Thu, 19 May 2005

Owen And Rissa Save Their Pennies
It was a gradual but unmistakable process, the cartooning of the park, in which trees which had held their ground since before electric light now were potted in striped pots with handles smooth and well-formed as refrozen ice, which meant you could lift the trees and move them to aid in shading, or all to one corner for epic weekend-long games of wiggley-poo (of which more will be elaborated on later). Beneath the trees one often found eggs as large as your head which never seemed to hatch, but would hum when you held your ear to them, and should you be wise enough to be in the lying-down position while listening to such egg-humming, a drowsy sort of stupor would find you like a puppy in the snow, and you’d pull up the grass as a blanket and the leaves would move in such a way as to make puppet-shows from phosphenes across your eyelids. It was little suprise the park became a frequent place for lounging and pontificating, which is why Owen and Rissa were there, as their plans to save the world had not yet made it out of research and development. The notion of whether or not the world even needed saving came up and was quickly dismissed as irrelevant; a quest, being a quest, needs no such validation. Equally dismissable were notions that they weren’t cut out for such efforts, for although they had no superpowers per se, they had an admirable collection of non-super powers, summed up by Rissa’s quoting Drunken Master II: “A little drinking to help in crime-fighting is okay.” Plus, the gradual cartooning had assisted them with a super-idea, on which nearly all of cartoon physics is based: the notion of compressed space, or c-space. It’s with c-space that you can fit all of a tree’s roots into a teakettle without difficulty.

Here’s an example: here comes Paul Apostrophes, his head in a jar, which seems awfully improbable, until you consider that the jar is chock-a-block fulla c-space, where all his innards are stuffed. It’s c-space where your car keys went that one time, where the rabbit fits when the hat’s smashed, where all those bullets fired in late-night steroid-action movies go instead of hitting the leading mensch. It’s another discovery that would have made the front pages, had it not been for the control of all media from global networks to apartment complex newsletters by Sarah and Karen, secret rulers of the universe and owners of Rent ‘N Putt Video and Mini-Golf, whose courses have become world-renouned in mini-golf circles due to their use of c-space (which is why you can never make that fucking eighteenth hole waterfall shot). But how, you ponder, will the deus ex codex of c-space help our young heroes fufil their superheroic destinies? By use of what may possibly be the quintisential c-space embodiment: the portable hole, which are literally a dime a dozen across the swings and past the jungle gym at claude’s improbable mechanical delights, of which we take a slight digression to speak at some length of subjects pertaining to. Claude sells balloons to chilren ready to run from home, for which they give him stones they’ve held in their shoes all these years, stretched out in kid-time like a sweater you’ve outgrown. the kids take the balloons and go up, into the sky, out and away, until you can’t even see them by squinting. I’d tell you where they go, but that comes later in this story, and there’s no need to blow my whole proverbial verbial wad here.

Anyhows, so Owen and Rissa have this portable hole, which they’ve gotten no end of yucks out of by tossing it in front of passerby on the street, who fall all the way to China before being slingshotted back to where they were, the hole yanked away on yarn, leaving them a bit jetlagged but no worse for wear, mostly. Owen, giddy with power, tried to wear the hole on his stomach as a way of passing the middleman of his mouth in the eating process, but decided it felt “creepy”, at which point the two decided to get serious as to the potentials of the hole, which mostly brings us to now.

“Well, there’s no point in overshooting our abilities, so mayhaps we should start with saving something smaller than the world. Like oatmeal, say. Or Tenessee Ernie Ford! He could use some saving!”

“No no and no. Better we save somebody who really *needs* saving. And somebody close by, because we’ve got an eight dollar expense budget until that Macarthur grant comes through. Think locally.”

“Oakeley-dokeley.”

“You’re this close from being off the universe-saving team, Owen.”

The logical solution, certainly, was right across town, where no less a county-wide superstar than Fast Eddie Satan was serving an extended summer-school sentence for skipping 87 days last year while on tour. His partner, Merle Skyfish, got his mom to write him a note, explaining how he had “the nerves”, which was plenty suitable for his school, the Cedar Valley Learning Collective, a freedom-intensive program for autonomous self-generative processing teams. Ed, however, was doing an extended stint at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, which is essentially a holding-pen for pre-teen visionaries and other problem cases. The missed days being problematic enough, Ed then compounded his woes via a run-in with his Consumer Responsibility instructor and a baseball bat, leading to his all-weekend “study sessions” with Mater Tenebrarum, the most vicious of the sisters. The school was positively impregnable from the street; the only way in at all was through the head office, which was only open to outside entrance during special events, such as dances. Saint Jude’s day was fast approaching, and so it was that Owen and Rissa spent the remainder of the day in the park, misdirecting children into hile Rissa backed him up on a bass Merle had lent her for the occasion, with percussion supplied by a bus fed on sugar and cooking oil trying to backfire the poison out of its fuel line. Aware there wasn’t much time before the unholy terror this spectacle induced wore off, she led the dazed sisters (and their first echelon of toadies, the Bown-Shorts) on a conga line directly inot the Enclosed Infinite Space, kicking the door closed behind thed running back to the gym in order to find Ed and ditch this creepy-ass school. Ed, unsuprisingly, had set out the dance by claiming religious practices forbade him to come within thirty feet of girls, opting instead to hide out in his room and play endless games of Devil Pig. Springing Ed, thus, was as simple as opening the door and leading him out through the pandemonium, despite Ed’s pleas to let him finish the End of Assyrians.

There is no end to the tests and demands on modern superheroes.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #