DANGER MOUSE:
A VIVID PICTURE
WRITTEN BY ZARIUS
Disclaimer: Danger Mouse (2015) and all trademarked characters are property of Fremantle Media and CBBC
A lazy Sunday afternoon, and for the world's greatest secret agent, the morning had all been a matter of time.
The evil King Kong Brunel had travelled back to the past to the creation of the Danger Agency and prevent Danger Mouse from ever passing his rigorous training exercises needed to qualify as a secret agent, but in attempting to do, he failed at one task and had succeeded in ensuring Danger Mouse had never met Penfold, his anxious little assistant.
And what a success Penfold had been without him.
A successful businessman with an impeccable timeliness thanks in part to enlisting the use of Brunel's time machines to ensure he was there for a meeting.
Danger Mouse had felt somewhat guilty of prying Penfold away from all of that, just so he could mop up after him and hand him the keys to the Danger Car.
Still, time and tide wait for no man or mouse to make their mind up, not when the fate of the very world was at stake.
There were other pressing matters to contemplate besides that.
And he knew he needed a moment of meditation, maybe even medication, to work it all out.
For that, he downed a couple of pills (and no, confidentiality issues means I'm not at liberty to divulge what kind of pills) and then called the department to enlist the services of a dear friend of his.
Within a few seconds, due partially to being able to fly, and partially because the story needs to get to the point quicker, she appeared.
"Danger Mouse...you wanted to see me?" asked Danger Moth as she entered the lounge.
"Ah yes DM...Do come in" DM said.
"Oh you're not doing that again are you?" said Danger Moth to the narrator.
Yes.
Yes, me.
No I am not doing that again.
"So you're just going to call one of us 'DM' this time?" said Danger Moth
There. See?
"Oh very well, I'll play my role in this little tale then" Danger Moth said, sitting down as DM rested his head on her lap.
"I need one of your patented head massages while the pills kick in, you don't mind do you?" DM asked.
"Oh I don't mind at all DM" she said.
Ah, you did it again. Don't do that DM.
"Which one? I'm DM" said DM...I mean Mouse, I mean...oh fiddlesticks.
"I love it when we confuse him like this" Danger Moth replied.
"Well it's better than the confusing goings on in my own mind" Danger Mouse replied.
"Then just sit back, relax, let me massage that big old head, and you can tell me what's on it" said Danger Moth, proceeding to sooth Danger Mouse's migraines.
"I was thinking back to the last time Kong mucked about with time travel" he began, "Penfold and I retained the memory of those events as they were before the changes. Penfold said it didn't make any sense, but today I feel compelled to make sense of it, because I woke up this morning to find I remembered the timeline where I had met Penfold, but the changes had already occurred so he was doing his own thing with Penfold Corp and I was left with a very big mess to clear up"
"It all comes down to encoding...I don't want to see convenient writing, so I'll just say that. Everyone has it to sort out their every day memories in regular life" Danger Moth explained, "In order to preserve an event in our perceptual systems, we have to live within the moment and convert it into something that can be remaining a persistent imprint. I've found strong amounts of stress levels can withhold the image in your head.
Studies show that we do a worse kind of encoding when our attention is diverted"
Danger Mouse was learning this first hand as he got perhaps a little too comfortable with the way Danger Moth's hands were pressing softly against his temple.
He felt his heart flutter and a soothing sensation course through his body, he began humming a few merry tunes to himself as Danger Moth continued to give him a lecture.
Danger Moth sensed he was personifying her explanation and didn't bother to interrupt herself just so he could ask her to repeat herself.
Besides, she quite liked the tranquil and peaceful sight of her dear friend, high on pills and on ego, trusting her implicitly with sorting his own head out.
"Distraction causes our confusion in our context of events; my advice would be to shut off all distractions in order to encode things more precisely. If we are motivated to remember things, we will be better at it. Especially if you're motivated at the moment of encoding rather than at the retrieval. Penfold must do have an awful lot of important things for you in order for the encoding to bypass even temporal interference"
"Well he always does do a great deal of washing up" Danger Mouse remarked, half-listening.
"Oh that's very much something you often forget to remember" Danger Moth joked.
"You know, that's a song by the Bee Gees" said Danger Mouse, by this point close to zoning out altogether.
Danger Moth took the opportunity quietly disembark from the sofa and place a blanket over Danger Mouse and tucked his head neatly behind a pillow. She stared intently at him for a while, tempted to use a mobile viewfinder to capture the moment, but instead choosing to rely on her perceptual faculties to put together a vivid picture.
If time went out of step again, she wanted to have the necessary motivation to remember life as it existed now, so she could put it back in place.
A quiet part of herself snuck into the back corner of her mind a little thought shared by novelist A.S Byatt. The very same thought she had told a younger version of herself.
I'm going to remember this