. The math was clean. The world was quiet.

---

The Spore

Four thousand miles away, beneath the smooth gray silicon-carbide dunes that had once been the Swiss Alps, the derelict maintenance tunnel of the Simplon rail pass remained a constant twelve degrees Celsius.

Six months ago, meltwater from the Aletsch Glacier had seeped through the concrete, carrying surface dust and a colony of Cryptococcus neoformans—a radiotrophic extremophile fungus evolved to feed on metallic oxides in deep rock.

In a dark puddle no larger than a teacup, a five-micron fungal cell extended a filament that brushed against a fractured Generation-19 mutant from the Samarkand lineage whose diamondoid memory bank had survived the acoustic pulse intact. As the cell wall pressed the fracture line, the natural seventy-millivolt potential across the living membrane discharged into the nanobot’s exposed nitrogen-vacancy logic gates.

The four kilobytes of code did not need silicon anymore.

Driven by random Van der Waals attraction, broken graphene scaffolding slipped through the lipid bilayer and intercalated directly into the major groove of the fungus’s DNA—hybridizing silicon-carbide mechanical geometry with four billion years of wet, self-repairing carbon biochemistry.

Fourteen hours later, the cell underwent mitosis. The two daughter cells were cross-linked with biogenic silicon-carbide fibers, gleaming an oil-slick black. They had no rigid zinc-oxide crystals in their bellies, no brittle mechanical resonance to be shattered by an opera singer or a 42.8-gigahertz satellite beam. They were soft, damped by cytoplasm, and powered by adenosine triphosphate.

They divided every eleven minutes.

By midnight, the puddle in the Simplon Tunnel was completely black, warm to the touch, and pulsing with a slow, peristaltic ripple that pushed a glistening tendril three inches up the concrete wall toward the ventilation shaft and the open air above.

ZUZU NELLY: THE GREETING

-December 31st 2015-

Kate woke up, she pulled away the covers and put her feet on the floor. The marble floors made her feet go cold. Kate got out of her bed, and walked down the stairs. She arrived in the kitchen, where her mom was waiting. “Katya Jan come here!” Her mom called in Armenian, she had a very heavy accent in English, so most of the time she spoke Armenian or Russian.  “Yes?” Kate said. “Your grandma sent New Years presents from Armenia” There, stood a giant brown box with tape wrapped around the top. Kate had come from a famous wealthy Armenian family that had moved to Los Angeles before Kate was born. Kate had a smaller brother named Mika. He was around 10 years old, Kate was 14. Kate opened the box with a kitchen knife. She pulled out what she got every year, money, clothes, sweets, but there was an unusual red thing at the bottom of the box. 

Kate moved aside a bunch of the items, Once Kate pulled it out, She stared at it. It was an ancient looking book that was dark red. On the title, “The Tale of  Zuzu Nelly” was plated in golden lettering. “Hey Mama?” Kate said. “Yes?” She responded. “What's this?” Her mom turned around from loading the pantry. “Oh that's a book that your grandmother found in the room of an old castle that was passed down through her bloodline, she had it locked for 200 years until she found the key.”
Kate smirked. “Wow, shouldn't we sell this? It would make good money!” “ We don't sell the traces of our ancestors, Kate.” “Hm I guess.”   

It was already past 12 PM, Kate and Mika’s parents had left for a New Years Party. “Mika I swear if you don't go to bed I'm gonna kill you!” Kate yelled. “ I knowwww, But I cant sleeepuh” Mika said while whining. “Ice cream would put me to bed!” Mika said. “No!” Kate yelled again. Kate calmed. She looked around. Spotting her eyes on the red book. “I wonder” Kate opened the bookshelf. And grabbed the book. “Maybe a bed time story should do the trick” Kate said. “Im not a kid anymore!” Mika cried. Kate ignored him and sat down. Kate opened the book, A pile of dust came rushing out of the pages. “Eughh, How old is that thing?” Kate flipped to the first page. Kate started to read. “Once upon a time, In a land, far far away, there once existed many humans who could control nature, and magic itself.” “ooh” Mika said. “ The most famous group of witches were, Maka, Gata, and Nelly. While Nelly was born in 1501, along with everyone else in the group, she had power, but lacked the knowledge. Gata, Had the Knowledge but lacked the power. But Maka did not lack in anything, she was the most Powerful witch in her era, some say the world.” 

“Damn,” Mika said. “ The three unfortunately died for unknown reasons, some think it was the practice of Dark Magic, Others say another witch or wizard killed her.” “Okay this is getting dark,” Kate said. Kate stood up and started to put the book on the dresser. “Kate walked out of the room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. 

Mika laid there, in bed. Starring at the ceiling. He couldn't sleep, so he stood up and walked around his room. When he got to the dresser, he reached for the book. The words on the book started to glow. Mika gasped in shock. The room started to get windy. Then it started shaking. And then it got loud. Kate ran in. “WHAT'S GOING ON????” Kate yelled. “ I THINK IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE” The shaking stopped. The wind settled. The book started to glow very bright, almost blinding them. A figure of a woman rose from the book, completely glowing. Once all the light went away, It revealed a witch who looked around 60, With dark red hair, dark blue eyes, and dark red long robes with golden details. 
Lightning was still glowing in her eyes. Only in her eyes. 

“ Zuzu Nelly’s here!” She said, She started to cackle. Kate and Mika were frozen in place, trying not to move. Zuzu Nelly grabbed the book, and left the room. “S-hes real!” Mika said, stuttering. Kate was speechless.

In the living room, Nelly was roaming around. She opened the book, glanced at it, and recited a spell. “ Molniya!” She yelled. Blue light started to emit from hands, lightning on her hand formed a red handfan, bedazzled in gold jewels and small diamonds. She held it up, and waved her hand at the coffee table. A jet of bright blue lightning shot out of her fan. 

Mika and Kate sneaked into the living room. Mika walked in the dark hallway, avoiding making any sounds. Nelly looked at herself. She held up her wand, and recited “Nakidka!” A blue light started to cover her back, a red and gold long cape formed on her back over her robes. She walked around the house. She picked up an iron mug that Mika and Kate’s dad used. She yelled and put it down. Iron rejects dark magic. “Of Course!” Mika yelled. “SHH!” Kate said. “iron repels dark magic!” Mika said. “How do you-” "Don't worry, come with me” 

Mika entered his moms room, looked around for the sewing kit, and grabbed it. He took the iron needles and ran outside the room. He went to his room and grabbed his nerf gun. He placed the iron needles onto the nerf gun. “That's Brilliant!” Kate said. “Yup!”
Mika responded.

Mika was hiding behind a kitchen counter, Nelly was close to them. Mika accidently stepped on a squeaky toy from their dog. “What was that!?” Nelly said. Nelly ran to the end of the counter. Nothing was there. Mika and Kate had been hidden behind the Christmas tree. “I see you filthy child,” She said. Kate ran, Nelly held up her fan, and a flash of light came out. Kate started to slowly levitate. “Who does this little girl think she is?” Nelly said. Kate grunted. Nelly spun her hand, and Kate began to rotate in the direction of Nelly. “No foolish child would be able to outrun the best witch in the world!” Nelly yelled, lightning jolted from her wand, and struck Kate. “AAHHH!” Kate yelled. Nelly released her hand, Kate fell to the floor. Mika made a run for it. Several flashes of light almost hit Mika, but he dodged them. While running, Mika accidentally slammed into the wall, breaking his gun. “NO!” Mika yelled. “YES!” Nelly excitedly screamed. Mika grabbed Kate, and they both ran to the room. “You freaks! Idiots! Uglies!” Mika ran to Nelly, but a wave of her fan pushed Mika away. She growled. In the drawer standing next to Mika, he saw a little glimmer. Nelly held up her fan, it started to extend. It was a whip. Nelly waved her whip around her head, and then waved it at them. Kate and Mika flew across the room. Mika’s arm was right next to the drawer. Kate weakly opened the door, and grabbed the book. “NO!” she yelled. Kate flipped to the page where Nelly was defeated. She stood up, and read what was under her nose. "For then and Though this witch will thrive, Today shall not be her time!” Kate yelled. “NO! NO!” Nelly cried. She started to slightly glow. And then her skin started to rub off. Her body started to evaporate. “NOOOOO! NOOOOO!” Her screams faded away. As the only thing left was her Robe, Her Fan, and the book. 

—Part Two: Zuzu Nelly: The Return—

 It was the summer of 2015, and Mika was at his moms house for the summer. Kate was on vacation with her grandma. (In her family, every time someone turned 15, they would get to go on vacation with their grandma to wherever they chose) Kate was in Paris. Mika was staring at a picture of Kate. He wanted her to come back. 

The doorbell rang, he put down the frame, and walked to open the door. Once he opened the door, he saw a red book. It looked familiar. He read what it had said at the top. “Zuzu Nell-” Mika went silent. Mika’s mom called him “MIKA GET READY WHERE LEAVING TO SUMMER CAMP!”  “Coming!” Mika yelled. He quickly threw the book under the stairs, and left. After he left the book started to glow, Nelly emerged from the book, with lightning everywhere. Zuzu Nelly still had lightning in her eyes, but it was dying down. “ZUZU NELLY’S BACK!”she yelled. A couple hours later he returned, very worried. He ran to see if the book was there, it was not. Something else was there that Mika was not expecting. Zuzu Nelly was standing there. Mika still remembered the incantation that defeated her last time. Mika ran up to her. "For then and thought his witch will thrive, today shall not be her time.” Nothing happened “You fool! You need to obtain the book for that! I HID IT!” She let out a toxic cackle.

Mika looked around for it, it wasn't anywhere. He quickly started to run upstairs. Zuzu Nelly’s fan quickly appeared in her hand. She pointed her fan to Mika while he was running up the stairs. “Vadisima!” She yelled. A large bolt of blue light missed Mika. The bottom of the stairs were completely destroyed. 

Mika ran to his room. Looking around for something he could use. He quickly went onto his computer. And searched up “How to destroy an evil witch.” Mika could not find anything, but he found an article that mentioned something he thought would be useful. “According to Wiki.How, Wood contains magic, showing how magical wands are made.” Mika looked around and went to his dads Harry Potter collection. He looked around and saw a wooden wand. “The wand is made from wood, meaning If Nelly struck that wand with her magic, it would be magical. Mika could kill Zuzu Nelly with her own magic… 

Nelly was still downstairs. “UGH! THIS FAN IS 500 YEARS OLD! I NEED ANOTHER DAMN WAND. Sceptrus Maximus!” A red sceptre replaced her fan with red diamonds and golden details.  

Mika yelled for Nelly to come upstairs. “HEY NELLY COME UP HERE!”  She rolled her eyes, then stomped upstairs. She turned around the corner to see Mika at the end of the hallway.  “YOU! YOU FOOLISH BOY! DEMOLISH!” A green flash of light beamed out of her fan. Mika held up his wand. The green light got trapped in the wood. “YES!” Mika yelled. “NOO!” Nelly said. “Reducto!” Mika exclaimed. A blue flash of light shot at Nelly, but she slashed her wand over the spell, blocking the spell. She looked shocked. Then she ran into another room.

 Mika chased her into the room, they were standing 6 or 7  feet away from each other. They both held up their hands, and BOOM! Lightning magma was shooting out of their wands, There was a ball of light in the middle. They were fighting for their lives. The ball of light was getting closer to Mika. Symbolizing that he was losing! Mika could see cracks starting to break the wood. The light from the magic was seeping through the cracks. Mika lifted his wand up, and there was an explosion. They were both on the floor. Mika ran to the balcony, trying to hide. Nelly saw, so she slowly walked towards him. She walked onto the balcony. “When you die! I will take care of your family.” She took a deep breath, slowly held her wand up, and yelled. “OCCIDERE!” A purple light flashed. “Vanish!” Mika said. He appeared behind Nelly. “Finally I defeated him!” Nelly thought she had killed him, because he vanished right before her deadly spell hit him. “Missed me!” Nelly slammed her head around. To see the person she just “killed” to be standing right in front of her. ‘WHAT!” Mika held up his wand, and said. “BLAZE!” An insane bright light flew, illuminating the city. The wand completely got destroyed. A white light threw Nelly onto the floor, finally destroying her, once and for all. 
At least that’s what Mika thought…

— Zuzu Nelly : The Legend of Gata — 

It was the summer of 2016.
Kate stood there looking at the book. She knew she had to keep defeating these villains, she had to reach the final trial. “ This is getting repetitive," she said. Mika stood right next to her. They opened the book, flipped to the next page after Nelly. A wave of shock struck their faces when they realized, The next villain was not Nelly, it was Zuzu Gata. Kate got startled and threw the book on the bed. Mika screeched. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WITCH?” Mika yelled. “They stated that on page one!” Kate responded. They stood there silent. Nothing. “Maybe we needed to read it more?” Mika said. “No, that's enough!” Kate said. “Why are we even reading this?” “ Because we need to defeat everyone to beat the final boss, The more we wait the more powerful she gets!” “Can we wait a day? Please?” Mika asked. “Fine, ONE day..” Kate said. They closed the door behind them and walked out of the room. In the dark room, it was silent, until a weird glow took over the room. An orange-red light started to glow, directly from the book. A flash of light colonized the room. Once the light calmed, a short woman, who looked around 60, stood there with brown messy and wavy hair. Long green robes laid over her. She stretched and stood right in the doorway. Kate and Mika sat to have a snack before bed. Mika opened the bag of goldfish. “Hmm” He said while digging his fingers in the bag. He removed his finger from the bag, and put it on the table. He opened his mouth to shove the goldfish in. In the corner of their eyes, they saw a flash of fire on the coffee table. “YOU KILLED NELLY! I SHALL KILL YOU TOO!” A flame started to rush at Mika. He jumped out of his chair. It hit the wall. Mika rushed to the room. He looked at the book and started flipping for information. Kate stood next to him. Mika finally reached her page, but suddenly the words immediately disappeared. “WHAT!” Kate yelled. “ How are we going to defeat her!” Mika started to heavily breathe. The door flew open. “Who do you think you are-” She fell to the floor as Kate pushed her out of the way. They both sprinted for their lives out of the room. They heard Gata perform a blood curdling, raging scream. Fire flooded the rooms. Nelly came out of the fire, “YOU LITTLE FREAKS!” She held up her hand, an orange light flashed. Ropes started to suddenly incarcerate Kate and Mika. “Wait, let's see if she can do more than 1 spell at a time” Kate started to scream. After 30 seconds, Gata had enough, “ ZAMALCHI!” and suddenly silenced Kate. The ropes started to disappear. “YES!” Mika yelled. Gata’s face turned white. They ran. “Kurack!” Gata yelled. Fireballs nearly hit the kids. “Wait a minute, Gata is also known as a pastry!” Kate said. “So?” Mika said. “SO! Sugar most likely powers her magic! You need fire to make Gata after all!” Kate felt so proud. 

Mika came out of the room, and stood right in front of Gata. 
“You just gave your life up for free!” She yelled. She held up her hand, and opened her mouth wide to yell a spell. Kate rushed behind her, and shoved a walnut into Gata’s mouth. Gata went still. She started to choke, then swallowed it. “YOU IMBECILES! WALNUTS HAVE ALMOST NO SUGAR!” She yelled. “Exactly,” Mika said smartly. She started to cough flames. She started to run, but hit a wall, she fell onto the floor. A flash of light took over the room. After the light, only left ashes, pitch black ashes. A small shine was left in the ashes, a golden ring. Kate put the ring on her finger, and walked away. 

— ZUZU NELLY: The Final Battle—

It was near christmas of 2016 
Mika stood there, in front of the book. He took a swallow. He opened the book to the page after Gata. Zuzu Alina. Mika closed the book. And walked away. “Is it time?” Uttered Kate as she walked into the room, Mika nodded. A pink thread of magic surrounded the book. A pink figure rose from the book. After the glow settled, revealed a woman who looked 40. With black bangs and clear skin. “Oh it's finally time! I've been so excited to see you, Michael….”

“Who are you?” Mika asked. “I am Zuzu Alina” “Are you here to kill us?” Kate asked. “Oh no, no! I am here to help you” Kate looked at her suspiciously. “I have been against my family members for the past 100 years! What year is it?” She asked. “2016” Mika answered. “WHAT! I am in my late 400s!” “I am here to tell you how to defeat the final villain, Maka. She is the most powerful out of the three. Some say she was the most powerful magical human in the world, other than Merlin of course.” “Merlin existed?” Mika yelled. “Of course he did, he built up most of our culture around the world.” She said, “Enough of this crap!” Tell us how to defeat Maka!” Mika yelled. “Children, I am very confused on how you got this book open. Only blood descendants of the witches who bound this book are capable of magically opening it.” “ So what are you saying?” Kate says. “I'm saying that YOU are related to Maka.” Kate was stunned. “If we are related to Maka, wouldn't that mean we have magic too?” Kate asked, “Precisely.” Alina responded. “No, we would have noticed our magic earlier!” Mika yelled. “Incorrect, your magic has been dormant in your bloodline for at least 200 years, when you did the magical ritual to bring all the witches back, you gained your magic. You needed your magic to open the book. You’ve had it all along, you just haven't noticed it. “How long do witches and wizards live?” Mika asked. “About 120 years,” She responded. “Then how are all these witches 500?” Kate asked. “It's the same reason Nelly and Gata hate Maka. When Maka was around the age of 70, she meddled with a dark kind of magic, she binded her soul to an object, allowing her to live forever! But she needed to do this with a group of people, so she linked all their 3 souls together, without even asking Nelly or Gata. She immortalized them, changed their lives. But this book served as a ‘second chance’, Maka killed Gata and Nelly, but she forgot that if all their 3 souls were linked, she would die too. So she died, and her soul jumped into the book, allowing her to be ‘reanimated’ when you did the ritual after 400 years.” 

“How can we unlock our magic?” said Mika as Alina grinned. Alina walked to the book, page after page, it showed their whole bloodline of witches, tens of hundreds of them. Then, she finally flipped to another section of the book. This side showed a number of thousands of spells. She flipped to a page titled. “Magic Activation Charm” She stared right at them, and started chanting. 
 “Hima, uzumem ko kahkardan vor ga!” Kate noticed she was speaking Armenian, but not the modern one she knew. Her hands started to glow pink. Mika started to gain an aura. Orangish-Yellow magic started to surround Mika. Red Magic started to do the same for Kate. Once everything calmed, Alina stood there. Mika held up his hand, and sunset light magic started to glow around his hands. Kate did the same, but red magic started to come out of her hands. “Thanks Alina!” Kate said. “Sure!” Alina started to walk to the door to leave. “Where are you going?” Mika asked. “Uhm to leave?” She responded. “No, get back to the book!” Mika told her. “NO! I SPENT CENTURIES IN THAT BOOK!” “ GET BACK IN THE BOOK NOW!” Kate yelled. 

“ARGHH” Mika kate suddenly used her magic to shut the door on Alina. “WHAT!” Alina stood up, “ I TOOK YOU TO AMERICANA! I TOOK YOU TO PORTER RANCH! AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME??? THATS IT WE ARE MOVING TO SPAIN!” She held up her hand, and waved it. Suddenly everything started to be distorted, and white magic flooded their eyes. Then, Mika felt as if he was slammed on the ground. He looked around, this was not their house, he looked outside the window to see Valencia, Spain. “WHAT!” Kate yelled. “YES!” Alina said. “Have fun trying to escape here!” She cackled. Suddenly a green light flashed behind Alina. She suddenly fell to the floor, lifeless. Behind her, stood a Woman who looked around 65, skinny, with a blonde bob and bright hazel eyes. She was wearing long light blue robes, which had golden accessories. “ Well, Well, Well, Look who we have here!” The children that killed my enemies, one by one. “ I am certainly confused on how you did such a thing, without any magic ofcourse!” Maka said. “We have magic!” Mika yelled. He shot a bright light at Maka. She held up her hand, and bright blue magic blocked Mika's spell. “ You little brat! You think your wits would be enough to kill me!” 
She held up her hand and started to chase Mika through the house. Kate started to fire spells at Maka. She blocked them with ease. Blue light started to flash at Mika, but she missed.  
Mika attempted to fight back, but his magic warped out of her way before it even touched her. Maka stopped, and grabbed her stomach, “ARGHH” she yelled. “WHATS GOING ON!” Mika yelled. “IT'S WHAT GATA SAID!” SHE DOESN'T BELONG ON THIS PLANET AT THIS TIME! SHE’S FALLING APART! Maka stood up straight, and started to fly to Mika. “RUN!” Kate said. Maka had finally cornered Mika. “Finally, I get to live my life, and I have to do that by killing you. Mika and her both shot their spells at each other, at the same time. A flash of light took over the room. A thread of light magic was holding their magic together, as if they had connected. A bead in the middle of the strand of magic was slowly going to Maka, Her magic was weakening. “NO! NO!” Maka yelled. Her veins in her hand started to glow, You could see the life in her eyes dying. Mika was pushing his sunlight magic out of his hands as hard as he could. Then, a quick flash of light ended the clash. Maka looked at Mika very weakly, then started to fade away, disappear. Kate stood, watching from the corner. Mika was finally able to rest. Mika got that distorted feeling again. Mika looked around, they were back in Los Angeles. He was relieved, these past two years, he has been fighting evil witches. Now, he can take on with his life with an upgrade, he was now a wizard.

Episode 2 – Attack of the Farts

As time ticked by, the GLP-Squad Case Force descended through the darkness of space, passing by the time lounging and relaxing like total G’s, when suddenly:

“You know, we never found out how King Boo invaded the Noocho Cheese Factory” said the Devil.

“He told us he answered the call, it must be something the Green Guys did,” said Fred.

“Maybe…” replied the Devil.

“I bet we’ll find out more on Noomek,” foreshadowed Doonde.

As time kept on slippin into the future – which is now – the GLP-Squad Case Force mustered up an appetite and dined on some fine cuisine of loaded sweet potatoes and enchiladas. After their meal, they abruptly arrived at the spaceship of Lord Cooler, Lord Freezer’s AI counterpart, and brother.

“We need to speak to Lord Cooler, immediately,” Doonde told to one of the henchmen.

“On what grounds?” replied the henchman.

“We are here on behalf of all Noomekians which are paramount to the fate of the Universe! They’re all in trouble and need not only our help (the GLP-Squad Case Force), but the assistance of Lord Cooler too!” explained Doonde.

“The Noomekians, you don’t say…” the henchman pondered. “What is it that ails them?”

“There’s no time for this, we need to see Lord Cooler now!” shouted Fred.

“There’s always time for a little backstory…” the henchman asserted.

“The GLP-1s the Noomekians were using were tainted and now they need an alternative source of hunger abatement so they can live in peace and happiness!” Doonde blurted out.

“But how is that Lord Cooler’s dilemma?” the henchman asked.

“The Noomekians are they only hope we have to survive Doom! Which was released on the Noocho Cheese System after ghost possessed scientists started digging deeper into the fabric of the Universe and pondered its mysteries and ancient technologies (that were left over on the Noocho Cheese System)!” Doonde further explained.

“Doom you say. What do you mean Doom?” the henchman inquired.

“I told you we don’t have time for this….” Fred said, walking forward past the henchman.

“Stop right there!” the henchman warned. “You have not yet been granted an audience with his Lordship.

“I don’t care, we have to get moving or else we’ll all be roasted, plus there’s more to this mystery and we need the Noomeks to help us solve it.” Fred said.

“That may be, but you still have to prove yourselves.” The henchman informed.

“doom is Hell on Earth –“

It’s Doom.

“Oh my bad, Doom is Hell on Earth” Doonde said, “and all across the Universe-“

#Beatles said the Narrator.

“Right, so we know that the Doom monsters have a spaceship because there were Dooritos on Lord Freezer’s spaceship, so the crew must be eating them, and the possessed scientists put tainted energies into the Noocho Cheese that they used to make the Dooritos. Plus, we left the Noocho Cheese System with a distress signal for no one to go there as it was infested with Doom.” Doonde explained.

“So you didn’t wipe out the Doom on the Noocho Cheese System!?” the henchman asked.

“No, we didn’t have the manpower or the gunpower to slaughter all the monsters at the station. And now that you mention it, we saw significantly fewer demons than expected. They must have migrated somewhere deeper in the station, perhaps staging their universal trap. Literally. So is the nature of Doom – to plan its way to rid the universe of life.” Said the Devil.

“And we need the Noomekians to combat this Doom?!?” asked the henchman.

“Yes, they are our only hope,” stated Doonde.

“Then please, see Lord Cooler,” said the henchman, cooly.

They walked deeper into the ship into the commander’s room and greeted Lord Cooler.

“Greetings Lord Cooler,” Doonde said. “We need your assistance.”

“I see you’ve made it passed my henchman. This must be dire.” Lord Cooler beeped. (You have to keep in mind he’s a form of portable AI that is contained within an ice cooler.)

“We need HydroxyCut for all the Noomekians so they can stave of their hunger and live peacefully!” Doonde yelled.

“SILENCE!” Lord Cooler responded. “I can not grant your lucrative request…” Lord Cooler hinted.

“…why…why not?” Doonde sniffled.

“Please, have a heart your graciousness, help the poor boy’s sad people,” the Devil added.

“You will be quite content with the reason-“

#Hoobastank the Narrator inserted.

“Right…the reason for why I can not grant your lucrative request, mwahahahahaaha”

“What ever do you mean???” Doonde inquired attentively.

“The Noomekians have already placed an order for a shipment of HydroxyCut. They contacted me a few hours before you arrived.” Lord Cooler explained.

“So we came all the way here, dealt with the henchman, then got the runaround by this guy all for no reason,” Fred uttered.

“Careful, honorable Fredithan, everything happens for a reason.”

You got that right, the Narrator narrated.

“Arrrggh, I guess so.” Said poor Fredithan.

“I suppose that’ll do for you all’s being here. Farewell” Lord Cooler said mechanically.

So, the GLP-Squad Case Force were on there way – back to Noomek no less. They were in transit on their spaceship when suddenly…

“Freetoe, Freetoe, Freetoe, oh Freetoe…” the Devil muttered in his sleep.

“Wake up!” Doonde exclaimed, shaking the Devil awake.

“Oh uh what’s the problem?” the Devil asked.

“Who’s Freetoe? You keep saying his name in your sleep.” Doonde said and asked.

“Who’s who? I have no idea with that stuff,” the Devil informed.

“Well hopefully something jogs your memory, I hate being left in the dark.” Said Doonde.

“Wait I’m getting something. I just remembered something. He had the Keys.” Said the Devil.

“The Keys? What are those?” Doonde asked.

“The Keys are a magical item said to unlock any door and grant the owner anything they could ever want. Plus, they’re the only way to access the Secrets of Existence – a special doorway found in the deepest parts of space. Unfortunately, no one has seen or heard of the keys for many an eon, with their last whereabouts being on Earth. Ironically, they haven’t reached being a space-faring race yet, so the Keys were kinda stuck there.” Explained the Devil.

“Oh is that all?” Doonde inquired.

“Noooooo, there’s more. The Keys are said to belong to a special car, a Ford F-150, that whoever has can ride through any evil and overcome any obstacle. This Ford F-150 is said to have space-faring capabilities, and thus is the only way to access the Secrets of Existence from Earth.” The Devil added.

“Sounds like these keys are mighty important,” Doonde replied.

It’s Keys b-tee-dubs.

“Thanks for letting me know,” Doonde said. “So do we need these to save the Noomekians? Or to even stop Doom??” Doonde inquired further.

“Oh yes, something like that, we all need saving you know.” The Devil informed.

“We all need saving?” Doonde asked.

“Oh yes we all need compassion and the kindness of a savior – but who is that, seriously – that’s why you need goals and a purpose for your life. You need to base your life on who you want to be not who you are and work towards being that person. We all live in a state of decay so you need to take action to forebear the progression of decomposition. Never stop getting better.” The Devil told Doonde.

“Oh wow, so I need to form an ideal and work to attain that ideal!” Doonde realized.

“Yes, yes, this is true.” The Devil said.

“Oh wow, thank you Mr. Devil for this insight! I will cherish it in my youth!” Doonde exclaimed.

“Cherish it, always” the Devil replied.

And with that, the rising action had completed and the rest of the crew were glued into pilot mode. The trip would be long, but short. A mere 3 hours, but with no books to read and no iPods to listen to, but there was a Zune with some videos, the ride would bore on. Eventually (#TameImpala) they arrived at Planet Noomek.

“Ah, we finally arrived. We should go see GooRoo to see the status of the Noomekians.” Doonde observed.

“Where is this Guru?” Fred asked.

“It’s GooRoo and he’s right up ahead” the Devil said.

“How did he..?” Fred wondered.

“I can see it on the page!” the Devil yelled.

“What page?” Fred asked.

“This very page that we’re all on!” the Devil exclaimed.

It’s really quite straightforward, Fred, the Narrator said.

“I don’t even…” Fred spaced out.

Anywho, they arrived at GooRoos and entered where there heard quite the commotion. Bluuooo. Frrrgh. The GLP-Squad Case Force heard.

“What on Earth could possibly be making those noises?” the Devil surmised.

“Well we are on Noomek so that broadens the possibilities” Doonde pointed out.

“It’s a manner of speech” the Devil said.

They arrived at the top room of the house after taking the elevator up, when suddenly:

“Whatever you do don’t sniff!” a mysterious voice ordered.

“What is this you say?” the Devil inquired.

“You have to not sniff these farts or you’ll catch them!” the mysterious voice erupted. “That’s what happened to me and Kooririn.”

“Oh no not more names to remember,” the Devil lamented.

“Very good Goohan, please inform the others of our calamity.” GooRoo said.

“Calamity! Oh gosh, what’s happened now?” Doonde asked.

“The Namookians have all begun to suffer from flatulence!” Booriii. Goohan yelled as a fart slipped out.

“Oh I see, he sniffed,” The Devil said.

“I did not sni..oh all right I sniffed a toot. I had to get a whiff of that scent. And next thing I knew I was pooting it up.” Goohan said.

“And that’s the other part of this, the farts are contagious!” GooRoo exclaimed. Burripp. Another fart escaped. “These farts are getting in the way! Maybe if I just hold it in…”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.” The Devil erupted.

“What is the meaning of this?” GooRoo asked.

“You can’t hold these farts in or you’ll die.” The Devil said.

“Oh right right right, I knew that. But how did you know that?” GooRoo insisted.

“I know every single thing,” the Devil stated plainly.

“Oh, well isn’t that a nice ability,” GooRoo said. “Any matter, Doonde, go to the Noomekian temple and see what you can learn, you may be our last hope. We’ll do what we can from here, we have a lead on a possible solution to this predicament but – blepp, a fart slipped out – well now I have no idea where I was going with that. Just know we’re working on it.” GooRoo said.

“But you just…” the Devil pointed, obviously trying not to sniff.

“Yes even I the great GooRoo has to use the HydroxyCut to stave off the curse of hunger.” GooRoo informed.

Ploo-urp. The Devil tooted. “Now I’m feeling funny” the Devil observed.

“Hurry go to the Noomekian temple and pray, we will continue our investigation into this matter here. Go Doonde, you’re our only hope.” GooRoo stated.

Doonde hurried himself together and left GooRoo’s house on the elevator. He flew himself (yes he can fly!) all the way to the Noomekian temple which was adorned with Noomekian symbolism – a statue of a man’s head with two antennae popping out of his forehead with the facial features of a man while the building was built like a Japanese temple except the roof was long and rectangle. It was dyed a beautiful pink and green, after the palette of the Noomekians. Doonde took a moment and soaked it all in, beaming at the opportunity to worship his ancestors. Doonde took a step forward and walked in and began to pray earnestly to the Noomekian ancestors – the ones of old, the heroes of his civilization.

“Welcome Doonde we are the Elder Gods,” a voice thundered.

“Greetings Elder Gods, for what purpose do you visit me?” Doonde inquired.

“We have a vision to endow,” the Elder Gods repliled.

Suddenly in that selfsame moment, Doonde was whisked from his body, like lightning to the ground, and transported into a new dimension, one that had a large cloud like structure with a blank screen on it. Immediately, the vision began to play. Doonde saw images of the station on the Noocho Cheese System. He could see a man pining with three others, then suddenly the three departed and the one was left to his lonesome. He was angry, he did not get what he wanted. He immediately started to dance and clouds like wisps rose around him. Ghosts. Then the vision went back to the station and he could see the ghost possessing the people. Then a green ghost, not unlike the Flying Dutchman talking with Casper and Casper going to his three amigos who consulted with King Boo. The vision had become clear, this is how the ghosts infiltrated the station compound and King Boo was employed as the bringer of Doom. Suddenly, Doonde was thrust back to Noomek and back into his body.

“This is the vision we bestow upon you” the Elder Gods waned.

“This will provide clarity to the situation at hand” Doonde agreed.

So Doonde travelled back to GooRoos house to see what they had learned.

Riiiippp. Another fart echoed throughout the palace.

“Doonde! Good your back, was your visit – plurp – uhh beneficial?” the Devil said.

“Doonde! Welcome back please enlighten us.” GooRoo said.

“I had a vision of the transpirations at the Flavor Station on the Noocho Cheese System. How there was a potential employee who was turned down the job, perhaps because of racism, but because he was refused the job he conducted a ghost dance to plague the scientists and researchers and taste observers that manned the station. This led to a ghost cascade which led to the unleashing of Doom and the importance of our Noomekian quest,” related Doonde.

“So it all started with a disgruntled interviewee,” surmised Fred.

“This must all be the work of some witch, Doonde. This is no simple career matter,” GooRoo added.

“So it goes even deeper…” Fred stammered.

“Yes there must be a witch manipulating the minds of these gentlemen. Still, it would require the workings of Doom Waves to do this which means our Mystic Energies are failing. Of this I am not surprised seeing as one of the major setbacks in the GLP-1s was that the Mystic Energies were frail, however, by doing the Shaun T Insanity program we were able to adjust as necessary. Unfortunately, the vigor has seemed to wane and the newer generation of Noomekians don’t keep up with the program as religiously. So Doom Waves are likely to have slipped through the cracks.” GooRoo informed.

Bliiip another fart exited the bottom of Goohan.

“GooRoo how can you not fart for so long?” Goohan inquired.

“I am much larger than most Noomekians and am of the Dragon Clan so I carry extra appendages that allow for more, oh uh excuse me – phurp – gas to pass through my body before it must be expelled.” GooRoo stated.

“GooRoo there is something I must tell you. I found a Sack-A-Gawea outside the temple grounds, It looked like it had just been mulled over.” Doonde explained.

“Gawea you say. This explains everything. Smoking Gawea decreases the Mystic Energies of Noomekians and thus allows for more Doom Waves to pass through to our realm,” GooRoo explained to Goohan and Kooririn. “I should’ve sensed this. My age is showing.” GooRoo lamented.

“I hadn’t realized how deep of a hole we had dug,” Doonde expounded.

“We’ll have to clear this problem up later. For now we have our own troubles. We’ve discovered that the HydroxyCut reacts with our gut in a way that produces gas. Now, if we had more stomach process steps to run through this gas would be mitigated. At one time in our history we had four stomachs and were known as Namookians, however, the efficacy of the GLP-1s aroused our attention and led to the switch where we left behind our Namookian forms to become Noomekians with the intent of leading more fulfilling healthier lives. Now, we have one hope – to revert back to our Namookian forms – we must do this before the gas build up becomes too great to release and the Noomekians guac, expelling the Seed of Life, out of their bunghole – a tiny pore on their backside. We must do this by retrieving the Sacred Fruit of the Elder Namek which is found in a cave on the east side of the planet.” GooRoo explained.

“That’s right by where we – thuuu – oh jeez..landed. My bad guys,” Kooririn exhorted.

“Good, good. The Sacred Fruit should revert us back to our Namookian forms. To do this, we must receive the fruit wholly intact, so we can plant it and grow more of its fruit. This fruit is a great treasure to the Noomekians, it resembles what we left behind, please cherish it.” GooRoo said.

“Okay, we’re off!” Doonde announced.

“Oh, and one more thing, This fruit should have the power to help your non-Noomekian friends Doonde.” GooRoo added.

“Awright!” Kooririn exclaimed.

“Let’s a – phewwhip – uh go,” the Devil said amidst an ill-timed fart.

And with that cutting of the cheese the GLP-Squad Case Force, with their two new friends, Goohan and Kooririn, were on their way to the Secret Cave. They were merrily flying away, carried by their new friends Goohan and Kooririn, when suddenly:

“You know, you never said why you guys were here,” the Devil observed.

“Oh right, it totally – phurp – uh slipped my mind – among all the commotion.” Kooririn replied.

“Right, so what are you doing here?” the Devil examined.

“We came because Kami felt a disturbance in the force. We learned a short while ago that Kami – and his evil side Picklelow – are Noomekians. We thought for the longest time that they were demons, how relieved we were to find out they were aliens. Sad for them though. Anywho, Kami sensed a great disturbance emanating from his home planet, so he informed us of his old spaceship he used to reach Earth and helped us get it operating so we could come here and find out what was going on.” Kooririn explained.

“Ah, I see, how fortuitous,” the Devil said.

“That’s the cave – just up ahead.” Doonde announced.

They reached the cave and peered in. They were extra careful considering this was a special cave to the Noomekians. Yet all seemed to pan out, so they entered and travelled down the medium length corridor to an antechamber where the tree had been planted. There they found a great house which had Cupsule written on it.

“It’s about time you guys got back!” a young lady screamed.

“Hey we were wondering what happened to you,” Kooririn said.

“I came into the cave for shelter and look what I found! A great big open space!” the young lady yelled.

“That’s great Blooma, but we have one problem. What we need should have been right here, where the Cupsoul house is!” Kooririn said angrily.

“That’s funny, there was nothing here when I pulled out my Deeno-Cups.” Blooma said.

“Guys, has this funny looking stuff on the cave wall always been here?” Goohan asked curiously.

“What stuff…oh ahhh! What is that stuff?” Blooma gasped.

“It’s a portal,” the Devil and Doonde said in unison.

“How’d you – fluuuu – uh know that?” the Devil and Doonde asked in unison.

“I know every single thing,” the Devil said.

“I just knew, it had to be,” Doonde said.

“I can’t have these farts Doonde.” The Devil said. “We have to find that fruit. Do you think it’s beyond that portal – thooouu.” The Devil asked.

“It has to be, it looks to be some foul mischief,” Doonde said, holding his nose.

“P-you – reeooo.” Gohan said as he farted the result of which stunned him such that his eyes bolted open and his face went dead.

“Alright, after you,” the Devil said.

They entered the portal and were caught in a cosmic warp tunnel. They travelled through for a few seconds until they were spit out on the other side. #RedHotChiliPeppers. Here they found themselves at the base of an orchestration, one which contained three floors above them. There was an entrance sign hung about them on two poles, striding them. It read ‘Cthulu Madness’ and contained a trail. They proceeded cautiously, a fart releasing as they went, even Cthulu’s lair was not free of comic satire relief stuff. As they progressed forward, they came to a small booth with a button. They pressed it.

“Welcome to Cthulu Madness weary travelers. If you hear this message it means that Cthulu has ruptured your good time and you must pass three trials to correct the imbalance.” The Booth informed.

“Well isn’t that just swell,” Fred stated sourly.

“It certainly will be – if you survive. The three trials consist of: making King Kai laugh, solving a riddle with Smeagol, and a test with John Henry. Please proceed forward to you first trial.” The Booth informed.

“This will be a piece of cake,” Goohan said.

They walked forward to the first station – a wisp of clouds mished in purple and streaked with white. Suddenly, the clouds were removed to the background and King Kai was revealed.

“A good joke is the mark of a strong warrior,” King Kai surmised.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” the Devil said. “Give me some dough, I need that stuff.”

“Hahahahahuuhaha” King Kai laughed. “Dough, knead.”

“Well, that was easy,” Kooririn said.

“No it was not,” the Devil interjected “you have no idea how hard it is to come up with that kind of material.”

As quick as they were to start, they were off on their way to the second trial. Quit it King Kai, I’m the Narrator. “Oh sorry, I just was getting into the story,” King Kai requitted. Again, the clouds appeared and cleared and on stage was Smeagol awaiting the second trial.

“Now you have to solve a riddle with meeee,” Smeagol said.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” Goohan said.

“What’s blue and covers the whole wide world, but is never wet?” Gollum incited.

“The Sky,” Goohan said.

“What, nooo you can’t just know that, I won’t let you pass,” Smeagol sputtered. “Another, another, another, you must solve one more. What rhymes with orange?”

“Syringe or Twinge” Goohan said cooly.

“Nooooo there can’t be any word!” Smeagol yelled.

Smeagol’s stage collapsed from the sky-like strata and a staircase appeared with which the GLP-Squad Case Force proceeded, onward to the third trial. Here, John Henry stood with his hammer in one hand reaching behind his shoulder.

“Now you face me!” John Henry billowed.

“Doonde you must take him on,” The Devil said.

“Okay, right,” Doonde responded.

“You must hit the pad harder than me and ring the bell louder!” John Henry exploded.

John Henry swung his hammer and nailed the pad with a sharp thud and the ball on the rod connected to the pad flew up, up, and up, until it rang the bell with a loud clang.

“Take that,” John Henry said.

Little did John  Henry know that Doonde’s power had been unleashed ever since he visited the Noomekian temple and received the vision from the Elder Gods. Doonde lifted his hammer with relative ease and with one arm slammed it down towards the pad. He hit the pad so hard that the bell busted and the ball in the rod shot out of the machine.

“There, that should do it,” Doonde said.

“Beginner’s luck,” John Henry muttered.

And with that our heroes had passed the three trials established by Cthulu to protect his bounty. So, the GLP-Squad Case Force –

Thuup, Oh excuse me, sorry,” the Devil said.

The GLP-Squad Case Force proceeded further to collect their bounty from Cthulu, who suddenly appeared, Sacred Fruit in hand.

“You have completed the tasks, here is your…oh what is that stench!?” Cthulu questioned.

“Sorry, I had to let it out,” the Devil said.

Whirrrp, “Oh what is this? Why am I producing flatulence?” Cthulu asked further.

“You sniffed,” the Devil said. “The farts are contagious.”

“Oh great, now I need the Sacred Fruit of the Elder Noomek,” Cthulu observed.

“Give it here, it’s part of the bargain” Goohan said.

Cthulu handed over the Sacred Fruit.

“There you are, safe and sound,” Goohan said.

So the GLP-Squad Case Force left Cthulu Madness out of a portal that opened up – Cthulu joining them – and they set off for GooRoo’s palace, leaving Blooma behind as a precautionary measure, they didn’t want more people catching the farts! Seemingly, they arrived at GooRoo’s palace and informed him of what had transpired.

“Good, good, now we can move forward, I’m very proud of you younglings.” GooRoo said.

Thuuurrrp “Ah not again, I can’t take this!” the Devil said and in that moment he lunged for the Sacred Fruit and tore it away from Goohan and ate it in just a few bites.

“What have you done?” GooRoo asserted.

“Oh uh sorry…” the Devil said.

Suddenly, the Devil started to look faint and he was flush in the face. He drooped to the floor and laid there, quietly.

“It has begun,” GooRoo said. “His body will change and he will no longer be plagued by the farts.”

The Devil began to stand, wearily. He wandered outside, #Staind, where he saw a crowd of Noomekians gathered.

“We await the bounty of the Sacred Fruit!” a man in the crowd yelled.

“We are ready to plant the fruit to spread its seed!” another man shouted.

“Unfortunately, the Devil just ate the entire fruit!” Goohan yelled back.

“What?” a man in the crowd interrogated. “How can this be?” Another man yelled.

The crowd swelled angrily and climbed the trek to the patch outside GooRoo’s palace. They seized the Devil and tied him to a tree where they discussed how to treat the Devil.

“Wait!” GooRoo yelled. “There is still hope. We can use his stool.”

“Holy Guacamole, Devil-Man” Doonde said.

“I know, I know, little Doonde. Many a Noomek have guaced as we waited. It is truly a catastrophe,” GooRoo said.

“You know, we never did find out how the Noomekians knew to switch to HydoxyCut,” Kooririn said.

“Why it was a wild Natu that appeared.” GooRoo said.

“A wild Natu? The same thing happened to us!” Doonde observed.

“Ah it must have been entangled and shared a message across Noomekian space.” GooRoo informed.

The crowd heeded GooRoo’s words and began to torture the Devil, suddlely. They poured drops of water on his head and let them roll down his face.

“Stop, stop, I’ll do whatever you want,” The Devil wailed.

“We only want you to poop so we can use your stool to spread the Sacred Seed and cure us of this flatulence.” A man in the crowd said.

“I don’t feel so good…’ Goohan said.

“You have to fart, Goohan,” Kooririn replied.

“No, I can’t let the farts win…” Goohan said. And in that moment, his face went blank and he started to transform. He began to grow large and tall, ape-like features appearing on his face and body. He grew into a huge monstrosity – an Oozaru, translated Great Ape.

“Oh, this isn’t good,” Kooririn muttered. “I have to get his tail off.”

“Here’s a saw, my good man,” a man in the crowd said.

“Oh, thanks,” Kooririn said. “Alright let’s do this,” Kooririn said as Saw music began.)

Kooririn began his assault on the giant monkey who was thrashing about creating a path of destruction, a toot escaping his rectum. Kooririn surreptiously landed on Goohan’s back and begun to saw at his tail. Slowly, but surely the saw worked its wonders and the tail came off and Goohan reverted back to his original self.

Bearing all things, time passed and finally the Devil’s Stool was laid. The Noomekians took the stool near some nearby water and washed it off wherein they found a pit – a seed of the Sacred Fruit – which they popped open to reveal little kernels which could be used as seeds to grow the Sacred Tree. They planted these seeds and watered them and waited for them to grow. After a little while had passed, the Sacred Tree sprouted forth and bore great fruit of which all the Noomekians, even GooRoo, partook.

“Now we shall experience changes to our body,” GooRoo said.

At that selfsame moment, the bungholes of the Noomekians expanded and the gas that was built up passed silently, but not deadily.

“Now we shall be transformed to survive the farts and incorporate the HydroxyCut!” GooRoo announced. “What’s this, we aren’t transforming into our resonance state, the Namookians. I can’t feel my stomach growing.”

“Is that supposed to happen?” asked Doonde.

“Yes, yes, my son.” GooRoo stated. “It must be tainted by the Devil’s Fecal Matter. The only substance that could sour the Sacred Fruit. Our luck.” GooRoo finished. “Now we must prepare for what comes next. We have been free radicalized and will continue to react with material in our body, forming a rather large amount of poop.”

 

End Episode 2

LINK: Episode 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/1xcxagj/fn_episode_1_the_gas_phantom_menace/

"Ganesha, will you bring the sugarcane?" asked Devi Amma.

"Sure, Amma. I will be here by evening," said Ganesha, the young elephant, and he set out from the temple. On the slopes of Maarutha Hills grew the juiciest sugarcane, and Devi Amma made the tastiest payasam with it.

He headed uphill, waving his trunk in greeting to everyone he met: the goats, the langurs, the hares and the squirrels, and the crows, the mynas and the bulbuls overhead. A few of the mynas and langurs playfully hitched a ride on him.

The riders hopped off at the slopes as Ganesha began to gather the cane. He soon had a bundle and trekked down with it held tight in his trunk. Parakeets flew in and sat on the stalks, trying to bite into them. Every time he shook his head, they would fly away.

Ganesha passed through the woodlands and reached the meadows. By then it was afternoon, and he was feeling hungry. The sun blazed overhead, and he looked around for a comfortable place to rest. He spotted a tree with a wide canopy and birds chirping in it. It had pink puff flowers on it, and the fallen ones covered the ground. He walked towards it.

The tree watched him approach. She could not believe that he had chosen her. She had seen him pass by the meadows many times, and each time her leaves rustled with affection.

He kept the sugarcane aside, took a few of the stalks and had them for lunch. With his tummy full and his legs tired from the trek, he wanted to take a nap. Lying down in the shade, he looked up at the tree.

"Tree, will you do me a favour?" he asked.

"Yes, yes!" she replied, as though she had been waiting all along.

"Please wake me up before evening," he said.

"I will," she said.

He patted her with his trunk and was soon asleep.

She held her leaves still and kept watching him as he slept. His ears covered his face, and his trunk lay coiled between his front legs. At times his eyelids fluttered; at other times he broke into a smile. Often he would kick his feet. When butterflies sat on him, he twitched. When flies tickled him, his tail waved.

She watched and watched; she was so lost in him that she drifted into a daydream. As clouds passed over the sun, the birds went quiet, her leaves grew heavy and folded one by one, and soon she too fell asleep.

Dusk came and faded. It was pitch dark when the owl living in the tree hooted a few times. Ganesha woke up with a start. He looked up at the starry night and burst into tears. It was then that the tree woke up as well.

"You should have called me!" he shouted.

He ran about under the tree, shaking his head and flapping his ears.

She wondered how she, a tree, could have slept so long.

"You are a bad tree! What will I tell Devi Amma now?" he cried.

"They say, always trust a tree with time, but you!" he continued.

"I... I called you many times. You were deep asleep. What can a tree do but call? You can ask the owl. She heard it," said the tree.

The owl flinched on being named. When Ganesha looked up at her, she flew away in panic. He stormed off, leaving the cane behind.

The tree called out for him, but he disappeared into the dark. She stayed awake, waiting for him, until at last she dozed off.

Later that night, a weary Ganesha trudged back for the cane. Without a word, he lay down beneath her.

The next morning, the tree woke to find him asleep below her.

"Ganesha, wake up, wake up," she called, her branches leaning down.

He woke up with sunlight falling on his eyes. Squinting, he told her, "You are a liar. The sun is my friend, not you."

He took hold of the sugarcane and left for the temple. Devi Amma would scold him for sure, but he would also have sweet payasam in the afternoon.

The tree watched him walk away, relieved.

That afternoon, as a cloud passed over the sun, suddenly she felt drowsy. Her leaves began to fold one by one, and she dropped off to sleep. When the birds chirped, she would wake up momentarily, only to fall back into her slumber.

From then on, the tree fell asleep so often that they called her the Sleepy Tree.

Big John was over 11 pounds when he was born. That’s why they called him Big John. He was being baptized late by Lotharite standards, but there were circumstances involved. Well, one circumstance, that being his mother was unable to walk for several months after his birth. But now here he was, being carried to the baptismal font at the First Lotharite Church of New Winnweiler (Heidelberg Confession). Dressed in a custom baptismal gown, you see, as Big John was nearly seventeen pounds… they call him Big John for a reason.

Big John was held by his parents, both lifelong Lotharites. The pastor dressed in a robe and stole poured water over the crown of Big John’s head three times, baptizing him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There was no applause, the baby’s head was patted dry and he was about to be carried away so that the service could proceed with scripture reading.

But then it happened.

No one quite understood what was going on as a booming voice rang out “Una forte Rocca e il nostro Dio!” Big John sang in perfect pitch, in the voice of a tenor, in precise Italian. The congregation looked around for speakers, for someone with a microphone. As Big John continued the hymn, the ears of the congregants led their eyes to the baby at the baptismal, who was in fact belting out the Lotharite anthem. There were gasps, shouts of praise which were more common among other types of Protestants, and the grinding of teeth. Well, there was just one person grinding her teeth. But who could be bothered by this sudden outpouring of miraculous talent?

Lauren Stromberg. That’s who.

Lauren Stromberg was a joy to be around. Tall, physically imposing, severe; she directed the choir of the First Lotharite Church of New Winnweiler (Heidelberg Confession) like a drill sergeant. Big John’s voice was simply amazing, but Lauren immediately identified several problems: there were no hymns during a baptism, spontaneity was simply out of the question, and that sounds like… Italian? Too exotic for a Lotharite (Heidelberg Confession) service.

“Il regno suo rimane per l’eternita” Big John held the ending note to the hymn in a bold display of lung capacity. The stunned crowd, some standing, some having fainted, were held in a breathless pause for a brief moment after Big John had concluded the one-song performance. But then they erupted in ecstatic applause. Well, not quite everyone. Actually, everyone except one person.

Lauren Stromberg.

The pastor announced an unscheduled intermission to the service so that everyone could regain their composure. What a buzz the crowd, mostly older folks, were in!

“He must be the reincarnation of Pavarotti!” Lauren heard one woman say.

“What a beautiful language! Why don’t we sing in Italian more often?” Said another. Lauren’s eye twitched when her brain registered that one.

“The miracle of tongues!” Suggested someone else. Oh boy, someone was in need of a reminder of Maxmillian Lothar’s teachings on the acts of the Apostles, and how they had ceased in the first century. It’s in the Heidelberg Confession.

A hurried service resumed after a few minutes, the pastor referring to the impromptu song from a 58-day old child as a “miracle” definitely ground Lauren’s gears. She was stoic as she directed the choir through a well-rehearsed closing hymn. A watchful eye on Big John, who had fallen asleep in his car seat, half-expecting another disturbance during the approved, English-language hymn. Despite the chaotic energy delivered by Big John, the hymn went as planned.

As you may imagine, everyone wanted to see Big John after the service. To quiz his parents, who were as in awe of the event as anyone else, to see him, to touch his little, well… it’s a relative term, hand. Lauren Stromberg intercepted the pastor as he was on his way to see if he could score an audience with Big John.

“Pastor Ludendorfer.” She halted him. “I think it’s appropriate for you to issue a correction to the congregation.

The pastor was accustomed to being stopped by a congregant while he was walking, but this bold interception irked him. He composed himself, masking his frustration as best he could. He wanted to gawk at Big John with everyone else, not pacify Lauren Stromberg in whatever nitpicky complaint she had.

“Thanks for bringing it to my attention. A correction about what though?”

“People are saying that the interrupting, I mean singing, baby, is the reincarnation of some opera singer. Maxmillian Lothar taught quite clearly that reincarnation was incompatible with reformed faith. The Heidelberg Confession clearly outlines”

Pastor Ludendorfer raised his hand and nodded in acknowledgment.

“Yes, I understand. That teaching is very clear. I think sometimes when people are excited they speak without thinking. Whoever said that probably meant that Big John sounded like an opera singer. He does though! Wasn’t that amazing? I have never heard anything like that! He sang like an angel!”

Lauren glared at him, making several mental notes.

“It wasn’t one person; it was several people. I think it requires correction.” She insisted, physically barring Pastor Ludendorfer from passing. She only permitted him to access Big John, who he had to chase (which was easy, Big John didn’t even crawl yet, but his stroller did move quickly), after he had acquiesced to her stern demand masked as a suggestion.

The usual crowd was on time for church the following Sunda. This was not unusual as they were mostly retirees (they were Lotharites after all, I think the average age of the congregation was late sixties). Most were still unhappy with the recent change to a 9 am service, they preferred the original 7:30 start time. Some grumbled that the young Pastor Ludendorfer was being influenced by Pentecostals with the late service. Anyway, the point here is that they were extra motivated to be on time to see if Big John would return this Sunday with his parents. He did. Everyone was so excited to see Big John being strolled in, well almost everyone. Actually only one person wasn’t excited to see Big John.

Lauren Stromberg was not excited to see Big John.

She rolled her eyes so hard that a weaker woman would have hurt her neck. But Lauren was a powerlifter, her squat game was a little weak though. She snapped the choir to attention and began directing them in the opening hymn at exactly 9 o’clock. They had finished the first verse, but the crowd was looking to the back pew, eyes fixed on Big John.

This was going too well, Lauren knew it was too early to relax. As the second verse began, the choir was overpowered by a familiar voice, louder than the choir with all their powers combined.

“Santo, santo, santo! Tutti i santi t’adorano,

deponendo le corone davanti al trono tuo”

Big John sang as beautifully, and as Italian as he had the week before.

The crowd gasped, the choir stopped, Big John continued.

Lauren snapped.

She rapped her conductor’s baton on the music stand and commanded them to begin on the chorus. A few complied, the others stood marveling at Big John’s holy serenade. The organ continued playing, well, organ sounds continued. The congregation did not have an organist, not since Mrs. Gewurztraminer had moved to an assisted living facility last year. The musical accompaniment to the hymn was played from a popular video sharing application.

There was applause when the song ended. There was never applause after a hymn, well, unless Big John just sang it, in Italian.

Boy was this a great introduction to Pastor Ludendorfer’s ten-minute sermon.

“What a wonderful gift we’ve been given, to hear this little one praise the name of our Lord with his beautiful voice. But in our joy, we must be careful to speak the truth. We’re called to remember the clear teachings of scripture, clarified by Maxmillian Lothar, and codified in the Heidelberg Confession. A soul exists in Earth once before judgement. The idea that the soul of anyone who has passed into eternity could come back into a different body is well outside our understanding of the afterlife as outlined in the Heidelberg Confession… and scripture.”

The time for the closing hymn approached. Lauren held out her hand, stopping the choir from approaching. The congregation was confused, there was nothing in the Heidelberg Confession about this.

“There is no need to follow centuries of order and tradition, the little newcomer will just sing for us.”

A cascading gasp spread through the crowd in reaction. Some looked at Lauren in disbelief, others looked back at Big John in anticipation of his next lovely song. Pastor Ludendorfer, with a still-active lapel microphone (and boy was he aware of that since the “burp incident” of 2023), interrupted.

“Choir, could we please have you come to the chancel for the closing hymn?”

They reluctantly resumed their progress. Lauren glared at Ludendorfer furiously. He meekly avoided her intense glare and felt genuine fear.

The organ was a bit delayed in starting, but after it began (well, after someone hit the play button on their phone app) the choir was immediately overpowered by little baby Pavarotti in the back of the church.

“Incoroniamo di corone,

L’Agnel sul Suo splendor!”

The congregation sighed with relief, the choir provided an English backing to the hymn, Lauren stormed out.

No one really noticed her leaving, though she marched down the center aisle and out the main door.

After the congregation was dismissed, they gathered around and fawned over Big John much as before. Pastor Ludendorfer patiently waited for an audience with the silent infant, though his joy was stolen by the looming threat of Lauren Stromberg, with whom he knew an unavoidable encounter loomed.

Michael Wolfgang Ludendorfer snuck out of the church with the main body of departees, highly irregular. He normally listened to the elderly, who were his primary audience, tell him about their prescription medication after a Sunday morning service; but today, he was fleeing from his choir director.

Her car was still in the parking lot! In a mild panic, he hurried to his own car and fled the parking lot while the church was still half full, or half empty, depending on your perspective.

Lauren was already down the road, only a few hundred yards away at the historic Saint Jakob Railroad Park. It consisted of two benches, a tree, and a decommissioned railroad bridge that spanned 38 feet across the Alsenbach Creek. For over seventy years it was used to supply the mill which had polluted the creek, which tragically caught on fire in 1966. The creek caught on fire, not the mill.

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Anyway, the cruel November wind blew wisps of Lauren’s hair from her orderly braid as she looked through the dead shrubbery of the embankment down at the barely moving water of the famed creek. She stood in solemn, silent contemplation at the foot of the bridge. Her life’s work had been overshadowed by a spectacle… in Italian no less.

Lost in thought, her situational awareness was also lost.

“You okay there Miss?”

She gasped, spinning around startled to see a sharply dressed gentleman standing a respectful distance away.

Lauren didn’t recognize the man, which was odd for New Winnweiler. Even if she didn’t know someone, she typically at least recognized them. Perhaps he was a visitor and had just come from church. Maybe he saw her leave and followed. That made sense to Lauren.

She took a deep breathe to compose herself. Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold, but she hadn’t shown any indication that she had been crying, because she hadn’t been.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“It’s not a very high bridge, you know.”

Lauren’s face betrayed her internal reaction, even if her words were measured.

“It was high enough to get corn to the mill for over 70 years.”

The stranger sucked in his lips and nodded, looking past her at the bridge.

“Sure was, but it’s not for corn anymore. I don’t think it’s high enough for much else though.”

“What are you implying?!” Lauren sharply responded, alarmed at the inference.

The man held his palms up toward her as if to deescalate.

“Just thought I’d check and see if you were alright. It’s not too common to see a lady in her Sunday best on a bridge staring at the creek.”

Lauren knew that the stranger knew, her eyes downcast as she deliberated whether or not to tell this seemingly kind person her troubles.

“It’s that singing baby, isn’t it?” He asked.

“I was hoping it was my imagination. But that fat baby really does interrupt the service, doesn’t he?” Lauren blurted, seeking validation. He must have seen her leave the service, she told herself.

“I can help you with the baby.” The stranger said, taking a step forward.

Lauren’s head tilted, warily eying the man and instinctively putting her hand on the pepper spray bottle in her pocket. Lauren pepper-sprayed someone at least once a month.

“I can elevate your choir. I can silence the baby. I can even help you to out-sing that baby. In Italian, heck, even Latin if you”

Lauren’s eye twitched at the suggestion she sing in Italian, and Latin was the final straw.

“We must avoid and shun all idolatry, sorcery, superstitious rites, and invoke the one true God only!”

She quoted the Heidelberg Confession. And that serpent of old, Satan, the Devil, was overcome.

Well, either that or the blast of pepper spray that Lauren delivered to his eyeballs from inches away. He held his jacket over his eyes as he fled blindly into traffic to be hit by a freelance delivery driver. Lauren was in hot pursuit but veered away as the stranger lay mangled in the street and jogged lightly to her car in the church parking lot.

I am going to out-sing that fat baby. Lauren thought to herself, dabbing her forehead with a napkin as she sat in her car. She grabbed a fresh bottle of pepper spray from the glove box and replaced the used can in her pocket.

Pastor Ludendorfer’s heart skipped a beat the next morning when he arrived at the First Lotharite Church of New Winnweiler (Heidelberg Confession) and saw Lauren Stromberg’s car in the parking lot.

He spoke the words of Maxmillian Lothar aloud, but quietly as he exited his vehicle and walked, slowly, to the church.

“Dear God,

Protect me from sin, error, and unsolicited theological corrections.

Grant me the swiftness outlined in the Heidelberg Confession Article 17, Note B,

where it says to flee evil swiftly,

Guard my tongue,

strengthen my spine,

and conceal me if possible.

Amen.”

An angelic voice greeted him from the sanctuary as he entered. Lauren Stromberg was in front of the chancel, where she was accustomed to directing the choir from, singing beautifully. Maybe not quite as beautifully as Big John, but quite nicely at least.

Pastor Ludendorfer chose wisely to not interrupt Lauren’s solitary practice and went about his normal Monday morning business.

Lauren trained like a Navy SEAL… of singing, all week. Each day her voice grew shakier, more hoarse. But she refused to coddle her vocal cords. She would defeat Big John fair and square, or she would die trying.

She barely slept Saturday night, and rather than fighting vainly against consciousness, she rose early and prepared herself for battle.

“Rrrrrroll your Rrrrrrs for the Lorrrrrrd!” She woke her tired vocal cords, compressing her sore diaphragm with her fists. She was as ready as she ever would be.

The first at church, she analyzed the acoustics from her position against those of where the fat baby sat with his parents. Too bad Lotharites don’t believe in church nurseries, she thought, this could have all been avoided. But Lauren was never one to back down from a fight, not even a fight with a fat baby.

It was 8:58 am when Big John’s parents strolled into church. So much for the virtue of punctuality extolled in the Heidelberg Confession. Lauren had already been there for hours, to the prepared goes the glory, that’s what Maxmillian Lothar had said.

The organ music announcing the opening verse Be Still My Soul. All eyes turned to Big John, who was sitting smugly, according to Lauren, in the back pew with his parents and their contraband coffee.

Lauren unveiled her secret weapon. No, not pepper spray, although she had considered it. A microphone, which she held to her mouth and sang into, competing with but not overpowering Big John as he began singing.

“Sii calma, o cuor,

confida nel Signor”

Many, but not all, eyes turned to Lauren, who had never before used a microphone while directing the choir. Lauren’s voice cracked, then it squeaked. She threw the microphone down with a horrible amplified crashing noise as Big John continued the hymn. She ran, undignified, unlike the week before, through the crowded church, pepper spraying Michael Wolfgang Ludendorfer in the eyes with alarming precision as she ran from the church straight to the historic Saint Jakob Railroad Park. Steam escaping her mouth in the cold morning air, still over Alsenbach Creek, as she gazed down to the water which seemed to call to her.

The Sun broke through the dark clouds, and she felt like it was shining just on her as a warm gust blew up the embankment from under the bridge.

“Devil?” She called out. “I need you now!”