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Adorable Armageddon: Part 8: An Epic Finale So Epic it Explodes with Epicness

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***Censor’s Warning: This Ending contains high levels of Epicosity.  It has been manufactured in a facility that also processes Raditude, Gnarliness, and may contain Soy.  Do not read if you are sensitive to peanuts or irony.  Avoid completely if you are illiterate.***

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I have just been given a few new sub-topics to add to the overarching topic of ‘Love’.  The list now stands at: Elephant, Pitchfork, Music, Magic, Clue (the game), Bears (adorable), Fireworks, Pantslessness, Blizzards, Time Limits, and, now, Hiccups / Population Growth Solutions-Censorship-Octopuses-Biospeleology.  Let’s see how they fit.  (This story has been written from scratch using the previously listed topics, which were given in comments made by voters who agreed that I should be awarded a speaking position at an upcoming Calgary Arts Development PechaKucha Lecture Night.  You can discover extra information about the candidates, the lecture series and the crowdsourcing used to create its line-up of speakers and topics at CalgaryCulture.com/Love)

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Frederick fumbled with the pitchfork game piece.  He was trying to coordinate quite a daft maneuver for a two-foot tall, fingerless, toe-less, knee-less teddybear.  In order to advance mercilessly and murder his best friend, he had to start by simultaneously swinging his right leg half of his body length up onto the first step of the stairs leading to the mezzanine, while awkwardly pulling the tiny pitchfork from where it rested, cradled in the loop of his tag.  The frustration brought on by the sequence of movements served nicely to deepen his desire to kill.

Clarence desperately pleaded, from his position atop the mezzanine, “Please hurry, Frederick.  Save me.”

“Save you?” Frederick replied with a snort, struggling now to mount the second step.  “I’m coming to kill you.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”  Clarence’s voice was a frightened tremor.  “It’s not funny.”  His face was being pressed closer and closer toward the shiny metal casing of the bomb that sat on the broken yellow couch in front of him.  The weathered, evil man that held him captive was forcefully pressing on Clarence’s back, while eagerly repeating, “Pour your magic into it.  Make it explode.  Bring devastation to your people; Popularity to mine.  Pour your magic into it…” It became a chant.  The man was consumed.

Frederick snarled, “It is not funny.  I am going to kill you.”

“Please don’t.  I’d like to live.  So, save me.” retorted Clarence.  

“I would, if you hadn’t betrayed me.”

“How did I betray you?”

“I thought you were dead.”

“When?”

“In the Magic Shop’s fireworks warehouse.”

“Is that what that place was?”

“Oh, don’t play coy. The elephant told me all about your plan.”

“Elephant?”

“Yes, elephant.  The one that saved you.  The one whose death you are responsible for.”

“The elephant was there?  I wish I had noticed.  I really wanted to see him.”

“Of course you did.  How else were you going to find an animal magical enough to set off the bomb?”

“Set off the bomb?  What bomb?”

“Don’t do that! I hate it when you do that.  I hate it when you play ignorant.  That is the thing I am going to miss least when you are dead.”

The man was still chanting, seemingly oblivious of the conversation the two teddies were having—a conversation that was keeping the teddies, themselves, oblivious to the conversation mounting amongst the magicians—one that had started when a pimpled boy uttered, “He’s got a wand.”

“I’m not playing.  I don’t understand anything.  I swear!”  Clarence’s fear was reaching a fever pitch. Frederick was getting closer.  He was only three steps from the mezzanine’s patterned floor, and the murderous tone wasn’t dropping from his voice.

“Don’t. Don’t! Don’t you dare do that!  Don’t you dare keep lying to me.  You’ve lied to me all my life.  You lied to me today.  I thought you were my friend.  I thought you were dead.”  He was just two steps away now. “I thought I should save you.  I thought I should risk my life for you at any cost.”  He was swinging his leg onto the last step.  The magicians were grouping. Whispers were flying, “If we could only get that wand…”

Frederick drove on, “I saw that explosion.  I listened to that dying elephant, and I decided to come after you.  But I get here, beaten and chained, and what do I find?  You are the centre of all of this.  You were here, with that man.” The man’s chanting was getting fiercer.  Frederick had his second leg on the last step.   “How long have you been plotting this?  How could you be plotting against your own kind?   How could you lie to us all for so long?  How could you lie to me?  I really thought we were friends.  And now I find you have magical powers.  And you are just going to set off the bomb yourself.”

Clarence cut into Frederick’s speech.  “I’m not magic.  I swear.  I’ve never done a magical thing in my life.  And we are friends.  We are!”

The man’s fierce tone was driving at Clarence.  “Pour your power into it, now!  Pour!  The Security Council’s kegger starts in an hour!  I need this explosion now!”  Clarence’s face was smashed hard against the side of the bomb.  He talked through the pain.

“I don’t know anything about the bomb.  I’m sorry I put your life at risk.  I didn’t mean to.  The last thing I saw was the exploding fire, and then I woke up here, tied to that chair.”  Frederick looked to a chair that was resting on the edge of the mezzanine.  In a moment he would be next to it; and then only steps away from killing Clarence.

The scared teddy continued as the man yelled louder and harder at him, crushing his face against the casing.  “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me, Frederick.  I want to be friends with you forever. I love you.”

The magicians were amassing below. 

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” shouted Frederick.  His belly was lying on the yellow-patterned floor, his legs were nearly under him.  “You never loved me.  You only lied.  And before you cause anymore damage to anyone’s life, I am going to kill you…”  He was on his feet.  “…with your own beloved pitchfork.”

Frederick raised his two elbow-less arms, the pitchfork clinched firmly between his fingerless paws.  The blood of the guards he had previously slain was dripping in dark, oozing blobs from every tuft of fake fur on his body.  His stare was vacant of empathy and completely resolute.  He looked like a primeval force of terror.  Clarence focused on the pitchfork.  Frederick began to run, growling with the fury of a broken heart.

“The pitchfork!” Clarence cried, his words were desperate, fast, and hopeful.  “It’s my favorite because it cured your hiccups!”

Frederick stopped.

His face was still askew with murderous intent, but his body was frozen with curiosity. 

Clarence pushed out his words through pain—the man’s hand was pressing ever harder on his face, and he had added the cold barrel of a gun to his threats.  Clarence was concerned only with Frederick, “Before we went to the magic shop, you asked me why I carry it everywhere with me.”  The man kept yelling.  “I carry it,” The magicians started to rush the stairs in a frenzied pack.  “Because when you were in the hospital with those hiccups,” The gun barrel prodded the hole in Clarence’s head. “nothing was helping you.  No medicine.  No treatments.”  The mass of magicians was fighting its way to the top of the stairs. “You almost died.” Frederick’s face began to soften as his mind wandered through memories. “But when I showed up with that game of Clue, your prognosis started to change.”  The first magician reached the platform.  “We played it every day.”  The gun barrel broke through the melted stuffing in Clarence’s head—it poked into the space behind his left eye, he went blind, but he continued, “And when you discovered it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the pitchfork, you were so happy…” Clarence’s body began to collapse. “…your hiccups disappeared.”  The magicians were racing towards Frederick, Clarence, the man, and the bomb.  “I thought…” His lips were growing numb. “if I carried it with me…” A bullet blasted out of the barrel, ripping through the teddy’s head, passing out his lower jaw, and embedding itself in the broken frame of the yellow couch.  Stuffing and strings flowed out of Clarence’s face, and one more sentence gurgled out,“…I would have the power to save you from anything.”  His body slumped, lifeless.

Frederick gasped for breath.  His entire world slowed down.

He could see smoke rising from the gun, licking the air with its deadly aftereffect.  He could smell the gunpowder mixed with the scent of burnt cotton.  And he could feel his friend, his best friend, his only true friend, sinking onto his hands.

Frederick looked down with gaping, wide eyes to where his paws felt the pressure of Clarence’s inanimate body.

He caught a reflex in his throat.  He wanted to vomit.  He wanted to rid his entire soul of the memories of this day.  But most of all, he wanted to undo what he had just done.  He wanted desperately to not see his paws clenched around that pitchfork game piece—because it was embedded deep in his best friend’s chest.

Everything became masked in a haze.

Frederick could feel the magicians grabbing at him, pulling with countless hands at every tear in his fabric.  He could see the man with the deeply lined face pull the gun from Clarence’s head, and with an open, furious mouth, point the barrel directly at him.  And he could see, in the last moments before the flash, Clarence’s body being lifted at the chest by a grouped series of feathered, furred, and scrawny hands, pointing the pitchfork game piece, through his best friend’s chest at the man who was now diving backwards behind the cover of the shining bomb, shell casings leaping jovially from the thrusting barrel of the gun.

Everything turned white.

*     *     *     *     *      *     *      *      *     *     *

Frederick awoke with a start.

He furiously patted up and down his body, searching for holes and tears and bullet wounds.  He found nothing.

He turned his attention to the room around him.

It was dark and cozy.  One wall was plastered with peeling yellow-patterned wallpaper, and he was lying on the same comfy, yellowed couch that he had found discarded on the side of the road one day, many years ago.  It had, ever since, been his favorite place to sleep.

He searched further around the room.  There he was!  There was Clarence!  Sleeping soundly on the worn blanket he had cherished since his youth—the one with the fireworks and elephants on it.

Frederick ecstatically pounced on his friend.

“It was all a dream!  It was all a dream!”  Frederick sang this revelation at the top of his lungs.  He was jumping up and down on Clarence, joyously shaking the sleeping teddy awake.

“Whaaaat?” Clarence moaned, groggily.  “What is so very important?”

“It was all a dream!” Frederick continued to rave.  “No Iranians.  No bloodbath.  No dead elephant.  No nuclear war.  It was all a dream!”

Clarence rolled over, batting his eyes open.

“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”  Frederick’s scream shook the cave.

“What happened to your face?”  He questioned Clarence.

“What do you mean?”

“Your whiskers, they’re all grey. —-AAAH!” He screamed again.  “And your head, there’s a scar of stitches on it.  Let me see you jaw!”

Frederick was startled.  There was a stark series of threads sewn into the bottom left of Clarence’s jaw.  Frederick ran for the opening to his cave.  Clarence stumbled along behind him, entreating Frederick to come back into the cave.  He met Frederick at the outside edge of the rock hollow.  Frederick was frozen still. 

In the distance there was a receding blizzard; it’s violent swirls of snow still visible from their cave.

Clarence spoke first. 

“So you had the same dream, then?”

“The one with the elephant?”

“Ya.”

“And the Iranians?”

“Yup.”

“And the nuke?”

“You betcha.”

“I don’t think it was a dream,” concluded Frederick.

“Not at all.”

There was a tall, old man walking with a cane along a path in the distance.

Both teddybears turned to each other.  Frederick uttered their common thought first.

“Do you think we should ask him?”

“You mean, find out how much we’ve missed?”

Before they had nodded their heads in agreement, their names were called.

“Clarence! Frederick!”

The man was waving at them in the distance.  His voice was gravelly and thin, but you could hear his excitement adding fullness to the tone.  He hurriedly limped his way toward them.

They ogled the man with trepidatious curiosity.  Then turned to their cave, and ran.

Their joints were stiff and their muscles creaked, but they pushed as fast as they could into the back corner of their cave, tucking themselves tightly under Clarence’s elephant-firework blanket.  The teddies trembled, hoping the man wouldn’t come in.  And hoping that if he did come in, he wouldn’t discover them under the cloth.  Neither dream came true.

The boys screamed as the blanket lifted from over their eyes.

The man with the deeply lined face was staring at them.  He had the same dark scars that they remembered from their ‘dream’, and the same deep eyes, but his demeanor was calm and friendly.  They didn’t trust him for an instant.

“You’re awake,” he said. 

The teddybears replied by smashing soft fists of fury against his kneecaps and lower thighs.

The man chuckled, “Ho. Ho. I wondered how you would react when you finally woke up.”

They smashed a little softer.

“Well, the storms are clearing.  I figured I’d pop by and see if you two had opened your eyes yet.”

Their smashes were barely half-hearted now—maybe only quarter-hearted.  They were being lulled into submission by curiosity.

“Come,” he said, motioning the top of his head toward the opening of the cave, “I think I have a lot to tell you.  Let’s walk.”

The man leaned on his cane, turned, then made for the open air.  The boys glanced at each other, baffled, then slowly picked up the trail.

“The winter storms are finally clearing,” spoke the man, a dry wind whipping at his face.  “Your entire nation will be waking up today.  And you will be named, heroes.”

The two teddybears looked tiny in the barren landscape through which they walked, their legs moving triple the speed of their human companion’s.  Their toe-less feet stumbled occasionally on ill-placed rocks.  They were staring too intently at the man to mind the surroundings.

“It’s been fifty years,” he continued.  “Exactly as intended.  And peace has been brought to the world.  Thanks to both of you.”  They were unsatisfied by what was being said and at a loss as to why this man, that they had known as so evil, was now giggling like a schoolchild as he reminisced about their shared past.

“We mined your Adorable deposits, but by mixing traditional TeddyBear technology with Iranian technology, we found more than we had ever imagined.”  The boys looked stunned.  “We have very good scientists.”  They were still unsatisfied.

“With the discovery, the value of Adorable dropped to nil.  So we just started giving it away.  We really didn’t want to store it.

“But as we gave more and more of it away, we noticed something, we were helping people to be happy.”  The boys didn’t understand.

“You see, when people were able to consume their daily need of Adorable without having to struggle to pay for it, they became happier.  And the happier they became, the more they were able to consume less of the Adorable, and in turn, give it to others that needed it more.  People started being happy all over the place. And then we became happy. –Imagine that.  Us! Happy!…What kind of a crazy world…?”  The man was momentarily caught in a fit of humour.

“Soon, we started being invited—not just to Security Council keggers—but to keggers all over the UN.  Then, soirees, and box socials, and even a birthday party, that first prosperous year.

“It seemed that people liked us, not just for our huge Adorable deposits, but for being happy, and making others happy….Oh, you should have seen the party we threw when Canada got voted back into the Security Coun—“

Frederick tugged at the man’s pants, with a folded paw.

“What the fuck happened?”

“You mean with the pancakes?”

Frederick was unamused.

The man’s tone turned somber.  “You mean with the bomb.”

Frederick nodded once.

The man cleared his throat.

“You blew up….We all did.”

“Then how are we still alive?” probed Clarence.

“It took us a long time to remake you.  We weren’t even sure if we could…or should.  But the power we witnessed in that single blast suggested there was something special about the two of you…And, frankly, we got a good deal on the fabric.”

“So the nuclear warhead went off?” asked Frederick.

“Yes.”

“And there was a nuclear winter?” he delved deeper.

“That has lasted until this day, yes.”

“And we are special?”

“Yes,” said the man, slowly.

“How?”  It was Clarence this time.

“There was a special reaction that occurred when the magicians conducted their power through your wand.”

“You mean my pitchfork?”

“Yes, Clarence, your pitchfork.”

“The magicians had obviously intended to aim their spell at me, and obliterate the very notion of my existence.  But they fired a moment too late and struck as I leapt behind the bomb.”

The teddybears were listening intently.

“We’ve run tests for years to figure out the reasoning behind it—what caused the reaction to form the way it did—but we’ve never reached a solid conclusion.  Some believe it was the result of using a jimmy-rigged wand, others say it was the verbage of the spell being garbled when incanted by so many voices.  And even others insist that because the spell came from the collection of magicians that you, Frederick, had just freed, and was fired through your paws and out of your heart, Clarence, using the talisman that represented the best of your eternal friendship, that the cause for the peculiar reaction was, ‘Love’.

The two friends looked at each other for a long-overdue moment of reunification. 

“Of course those ‘love’ dingbats are just high on nonsense,” cut in the man, abruptly.  “All scientific evidence suggests it was the result of sun flares.  

“Nevertheless, Clarence and Frederick, you, all the magicians, and I were spared our deaths at that moment.  The spell hit the bomb, but as the white light erupted in megaton after megaton of atomic power, we stood, impervious, and watched the most beautiful secrets of the universe unfold around us.  There will never be a day so spectacular again.”

The teddybears looked both balled over and hurt.

“Why didn’t we get to witness ‘the secrets of the universe’ then?” cried Frederick, obviously feeling cheated.

“Sorry about that,” said the man, ashamedly glancing to his feet. “I had severed your optic strings with the bullets I had just fired into you.  The shock must have knocked you both out.”

Frederick was dissatisfied.  Clarence was rubbing his jaw where the bullet had escaped his face half a century ago.

“Luckily,” picked up the man, “I was put onto the ‘Kill the TeddyBears and Take All Their Minerals” Project because I was Iran’s top biospeleologist.  All my years studying cave-dwelling organisms made me a shoe-in for the position. 

“So, after the TeddyBear state was razed to the ground by the nuclear blast, and I saw you both lying on the newly formed glass earth, still alive, I decided to protect you at all costs.  I brought you back to my lab, and, after running a few tests to deduce the differences between your anatomy and a real bear’s-–did you know you that real bears have brains but teddybears don’t?—I began imploring the Iranian government to pay for the fabric to fix you up.  And, voila,” he tapped the boys jovially on the cheeks, “you’re good as new!”

The man stopped walking.

“We’re here,” he said.

“Where?” asked Frederick.

“I think you’ll know,” replied the man.

Clarence’s eyes went wide.  They were stopped in front of a magnificent building.  He read the sign aloud.

“The Magic Shop…Disco Bar.”

Clarence was shaking with anticipation.  He turned to Frederick.  “Can we?”

Clarence didn’t even wait for an answer; he bolted inside.

As the door on the shop/disco bar swung closed, slowly muting the bassy music pounding from within, Frederick gently turned to the aged man beside him, and said, simply, “Thank you.” Then followed his friend inside.

Clarence was overwhelmed by the sights that awaited him within.  The room was booming.  An octopus was playing a piano—and a guitar, and a harmonica/808 machine.  Countless people were dancing.   

The magic shop was filled with—not just awkward boys—but, girls—ones who were magicians’ assistants and ones who were magicians themselves.  And there were Iranians—Iranians throughout the entire room, laughing and dancing with everyone.  It was a scene of utter bliss. Everywhere magicians were pulling rabbits from top hats, and letting people choose cards, and even uttering magic words like, “Ta Da” and “Abracadabra” and “Of course I’m single”—which, now, magically, was a formidable pick-up line.

But the one sight that Clarence was fixated on was a large patch of grey at the back of the room.  He pushed through the crowd, his heart caught in his throat.  Could it be?——No.

The crowd parted.  It was just an old coat rack, piled with dusty jackets.  He turned to leave, disheartened.

SMACK!

Clarence had walked straight into a pole…a moving, bristly, grey pole. 

His eyes followed the thick line of the pole up to a set of massive tusks, eyes, and flapping ears.

“Well, hello there, Clarence,” came a deep, soothing voice with a seemingly endless richness of timbre.

“They said you were dead,” stammered the teddybear; his stature, minute, compared to the towering grandeur of the animal before him.

“Yes.  They’d say that.  But don’t forget, I’m magic.”

Frederick arrived at the scene just in time to see the elephant give a wink to his friend, then disappear.

A smile spread across the drawn-in lines of Frederick’s face.  He was smiling not only because he knew that his best friend would be giddy for years to come over that moment with elephant, but because he could see, as Clarence stared at that vacant spot where the elephant used to be, a tiny, metallic pitchfork, swinging in the folds of the tag that hung off his pantless bum.

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I hope you have all enjoyed the story.  It has been a joy to write it using your suggestions.

Thank you for your intense support throughout the YYCPKN nominations.  You’ve let me dominate the crowdsourcing.

Hopefully, I’ll get to engage you with the actual lecture in a few weeks.

Check out CalgaryCulture.com/Love for all info on dates and times of lectures.

Thank you,

Steve Nagy

Adorable Armageddon: Part 5: Secret Words

Clarence’s head felt fuzzy, not, teddybear fuzzy; it was ‘punched in the head’ fuzzy.

He made to rub behind his ear, but his hand wouldn’t move.  It was caught.  So were his legs.   They were sticking straight out in front of him, planked off the seat of a wooden chair and bound with a rough, brown rope.

He couldn’t discern much in his daze, but the pungent smell of burning, fake fur was helping to rouse him.  It stung so badly in his nostrils that it seemed to shoot through the rest of his head. 

 The smell started waking his other senses.  First came taste—like metallic, yellowed eggs.  Then touch.  The fur on this wrists and ankles was being wrung raw by the rough rope.  Then sound.  There was a distant patter.  It carried a fierce, pointed melody.  And sight—just shifting blotches of white, black, and brown.  The floor was yellow and patterned.  It looked how his mouth tasted.  And the room in which he sat was not large.  In fact, it was getting smaller.  It was shrinking.  The white-black-brown swatches were closing in.  The patter was getting louder.  The pattern of the yellow floor was disappearing. The whole room seemed to be accusing him and every one of his senses.  It was attacking him with sound and crowding his sight.  He breathed his anxiety deeper, and with it the smell burned hotter through his soft skull.

 *     *     *

Frederick stared at the doorknob. He was frustrated.  There was a dead elephant laying in an olympic-sized pool of blood, behind him.  A million fireworks—no, one million, two hundred eighty-five thousand, four hundred and twenty-two—fireworks had just shot off around his head (he found the elephant’s inventory list).  And the only thing standing between him and his potentially dead best friend was a doorknob.

Sure, this wouldn’t seem like a big problem to anyone with opposable thumbs, but apparently the TeddyBear god had thought it best to leave his creatures with hearts of gold and stumps for hands.

He was desperate.  If the Iranians had managed to find the magicians and torture the true secrets of the universe out of them, the end of the world’s current social order would be close at hand.  But, maybe, he thought, the world ending wouldn’t be the worst thing.  If he, and all the other teddybears, were put to sleep, he wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of letting his best friend die.

He stared again at the doorknob. 

He had tried squeezing it from every direction.  He had tried gaining grip by slathering it with firework ash.  He had even tried smashing down the door but his fluffy, huggable, teddybear body just squished into it.

He plunked down into the pool of blood and looked longing at the dead behemoth in front of him.

Exasperated and whingeing, he mocked the unresponsive elephant, ”I’d just turn the knob with my trunk. So simple with my trunk. Everything is so simple as an elephant. I’m big, and tall, and magical.”—Magical.  The word stuck in Frederick’s throat.  That’s right, the dead mammal he was mimicking was magical.  And they were now stuck in the basement of a magic shop.  How would a magician, he thought, open a door in a magic shop?  With magic, of course.

It may have sounded dumb, but Frederick was desperate.  And if the elephant had, in fact, been telling the truth, then magic held together the fabric of the universe, not physics.  So, as long as he had the right spell, he’d never need thumbs again.

He stood tall on his leather feet, stretched his arms down to the floor, and narrowed his eyes on the door with all the determination he could muster.

“ABRACADABRA!” he shouted.

Nothing moved.

“Ah, fuck it!” he cried.

Frederick almost sulked, but caught himself, and decided to give it one more try.  He thought of everything any magician had ever said to him before, and fired that back at the door.

“PickacardWhere’dtherabbitgoPutyourfingerinhereOfcourseI’msingleTaDa!”

SLAM!  The door flew open.

Frederick didn’t know what combination of secret words had tripped it, but he wasn’t about to stand around to figure it out.

He pushed immediately beyond the doorway and into the long, white-walled corridor beyond and started running.  Just running.  He had no idea where he was going nor how he was going to find his friend.  But he knew that as long as he was running forward he was getting closer.

Little did he know, he wouldn’t have to run for long.  Because the perpetrators of all of his problems were about to find him.

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Are you cringing with the suspense? Have you laid awake at night fearing the end of the Teddybear world?  Do you find yourself confused by feelings of loss and hunger?  If so, tell me how you want the story to end.  There are three more installments left and so far you have told me to include ‘Magic’, ‘Elephant’, ‘Music’, ‘Clue’, ‘Pitchfork’, ‘Fireworks’, ‘Blizzards’, ‘Timing’, and ‘Bears’.  Now it’s time to tell me how you want it to end.  

Go to yycpkn.ideascale.com, register, then click “I Agree” next to “Steve Nagy” and comment on my listing.

See you tomorrow, for the next phase of the Adorable Armageddon!