Note: Spoiler alert - The third act of Heist Buddies was about as intense as the RJ x Heather content gets in this episode. I wanted to add in a satisfying reward for anyone sticking with the fanfic thus far.
Remember in the Prologue when I said I was shooting for a 10k word average? I gave myself a mission with this chapter. Like the last 3 chapters I gave this one its own little narrative, but this time it's much more condensed and minor. I'll leave you to judge the word count.
My new writing approach allows for more storytelling. "Show, don't tell" is an overrated philosophy. Not every point needs to be illustrated, I've realized. Sometimes it's better if the reader gets to decide how they want to illustrate it.
This is a very humble chapter. I like it.
Ep. 1, Chapter 6: Awesomeland (~14k words)
"Let me tell you a story of a voice. Always there, never in fear, but suppressed by the CHOIR OF THE WORLD. Following one ecstatic adventure, the family reunites in the midst of a fantasy one turtle never expected to claim reality. He hardly seems to care. But alas, one girl with one voice looks to make one day paradise. Does she know limits? Hoot hoot!"
ACT I: She/Her
"Dad, why can't we go meet them? You've never, ever let me-"
"Heather, we've discussed this many times! We stay in the trees for our own good."
"I just wanna talk to some animal, dad!"
"...When you bloom, Heather, you may… finally understand what I-..."
...
Through the wild woods, RJ, Stella, Hammy (and Fred) hurl themselves over the top of a hill, leaving a smoke-infested sky as their legacy. They heave a giant sack of food over their heads in a tablecloth.
"Hammy, you are God's second child for this!" RJ congratulates him for his help.
"The place is this way, my friends!" Tiger, full of breath, now guides them in the pack as their reporting scout. "Stella, you are going to look absolutely lovely in the tulip tree!"
Stella starts, "Is, uh, anyone gonna ask Hammy 'bout the-?"
"I'm layered with infectious diseases like a birthday cake!" the tiny wood tick on the squirrel's shoulder announces.
"His name is Fred," says Hammy.
"Great. Another bug in my life." Speaking of which… After they bounce down the broad slope, Stella steadies her feet at the base of the forest. The opossums pull themselves, or each other, in line at the back of the hasty train. She squints her lips at them. "Tig'uh, hold this for one sec'." In the meantime, Stella chooses one side of them, instead of the 50-foot canyon left between their sluggish feet.
She hooks Heather by the grumpy ear and whispers firmly, "Really. Heath'uh. Yuh shouldn't of gone on that trip. Don't matter how show-off pretty-prancin' you can get with yuh dance moves, whenev'uh yuh gets reckless with the raccoon, all it's doin' is piiiissin' yo dad off."
She leaves it at that, giving Heather a word to pout about, and Ozzie some curiosity to delve into as well. Ozzie puts himself nowhere near the vicinity of Heather, arms folded behind his back. His neck stretches forth like a turtle, although Verne's incongruence they've yet to meet. One foot clomps after another across the mud. He scratches over his shaved, burnt back, picky and scabbed between the edges of every wrong part of the kitchen stunt Heather attempted with RJ.
Then Stella joins Tiger's shoulder under the food load. "Sheeee's a lil' spider clingin' on the raccoon's web."
"I do hope this doesn't keep up, my passion flower. I know it nips at you so."
Ozzie glances once at Heather. Her zombie-like arch of a wilted flower. A patch of fur burnt off on the back of her arm, and the burger-shaped birthmark underneath. Neck bent out crooked like Stella's. How naturally then does it water itself after staring at the others for some time. He envisions those gears turning in her head, or whatever they may be. Her chest rises over her stomach and her eyes lose that cynical focus, now dream-filled, star-studded, and innocently naive, but never so sure. Then he looks at her tail.
A father's tail yanks back on hers just as she throws her arm out to offer assistance to the payload of snacks. "You can't be for real." He's knotted their tails together - She must be in kindergarten. It's shown in the way he wags a finger at her.
"Nuh-uh-uh, you are not running off from my side anywhere in this forest, do you understand me?"
"Cool. My feet're killing me." She makes the delivery of her attitude spicy as she shakes her end at him: "So go ahead 'n spoil me, dad." She lets herself fall to her stomach into the dirt behind him. Not surprisingly, Ozzie drags on without trouble.
Her nose makes a great plow. "'Course I weigh (like), NOTHINGGG, la-aaame. Like I don't even exist sometimes…"
"Don't say that - You did a good thing for the family this morning," Ozzie admits, "And I care so much about you, you just need to… sense your limits," he expresses. "Feel the 'possum inside you and leave things to their own."
What makes her eyes roll and put a badger inside her instead.
"That means over the Hedge, in this family, in- AUH!" The herculean strength in Heather's tail yanks his ghost out of his naked back end, nowhere in synthesis with the frailty of her limp body in the dirt. It keeps his walking foot trapped in the air as her tail clenches his upward in an iron grip. Sometimes - well, all the time - the incoherency in what she proves she can and cannot do, what tools she has available and the masses of them she lacks, terrifies him.
She picks herself up and approaches his side in caution, not care. "But I kinda wanna be the family girl as (like), y'know, a full-time job."
The bundle of food, 10 times her mass at the VERY least, flies through the air and crushes her into the dense green floor.
"Oh, great to hear," RJ eavesdrops on the opossums. "Well, everyone say 'thank you Heather'. C'mon, one, two-"
"Thank you Heather," goes everyone pathetically.
Hardly gets to her feet after climbing a mountain to one knee. But she carries it - pokes holes in shadows of doubt that sway over her. The leaf-line of the roof opens up at one crook of the forest where she arises in a bruised state under pulverizing weight.
"You're right, dad. RJ already gave me one chance. I'm gonna make the world see me." She strains, "'N I'll do… whatever… it takes." One foot after another.
Finally Ozzie slicks up his heavy whiskers and lends an extra set of hands. Heather becomes amazed at the help.
Just when the others left for that house, Verne took the others - discordant to him - flailing into the brush with a grudge on his face, no grin. Outside the Hedge, a man-patrol intrudes on the no-man's-land between man and nature, one heavy boot after another. Verne organizes Tiger and the porcupines behind the nearest tree quickly. They shudder as shrub leaves shake.
A hearty laugh of a reign higher than billowing smoke fills Verne with yet another quake. Behind the tree the porcupines huddle tightly against one another, Verne's head becomes a permanent resident of his shell, and Tiger does not quite experience such trembling fear. He sticks his head around curiously, watching the axe in the chubby man's hand gleam, not feeling its sharp presence as a threat to himself, but only to those friends and family of his who cling desperately to each other for dear life, for they are not welcome creatures in the domain of humanity.
A boot shakes the earth at the corner of the stump they use for cover.
That machine of a man faces the forest with keen intent. "I heard herrr…" Jack's chin curves up in a mound against his lower lip, weighing the bottom of his mouth down on his face like 2 dripping chunks of maple sap.
"Heard- Heard who, sir?" his typical clipboard-laden assistant stutters.
"She knows her name… Jerry?" He lobs his axe over his shoulder and readies it for a kill. "My daddy calls this shell-hunting…" He slices down the tree right in front of him with one powerful swing. The axe head penetrates the trunk and misses right above the heads of the animals hiding behind it.
The tree collapses to the side, slapping them with leaves of the fallen branches. When it crashes down, the human thing towers up before Verne, rugged in the beard as fat in the stomach. Verne panics into the deep woods with the others.
As Verne's slow pace lingers him behind the rest, the massive figure is left lingering longer in his backwards view as the bushes collect, and it leaves. "I'll have yer head SOON, Velma!" the human warns him. "Your time's RUNNING OUT! A-WOOOOOO-HA!"
The kids yell for help in the back of his head. He zips around. The three kids are jammed by their long quills in the messy branches of the fallen tree. Now that man prepares to chop them. Verne gasps and sprints a mile. His fears grow larger and larger as an elevator drops, or more accurately, as he nears the doors. His feet try to kick around the closer he gets to the axe-wielding man, but then he finds the kids' helplessness to be tightened to his shell. Verne plucks the three from the tree. The axe comes slicing down next to his tail, and he gets back into the forest as quickly as possible, the kids hugging onto him. Deep into the protection of the trees, he looks at the kids and grins breathlessly. He must be traversing the forest for minutes before he gets anywhere.
...
"Verne-o? You've been standin' like stale chips for an hour, there."
Between a line of trees, Verne snaps back into reality with Lou staring straight into his face, concerned.
Penny comes in holding RJ's journal open to the page of the 'dream forest', muttering to Lou, "Why, there's the creek they were lookin' for, there…"
"And that tree's almost as beautiful as you, hun."
To anyone, it'd seem like Verne was seeing it for the first time, though his eyes haven't been able to adjust for a full hour. The forest skyline leaves ample room over a broad clearing for faint, scented streaks to roll over the littlest hills and slopes like waves. The beautiful, faint landscape arcs to the right in a feasted crescent moon around a central cliff face. Flowers are scattered about - all kinds.
A creek trails the outer side of the semicircle, making its trip from the top end to the bottom and further beyond. Past the end, it seeps farther into the feral forest, into the shadows on nothing short of a prickly fairytale cruise. It flows only a few feet in front of where Verne and the couple stand, past a rooted spectacle into the muddy divot. They spectate from outside the moat the creek provides, between a pair of rustic oaks, x-marked. Lou and Penny's kids splash each other in the calm stream at the rightmost peak of the creek's curve.
Nothing compares to the sightseeing paradise provided by the major ridge climbing up to a towering cliff from its grassy hill on the left, clothed in abundant pines guarding the clearing and the outlands of the creek. Like a slanted house roofed by a garden, light brown dirt and sediment harden together for a clay cliff face to the front and right.
In the bottom, embedded halfway into the ground, a richer younger brother to Verne's crusty Log at home sticks just a couple yards out of the curved face. Almost twice the diameter to take in. All bark, no wood - the arch of bark leaves cuttings of mystery on the hollow space within, for it appears as a tunnel, a safe gateway sifting into a trans-dimensional portal. Verne rubs his eyes at it. It has no cracks.
At the top of the cliff, ascending to the sky, a tulip tree leans bravely over the ledge, making a seat of its hunched trunk. Out of the open roof, the soft yellow radiance of starry flowers stretches higher, and higher. The top of the tree curves upwards to retrieve love from the high sunlight, honing in as a golden halo rounding the tips of bunches of tulips. The flower buds glisten.
Verne finally wipes the impressed, awe-stricken, horrified look off his face. He goes inspecting the place firsthand, not buying into whatever it's selling. Leaning his head into the giant half of the hollow log, it leads into a small, cozy cave inside the face of the cliff through a protective tunnel. "This isn't the Log…"
The creek circles, ties, strangles him until he's nonplussed. "This isn't our lake!" He shivers from how perfectly enlivening the water the kids splash onto him is. In fact, the whole area is so unbelievably pristine - indubitably superior to his own - that Verne can't stand it, clasping his head while his eyes burn from wonder. "What… IS THIS PLACE?!"
So what's stopping him from wanting it?
He rushes as fast as a turtle can towards the porcupine couple, who admire the amazing foresight RJ left in this journal.
"Ooookay." Verne goes for it in vain. "I think we've had e-NOUGH of a 'vaca' for today-"
Penny nearly impales him in her back quills after she flips away on her own page. "Why this's… just what they're lookin' for, there."
"I know, I know!" Lou bubbles high.
The little triplets beg to keep it.
Verne puts his hands out at their ridiculous reactions. "I- I saved your kids."
"Well jeepers, maybe they'd be safer in a lovely place like this!" Penny throws back in a surprisingly sudden offensive.
"We shoulda gone on the heist with Uncle RJ!" The kids rally against him.
"Oh come ON, he left us to do his dirty work. Don't you see what he's doing?" Verne sobs in his speech. "Giving up on my home- Tearing apart what makes this family special just to have something NEW?"
"Well may-be HE'S embracing the future, there," Lou asserts, arms crossed.
"And Heather would love this here if we do." The porcupines share delightful agreement in Penny's word.
So the louder they cheer, the lower Verne's shoulders get. He prepares an argument to mouth, until he puts his beaked lips together and returns his muscles to their status quo. In favor of their own, the porcupines part from his sides. His hope dies like a coaster peak just about to dip below. And he's alone again, thinking about what she had done, what quick work her musical number did to brainwash them this morning. His ride runs wild down the drop. His leadership has never lost fragility, but has now fallen to a new teenager-y force.
"…Oh no. Heather…"
"Erm, (like), AWKWAAAARD!" that very opossum screams.
Oh dear god, a giant sack of food compiled inside a table cloth bombs from the sky, crushing Verne into his shell. Most of the family rains down gracefully - Hammy, Stella and Tiger, and Heather, now dragging a limp Ozzie in their linked tails, exhausted from her energy.
Hammy bounces by. "Sorry Uncle Verne! Forgot you existed!"
"MY name's Fred!" the tick on his shoulder says.
Verne moans in his shell like a balloon slipping out air. Turns out, RJ abandoning the trip wasn't for himself.
Such a calling ushers a loud, jazzy melody on a clarinet behind him. "You sound like a happy camper."
"R-J…" That gets his head and a fist out.
"Or are you packin' some hard feelings in that shell for bein' the… mmmmm, how do I say it… STINKY LOSER-PANTS?" RJ slurps on a soda cup up in a tree with a clarinet in his other hand. That's just a taste of his prize awaiting the family. He makes his descent and rubs Heather and Hammy on their heads. "A gift from suburbia, my friends. Where one feast fits all digestive systems." RJ introduces the feast in delectable terms that revive waterfalls pouring off their tongues. Everyone works on unpacking the food excitedly.
This part of the forest already becomes their canvas, and Heather takes the lead. She takes orders and passes food in return. Verne takes his cheeks down his face. He pulls so urgently until he pops himself free and can dig his distress loose from under his stomach. "No! No picnic! Kids, don't you take ONE bite of that delicious-!" They team up chowing down a big sub sandwich, shaking their bite-sized tails at him. "NRRRGH."
"PFFFFFT, no wor-ryyyyy! Why don't you stir up that shell 'n give your hips a lil' more breathing space, huh?!" RJ shakes his own to demonstrate, lost in his giddy, victorious raccoon mode. "It'll just be for one nighhhht, c'mon, loosen up."
"And then how many nights will it be in the morning? 2, 3, 4-"
"Oh yeah?" RJ pulls out a photo. "Here's a picture of a sad dog to make my argument objectively more valid."
"Well I can't top THAT, can I?" he retorts.
Stella opposed it as sternly as Verne until he mirrored her crossed arms. Unoriginal perhaps, or outed as being the rock in feathers, her lips pinch out their strife while the wind muds her hair. Verne's measly argument brings the rest of the family to start a circle materializing around him, muttering in opposition. As a red hue begins to stir, she eats it up quickly.
She wraps her arms as gently around Verne's shell as her inner temper allows her too, calmly inching him out of the line of fire. "Now heyyyyy, man." Her teeth grit and an eye twitches beneath her hair. "Let's not ripen up sum trouble we don't wanna ripen up. Just give everyone a break today, 'kay hun'?"
There's no way he can lose her from his side too. "W-…What are you talking about?" Verne gulps, bemused.
"DON'T make tuh'day another tussle." Now, seriously, she dips his face into the white bush growing on her head. "I've already got the girl's dad to deal with, 'n I'm through with y'all's TUSSLIN'."
Verne brushes himself after her hip bumps him away into the rest of his growing multi-colored crowd.
Tiger pounces to his side. "In your standards I reckon some *spoofiness* would make this place fit for a real prince of the outdoor woods."
"You're making this too much-" Verne pleads over his headache.
Heather flicks up to his other. "So you totally need an off day. Consider it done." Aaaaand she's off. Like a fool.
Verne sighs miserably, "…This's all a joke I'm not in on because I'm old, right?"
RJ bends his head forward into Verne's face, taking up his frontal view. "We're laughing AT you, pops."
ACT II: Pink Flamingo Mini-Golf
She snaps up a phone; grips earbuds. Heather sits her back up wholeheartedly, youthfully from her seat in a tree, and flips her hair past her back. She watches RJ bounce over some lucky clovers on his way into the clearing, happening to kick some into the remarkable winds coming to her future. Time's passed, the picnic's through, the family's all pooped out but she sure hasn't flushed. Verne remains on his own island out to sea, marking the third hour inside his shell in the middle of a clover patch past the peak of the creek's arc. Mushy as the hue of his skin, ill grass makes his nest. He hardly looks warm - or loved - in his uncracked egg. For him, she scrunches her face in displeasure.
For herself, she kicks off 'Love in an Elevator' (by Aerosmith).
She patrols the airspace as deftly as a hawk by the tiny glint of her bluest eye from place to place. RJ rubs his back down the bark embedded in the cliff face and yawns. Hammy zips around everywhere on a brave nut mission, only for the acorns he does find (re-find) to turn up half-eaten. Tiger wails to no end for an escape from the natural elements: mud sucking the princely-ness from his paws, leaves blowing into his face, oh my… Sequentially, Stella can't find a pair of dandelions sound-proof enough to focus on her anger-management meditation. Dad has no game-time partner for his checkerboard - Frankly, she scrunches her face just looking at him too.
Every problem gets remedied by mixing in her own bowl. On beat the whole way home, she first heaves herself back to the Log, then two heavy speakers on the way back. Heat waves at noon boil eggs down her shoulders. Round trip? A handful of miles. To the family, the speakers explode her color emphatically over everyone's pages, while she limps over her stubby knees to haul them down.
Not a drop of ink touches Verne, left in that croaky field, visited by earthy insects. Now her knee pads ache harder.
Yet the world doesn't care to stop for her. The waves only come in floods, request after request, like she is the president and her calories are her stamp. She stocks her tummy up on energy a few months early for winter, to haul it all onto her shoulders once again. A second round trip. She holds a metal detector like a fat log with twice the weight on her little messy body just to give Hammy a new attraction. A third round trip. Tiger gets his cat climby thing in exchange for two very-broken arms and an about-broken tail on her end. Stella finds her inner peace. Akin to the pain inside and out, Heather helps the rascally porcupine kids pluck stray quills out of each others' noses after an apparent fight broke out over the song choice on the stereo.
In the end, she's to blame if she can't keep her vibe spinning with the world. So she'll put the record in and let it go. Let it go beneath the raving sun, and partake in a party for the animals. Cheese dust blasts all over each other from chip bags suited to be party poppers, spreading cheer and making the grassy floor an orange tie-dye. RJ and Heather celebrate their success in the family by jetting whipped cream like rocket trails over their heads to blot out the sun.
However, contrary to how the others rejoice, Heather pants with a stone in her lungs until her legs nearly collapse. On the slightest hilly elevation, she still has twice the merriment as Verne while her muscles reduce to none. No progress, not from any of the work she's done, over in the clover patch. The mythical creature hasn't awoken from his shell. His door is shut the whole time the sun shines through the open roof.
Her once-scrunched face drops into a gruff frown. "I wish you were here…"
XXX
"Hellooooooo younglins and oldwings!" A sturdy-shouldered human man with deep tan skin, bushy black sideburns and a mustache with showstopping swirls flickers into view on a bright television screen. His attractive red tuxedo leads up and parts at his broad chest for a white buttoned shirt and a stiff black bowtie at his neckline. "My name is Mr. Ropeley and I have INVADED YOUR TELEVISION STATION with my loyal pal Saltiney-"
From a flat post on that colorful boardwalk, a twitchy green parrot squawks to his shoulder. "SQUAAAAAWK! Some of our friends look old and crusty. SQUAAAAAWK!"
Heather lies the bow of her ship forward, stomach under the grass, watching the TV she just hooked up to a shaded corner of the new joint. She gets a trusty crayon and RJ's journal ready.
"Well you know, fun is rated E for Everyone," Ropeley explains, "And here at Fun Land we have EVERYTHING it takes to have a good time…"
Heather, pupils now bigger than space, jitters her tail anxiously to learn what she's gotta do for Verne. Anything she's gotta do for Verne. The shadows of high leaves speckle over her, and she draws out everything the human man tells her. Her art skills aren't impressive, but damn does she have the passion to paint the world.
And y'know what, just face it, the best ideas in life will be the ones you steal. So steal 'em (from your enemies, preferably!).
As Verne's first act of 'sabotage' to this mess, he sneaks RJ's spiral journal from the floor and heads for the creek. Don't be too hard on grading him - he's new to the whole 'deception' thing. He pinches the top corner in front of him and shuts his eyes. But just when he releases his judgement, he backs out on his final decision and goes right for the notebook headed into the stream. He dives into the creek and hugs the journal tightly to his chest as the water rushes and surges all over his body. He screams the whole way. The water constantly flails itself to blind him, and the rough rocks at the bottom stab relentlessly at the back of his shell. He COULD be dead.
Aside from that he can't remember a thing other than Heather's abundance in joy to find him soaked and beaten at the end of it… and not a drop on the journal clenched in his scaredy arms.
"Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww-"
Verne blinks.
"-wwwwwwwww, you saved RJ's draw-y thing? No way, I've been lookin' everywhere."
She helps him up into the grass at least, before she steals it with delight. He wasted his chance, all on backing out over something so trivial, now to stake a nail of pain in his forehead. If anything he suffers a measurable loss, for he drips colder in the morning wind than a popsicle, and now an incomprehensible teenager pesters his non-existent ears.
"Y'know Uncle Verne, I know we don't hang much but…" Heather's cone-like eyes expand into spheres. "Like, RJ kept saying you'd tear it to shreds or something weird. He's gonna be totally all like 'WOW' when I tell him that (blah blah blah blah)..."
Verne chokes on his saliva for a moment once she says that, but he plays it off down his throat. "Oh, he-heh, well y'know, uh… I had to ride Splash Mountain 7 times to get it, if you know what I-" The words 'Splash Mountain' wave around her lips in a telegram signal. The sudden firefly flash over Heather's head stuns him into panic alongside the enlightened glow that stretches the lower half of her mouth down five feet. "Wait Heather I think your dad just called-"
"Verne, my G, your brain is freakin' HUUUGE." She knots her hands together clear-sighted to her heart and declares doggedly, "I'll grab the oth-ers!" She starts drawing vigorously her gameplan in the journal.
"NO, wait, don't grab the-!" It's too late. He pushed her down the hill, and piled up with snow she goes…
Mr. Ropeley lists off attractions as they ripple in Heather's head like chain lightning between firefly rods: "...A fume ride…"
Heather takes the family down the creek on a large board of bark. Hammy's ready to snap a photo at the biggest drop.
"…and our star attraction: the Switch-Rail Swinger!"
"SQUAAAAWK! It surrounds the whole park," Saltiney recites. "You'll see it on your way in."
Hammy's eager to help Heather construct a giant roller coaster of nothing but sticks, boxes of food, and *love* around the entire clearing - something anyone could see on their way in and then some. Mostly, Hammy just likes pounding things with a hammer. Nonetheless, the family enjoys their rides in cereal-box carts.
"We have other ornaments to satisfy your thirssssst for ssssavory fun-having. Like race tracks!"
The group drives their RC cars from home just for this and, honestly, Verne has to stomp on his own tail to not yield his stern spirit to this one. Just like on TV, he stares at the little cars race endlessly in laps on the course they build out of, well, other things they pillage from home, and it steers himself to stimulation. After another grudge he stomps on his tail again. This time it hurts more. Heather's game is sucking their home dry of its belongings in favor of these attractions. He must put an end to it, he tells himself.
…His failed tricks just inspire another idea of hers. At least he's never caught. Then again, could it be any worse?
"Experience our exquisitely-themed assortment of schportsamatem with Frontier Mini-Golf!"
Pink flamingo mini-golf, close enough. And by this point things are pretty much self-explanatory. It's mini-golf. With pink flamingos. By this point too they've raided his ol' home of half of its human souvenirs by setting up this (exquisitely-themed) 9-hole course, but y'know what, everything's fine, no it's real fine. Sure, everything's fine, yeah, whatever!
All this time he's been targeting RJ's plans, as the guy's aggressive golf shots clobber him in the head over and over, but… Heather's image increases in searing brightness by the hour.
"So come one, come all!" Mr. Ropeley parades. "Take your kids, your significant other, your donkey (who may or may not be a significant other), I DON'T CARE! Just, listen to me you schmoolapoofs, you come on down for our grand opening in less than 2 months here in Chesterton, and we'll give you memories that last from the cradle… to your grave." Ropeley ends on a deep chuckle. "Oh and by the way, here at Fun Land, we never punt pretty possums into walls. Tooda-loo!"
Heather screams "YES" and finally shuts the TV off after manifesting paradise. She joins up with RJ, Hammy, and Fred at the entrance, while everyone else has a ball of a time inside. She almost trips over the balls of her feet making a delayed arrival. "Oh. Oh- Whew… Guys, welcome… to 'Awesomeland'."
Beneath an overhang of the rollercoaster's largest swinging hill, a brief stick tunnel leaves plenty of time to appreciate everything inside less feral than the forest and themselves. If it controlled the weather itself, Awesomeland would generate a food-topia of winds circling against and with each other in a set of jovial directions. She's created the one spot in the forest that always makes a sound - a ringing bell of suburban glory. Not only on the coaster and the terrifyingly avid screams from it, but fireworks of lawn sprinklers blasted straight into the sky, golf balls plopping into red plastic cups, and the swishing of ocean waves recreated right at the doorstep. Artificial amenities climb up the central cliff as vines of man-made leisure animal-suited. Sunshine pierces impressively into the eye from the peeking tops of snack boxes, some for savoring and some just for show. A vibrant show. A vibrant empire.
"Aren't you outta gas yet?" RJ surveys her despite his awe. "Maybe you should slow down on this."
"I'm a family girl now, RJ. Y'know I like it like that."
"Hammy, Fred, you're catching her once she collapses from exhaustion." He sighs and leaves. "I'm getting back to pink flamingo mini-golf. THE BALL CALLS!"
"Aye-aye!" Hammy flocks Heather's space anxiously, tempted for the longest time as she dances happily into Awesomeland, always keeping no more than an inch between his fingers and her.
Heather spends her time allowing everyone to experience the best Awesomeland has to offer. She becomes a real great hit with the kids too, who follow behind her bottom the whole rest of the afternoon, making her tail into a mother's caravan.
XXX
Tiger and Stella trash themselves at a big soda bowl (a classy alternative to a fruit punch bowl). Going straight to town on the stuff while they show each other their buttholes or whatever cats and skunks do together. 'Til now, Stella lifts her fizz-full face up to see Verne deny Heather two make-believe paper-slip tickets to the rollercoaster, and seclude himself inside the log tunnel. "Aaaaaalright, I've had e-nough." She throws her drink down and drives her feet like a tank towards the tattered wood in the cliff.
She kicks down a non-existent door into the small dirt cave. "Verne. GET out here 'n put on a smile for my gal or I will light your crying corner like in that one action movie, YOU HEAR ME?!"
"You came in here?" Verne releases from his lips in the lowness of an underground rumble. He sits facing the back wall - his insane asylum. "To the place where the sun don't shine?"
"You dunno the real meanin' of anything the humans say, do yuh?"
That snaps his twitchy head in her direction, and now that she can see his veiny eyes and misshapen neck, she knows he's gone insane, especially the way he rasps, "OOOOOO, BUT I KNOW ALL ABOUT THE HUUUUUMANSSSSS!"
Of course he does. The human mouth is called 'a blabbering sack of skin brainwashing his entire family'. And the human being is called 'an egotistical bastard who sits on a fat phony recliner of lies'. Time. Time is a lie. They always think they have more of it than they have, because they WANT more than they have, and meanwhile Verne has NEVER lost track of a single day of any season. Because y'know why? - He isn't the one hoisting up their fat butt cheeks and massaging their feet. He isn't chowing down the sugar-infested party food they get themselves drunk on, party or not. He is a forager, through and through.
The flume ride is called 'a waste of time'. The ROLLERCOASTER is called 'a waste of time'. The race track is a 'waste'; The GOLF COURSE is a 'waste'. And the picnic - OOOOOH the picnic - He never should've released his grip on RJ for one second. The humans WORSHIP food. The family all worship the humans because they WORSHIP food. They've become just like them - they're LIVING to EAT, because they think they can't live otherwise if they're not up to date on what lives the HUMANS want them to live. Even if that means shoving them out of their home, overrunning THEIR way of life and controlling every aspect of their lives from dusk 'til dawn. And they're all letting these otherworldly 'THINGS' rule their lives because they're not acting prudent enough to realize that not everything those apes do is what's 'best' for them. Every single one of those creeps wants to KILL us and not a single one in this family seems to care anymore!
He rants out this vomit hurricane at her presence. Poor Stella. If he kept it inside his shell he would've quite literally blown to bony bits. That makes for a poorer Verne. The cave walls bloat outwards at the release of such pressure inside his throat.
"Nice argument." Still, Stella nudges her elbow at him. "But have yuh tried 'beat-the-gnome'?"
A squirrel rumbles "DIIIIIEEEEE!" from afar, possibly from the deepest depths of a volcano. Stella and Verne shoot their heads out of the cave. At beat-the-gnome, Hammy absolutely dominates the garden gnome with a hammer, with Fred the Wood Tick cheering him on.
"LEAVE THIS MORTAL PLAAAANE! DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIIIIEEEEEE!" He doesn't stop until he turns it into a thousand fragments. "I am the winner of EVERYTHIIIIIIING!" He clobbers the hammer into his head and screams a roar of victory before collapsing unconscious.
Verne and Stella blink at the same time.
Then Verne beats her to the conversation. "Stella, we have one… week until Heather's birthday, and until 'the doomsday scenario'," he mutters like the apocalypse. " I know RJ's tricks, his little 'schemes'. The more time we waste the less time we've got to prepare so when the time comes he's gonna say 'oh let's make a break for it'. And the Log is as good as dead." He huffs. "I know we can't stop them. But we have to try. So I've been trying to stop him… and Heather… all day."
"And how's that goin', huh sugar?"
Verne's eyes pop farther open. His lips shrivel into his mouth. None of his schemes today ever worked. He inspired every attraction of Heather's trying to destroy them, one after another. He's rewritten par numbers on the golf course, riddled the race track with boxes and boxes of toy jacks. All in all, no one in the family seems to care about any of that either, like he was just adding in items to one of those 'fighting games' he's seen the kids play. Well, they're in it for the casual play. Because he hasn't taken a single crack at the icecube of their human-loving amusement, frozen solid and hard.
Then he put a chili bomb in the beams of Hammy's coaster… A, uh, very stable and safe chili bomb… It hasn't exploded. Yet.
"Look, Verne, don't let everythin' get yo tail twisted! I got yuh a lil' somethin'," reassures Stella. She passes an envelope to his nose. He gets it open and finds one of those human 'cards' fit for a birthday party.
"What- What is this?"
"Invitation."
"Yeah yeah, got that part. For… what?"
"Heath'uh invited you to a 'family campout' tonight in yo-ur name."
"My name? Why my-" His confusion ticks down to a cherry of warmth struck by his heart. Stella slowly folds her arms at him, high and stout on her chest below her smug chin. Life from the great outdoors finds the perfect crevice between the far treetops to shine greatly into the cave, over Verne's nose and face. "Wait, you mean I'm invited?"
"The whole family…"
Verne stares at the card - a copy written individually for him. "That… sounds pretty nice. And… oh, a bit tingly. Why-" he chuckles, dumfounded, "Why am I tingling in my tingly areas?"
"We're bringin' snacks. In just a couple hours. Catch yuh there."
Verne appears absolutely ecstatic now. "But- But that's too long to wait! How am I supposed to pass the time?"
Stella jerks up so astonished her irises start to show under her hair. But then, she smiles, and points to the core of Awesomeland. "You blind, man?"
Verne's cheeks go aglow like a child to a regal carousel.
Right away, he rides the fume ride down the creek with the family. Then the roller coaster with Hammy (And who could forget the gift shop at the end?).
And to everyone's surprise, he wins it all at the RC car track after a bet of a 2-liter and some stale potato chips. Heather never looked happier losing her winning streak and her wager of 15 hotdogs. Because as Verne's NASCAR-style ride overtakes her monster truck around the final bend and speeds on home, Verne chucks his controller into the sky higher than his spirits have climbed that evening. She - no, everyone - delves their eyes into the fountain of laughter he takes leaping from his two feet into the air.
Via a 'formal' invitation (involving a fishing hook), RJ hosts a hunt of his own on Verne's rare bout of kiddy glee. Only under these shining circumstances does Verne agree to partake. He does so with a smile.
So to end the night, Verne gets to one-up RJ's perfect run at pink flamingo mini-golf with a hole in one of his own.
"Isn't there something the humans say after they get it in one?" Verne exclaims.
"Heck yeah!"
"TOUCHDOOOOWN!" they trill together.
Er… whatever. RJ and Verne roll beside each other in the grass, filling the empty sky above them with swirling stars.
"Oh I could get used to this," Verne jokes (a rare occurrence).
"It's been a long time since I've seen lil' Verne leave his shell." RJ pinches his cheek.
"Ah well, y'know…"
"Yeah I do."
They both long for some color the scheme of the sunset has to offer. Something from each other too as they glance that way. The colors of the leaves haven't changed all month. If autumn never came again, why would they? Delving endlessly into screens over eyeballs, they insist on remaining trapped in an affable, visual conversation. The end of the sun's reign - they feel as they gaze high - means another night unbelievably routine to the last. There could've never been a gap in the past weeks at all as they rock on their backs and fix a fixture there.
As his first and only win today, Verne lets victory rain over his forehead like the lazy tips of grass cradling them on the hump where they rest. Despite losing the war, subdued to a lower dirt lump, Verne stretches his torso up not to be on top, but to belong. He expresses that now, scooching closer in. A plane comes in and roars in the distance overhead. He keeps track of it with RJ deftly, relaxed under the eyelids. It doesn't rumble anything to him. Instead, being here among leaning towers of pizza and little racing automobiles makes Verne feel no use for walking ability anymore. He settles his feet in his seat.
"Remember this, Verne? This is the good life I've always been preachin'…" RJ starts. "Haven't done a 9-hole like that since the humans were still getting VCRs."
"He-he-he… Ohhhhhh…" Amused as he is, he never understands RJ's human talk. "What- what is that, a type of disease?"
"Hey Uncle Verne, hey!"
He sits up to discover her bouncing onto his feet. Contrary to the bags shriveling up for her heavy eyes, Heather's ecstasy waves in the pink tips of her ears flicking into place at her last hop. Back to the golden ball diving into the land past the eye's limit, her face stands out completely from shadow. "I need your help on somethin', (like) come check it out."
"Me?" Must be the case if RJ's pushing him along. "Oh. Oh okay, not a problem at all, Heather. Not a problem at all…"
Over the creek, she has him return to that empty patch of camp thriving with wild flowers, where he spent much of the day, well… not thriving. Now how far he's come, to be playing the card and laying the hammer down on where the welcome sign for her campout should be.
"Sick!" she says to his pick.
Her fur brushes a softer edge over his shell when she runs out to string up the sign. A warmer crook between the scales of his skin begins to collect a bit of orange from above the trees. The hairs of hers send unusual numbness down his tail in a bubble wrap tunnel, popping down the funnel until his whole back end fizzes like sprightly-shaken soda. Everything above his neck stays apart, enraptured instead by the flurry of herself she lifts high into the trees in the golden sunset. He smells maple. Sweet, sweet maple.
Why does his tail tingle more intensely than ever, gazing from below? It's not danger. It's not deception. She presents her whole self, her full age for him, and suddenly he feels his years climb from the bottom to the top. From his toes to his head, from the cradle 'til now, his clumsy awed grin catches amusement, confusion, and else from the wind.
Finally, he mutters, "The tail's never tingled like this before…"
She gets the streamer hung up between two tall trees with long branches hugging one another.
"Wwwow… you've done all this?" Verne speaks speechless. Between dorky pillow cases as sleeping bags, cookies to go around, and a pile of earplugs ready for Ozzie's imminent snoring disaster, she's got this whole campout thing figured out.
"Yeah! Thought we needed (like) some sorta get-together tonight if we're gonna be a family again for real. Lookin' good?"
"Looks, uh… totally… awesome sauce, Heather!" Though now even his grin locks in some concern. "But don't you think you're overexerting yourself?"
Heather blows a puff and leaps to the floor. "Everyone's been telling me that all day, jeez; Just c'mon Uncle Verne," she insists more gently than her feet prancing uncontrollably.
He hesitates to let her tail take his hand.
"I don't bite," Heather assures with her fifty opossum teeth. "Not unless you want me to."
"No. I don't want you to, Heather." He lifts his hand up.
As she runs past, her tail strangles his wrist before he can react, and his face trips into the ground.
She drags him over every element of the forest, across all of Awesomeland. Through the creek, under the roller coaster, down the mini-golf course, and to the steep hill at the back of the cliff characterizing the western edge. She takes him up to the golden, weaving tulip tree. When she leaps to the first branch, tied in her tail, naked Verne pops right out of his shell.
"Woah, hey, take it easy!"
"Lol."
She doesn't stop until she's up to the highest one, ruling over the roof of the forest while Verne dangles below in a clouded scent of chilly air. The platform of the cliff peak gets farther and farther away. Verne's breaths in his nude form get wearier.
"So how far away do you think you could see the sign?" Heather fidgets a hand.
Focusing not on covering himself any longer, he takes his eyes up. After adjusting to the eagle's view, he scans over Awesomeland as the world turns, and Heather's firefly lanterns - her ideas, unintentionally sparked by him - flicker up all over as the sky warms. The cutesy campsite's big pink streamer shines brighter than any of that. "Well, I could… probably see it from anywhere in this place." And he could SEE anywhere from THIS place. For instance, he catches a glimpse of the suburbs over a mile of forest. "Hey, there's Steve. And that house you three- Wait, why's it blown up?"
"Oh, ha-hah, ha- That chapter was 25000 words, dude."
"Oh ok."
He spins himself in Heather's tail like the top of a lighthouse until, several miles down one side of the Hedge, one pine tree shivers up its great height… Wait, why? There's not a single breeze anymore. He switches on his binocular vision. The rhythmic beat he once knew of Awesomeland silences.
Then… That tree tips, and crashes into the field of the rest. Then the next. And the next. In a perfect row. The more that fall, the clearer the opaque emissions of machinery get as they cloud the empty horizon. The tingling in his tail returns to the dreaded kind. His time's running out. He gasps, and jerks himself out of Heather's grip as a pin shoots through his bare back. He falls right into his shell on the very edge of the cliff face.
Heather mentions "Being butt-naked is awesome by the way" without a single piece of his knowledge and terror.
"Can't say I agree," he grumbles as he straightens up his cover. When he does, a patch of tender pink skin on the back of Heather's one arm flashes into his attention. "Hey hey hey, uh… Is your arm okay?"
That flops a sigh out of her, and as a more panicked counterpart she tries to claw her fur over to hide it. It stings at contact, what overcomplication was her fault to begin with. "25000 words…" She hops down from the tree and breezes past. "Got other stuff to do. I'm totally fine."
"No, really, I helped your dad earlier," he insists. "I mean I'm still sorting out the language butchering going on but I think this one works…" He holds up a thing of petroleum jelly from his shell and pronounces the brand like "'Vvvase-linnnne'" in a slow dragging of his tongue.
"No time." Off on her next chore, she puts out too much of a hustle to go down the soft side of the hill instead of, y'know, jumping straight off the cliffside. "Smell ya at the campout, Uncle Verne! OOF."
"Er- Sheeee's gonna kill herself isn't she?"
"R…J?"
Honestly? EFFECTIVELY so. The pure-steel robotics inside her lower with the eyes of the sky. Next RJ met her the second the sun sunk into its den. She messes up his last shot at pink flamingo mini-golf but it doesn't mess up him. He removes his too-large-of-a golf cap and turns to capture a vision of her fur and frail shape outlined more purely in white by the moon.
She leans on a noticeable sway in her voice. "I just- I just wanted to show you we've- or I've been going through the food I- or we stole earlier and we- we got marshmallows." She doesn't even seem to be forming sentences all too comprehensively. "The campout's about to start 'n I thought we could (like), y'know. We could (like), start a fire, and… My butt's kinda like a… marshmallow…"
All of a sudden, Heather topples backwards into the grass. Is she playing dead? No. She never plays 'possum. Not anymore.
"Heather?!" yelps RJ. He almost runs over top of her, kicking against her legs when he stands over her as a doctor does. "Oh goodie, she's talking about her butt again." He gasps, "That means she's losing it! STAY WITH ME, soldier."
Her eyes droop open for him, one after another. "Heh-heheheh. Butt." Her fingers crawl over her chest as she speaks, "Sorry. Nearly hit the snooze button right there." She yawns a very yawned-out yawn. "Kinda-... Kinda looked like I was playing dead for a sec', y'know? Yeah right, idiot. WOOOOOOO-"
She rises onto two feet somehow, but it takes her falling forward into RJ's ready arms before getting balance. RJ shakes his head at the poor girl.
He tips her up. Her eyes look painfully skewed and squinted, faint in consciousness. "Holy potato chip heaven, you need to rest. Just shut those sweet eyes for me, and me n' Hammy'll handle your sleepover, 'kay?"
Heather patrols her head between him, herself, and the campsite. "What're- How're-"
"Well that's the easy part. I'll carry you."
That forces a fart sound from her lips and woozy laugh to her, and RJ has to snag her hands to keep her from tripping backward again. Her smile drops. "Hey, this- this's (like)… MY campout. My campout. Me." She's too tired to even be sulky successfully. "I'm not gonna let YOUR roguish beauty take my… vibe…"
"Nah nah, you need to stop stealing my load. Really. Quit DOING this to yourself today! It makes me feel all sad 'n mushy inside."
"Dude, I was… helping you."
"Yeah, I know." RJ pats the back of her head. He nods proudly, but speaks softly. He looks more solemn and even a tad curious now, looking down at a microphone left on the floor. The same she used for her performance 2 chapters ago - singing for him - to get the family to this forest in the first place. "I know."
She squeezes out a lump of vulnerability and acceptance forming in her throat and lets him pick her torso up with both arms. He hauls her up snugly onto his front and tucks her head over his shoulder. She wraps an arm inside the pit of his and the other around his neck, and feels her eyes slowly black out once RJ leans back, and her body tilts forward away from the pressure of gravity, the weight upon her eyes, mind, body and soul. Her forehead throbs. His shoulder begins to bob her head up and down, and her feet begin to dangle in the air as he walks.
"Night-night, RJ." She's still woozy, but her mind feels more clear letting her voice ripple the water as the nearby creek meanders by. "You're the best."
"Nighty-night, 'Possum Pal."
By the third step, her senses simmer down her head in his caring embrace. Maybe that heisting event really did break the mold for the forever future, tender it be.
XXX
Crickets chirp (only from a sound machine). Akin to this, the air fills with snores (Ozzie's the loudest) from the family, tucked away in thin pillow cases that fit at least two critters apiece as suitable sleeping bags. Secluded out over the creek, their clover camp surrounds a masterful fire, its light slowly losing out to the stars. Marshmallow cream covers the mouths of many.
…Except for Heather. Hilariously snuggled in one bag with RJ.
A bit more of an… unconventional duo occurs opposite them. Ozzie nudges Verne away, who clings tensely over his arm, asleep. Eventually, after repeated frustration, Ozzie gives in and attempts to fall asleep while minimizing any physical contact he has to endure.
Heather's sleeping breaths coming into prominence on his neck, RJ sneaks one eye open and breaks his feigned slumber. It's amazing how someone can feel like heaven but smell like hell, isn't it? The campfire crackles lower and lower.
Verne tosses and turns against Ozzie's arm until he awakens with a gasping breath and repels himself immediately from the man.
RJ scratches the good part of his back as he goes. Verne wanders anxiously, a finger in his teeth. He sits down at a small retro TV and watches the most uneventful channel ever - NASCAR - to ease his flesh. By fate or luck, RJ bumps straight into him by the dying campfire.
RJ's countenance sours. "So why're you awake?" he dumps out.
"I… just couldn't sleep. What's your story?"
"I'm just roasting Heather marshmallows. She was basically - oh what's that silly thing those opossums do, uh - dead… during the entire cookout. Dead."
"Yeah…" Verne pushes through his teeth in an inelegant smile. What RJ responds with visually isn't any more palpable to the brain. "Just tell me: She- She did all that for me didn't she?"
"Apparently so…"
"What's with the tone?"
"Um, look, I'm gonna go do some, uh… raccoon things. Leave a message." RJ escapes that question entirely and steals the TV too.
"What do you need the TV for?" Verne asks.
"...Raccoon things? Don't… don't come by. Thank you… bro-mie." On one last note, "Oh, and keep that fire going, will ya?!"
Verne stares into it as it slowly withers from his neglect. "She did all that for me…"
Just when RJ escapes into a bush, it rattles loudly. Crickets don't chirp no more. The forest goes pitch-black. The wind blows colder, slight as it is. Verne's heart jumps. Rushing creek water rumbles the floor and surges in his head as the enhanced reddened light of the fire only strengthens the darkness in contrast. He feels as though someone isn't safe. With RJ gone, Heather finds little in her pillow case to grip onto other than the case itself. She grunts in her sleep as her hands and tail search relentlessly, and it rocks Verne's eyes into a furrowing spiral splitting apart from what he once thought the night was. He feels as though he is not safe.
"You have got to keep this fire going, Verne-o," he urges himself, passionate and afraid.
Does he really? He wanders over the creek entirely, biting his nails in doubt of it. He comes to the nearest firefly jar - the first great idea inside of Awesomeland - and stares to his feet. Out of the family's way, he is alone. Everything he broke his shell over in the daytime to correct comes back to him. He won't need to pretend he can scheme like a raccoon for this one.
Now's his chance to put an end to all this madness.
He picks up the jar and just about smashes it into the ground before the dying fire blazes into the corner of his eye.
Back over the creek.
He tries fanning the flames carefully with his hands but that just leaves it smaller. Heather groans in her sleep nearby, ears shriveling up. Verne grabs absolutely everything useless he can find to toss into the fire (even the porcupines, nearly), panicked like a crippled bug.
Somehow, he hears it laugh from the center, MOCKINGLY, and he feels like this has to end, SOMEHOW. He swaps his stance away from the campfire and covers his ears, wherever they are.
That doesn't stop the same little kid he just heard crying horribly for help. Another glance and the fire's malnourished down to smoke! He has got to keep the fire going, and in the next second it may only have left to live.
Make sacrifices. Bundles of leaves, twigs, anything, ANYTHING that doesn't have to be what Heather and friends spent hours to set up. For one second he crosses the creek again, abandoning an aneurysm of anxiety. Then back. Heather's infernal restlessness sharpens until it is unbearable. He clogs her mouth with marshmallows. She eats them. He tries THROWING HER IN THE WOODS. She comes back about to sleep-walk into the fire. He hurls her into the creek and the next second a cold, wet clump of hair slaps the back of his head, Heather hugging his neck, clinging to his shell like a baby, unnerving him past the lengths his screw can twist.
Resistance is futile. A bush rustles. Verne pelts her fur down with an air dryer and returns her to bed in terrible paranoia of RJ, and thank god he doesn't return.
The fire's still crying! But then why does the past he sees in it laugh louder at him as he fills it back to life?! Over the creek. Back again. Because when he fails to do so, Heather's relentless shivering motions parallel the fire's torturous siren. The winds intensify and toughen his task. At the largest he gets the flames to burst he just about starts a wildfire. His legs agonize as far as a turtle's legs can take him.
He's soon left without resources. Obsessive over its tears, he engulfs his body in flames trying to save it, but it begs desperately to be fed while the fabric of his own skin falls apart in great trial. He can only watch, and scream, and grasp himself in anguish as the last twinkle of a spark makes its last shrivel of a whine, its dying breath, before the last light at the campsite disappears from his life forever. There is no way to ever bring it back.
In the end, a child dead, no damage done to the scheme taking over his entire family either, he accomplishes nothing.
"I let another one go," he whimpers. "Oh no." After a realization shoots up his neck, he convinces himself, "RJ's gonna kill me."
Right now RJ (secretly) watches NASCAR on TV behind Verne's back, too embarrassed to let him know they share the hobby.
"...Or worse, he'll… He'll tell everyone I keep a special vibrating toothbrush at home just to scrub my hyperrealistic reptilian BUTTOCKS! THE HORROR! NOOOOOOO! WHYYYYYYYY-?"
Just in time to catch him bawling out of his shell, RJ returns from his break.
"RJ, you GOTTA believe me, I did EVERYTHING I could to save this kid- er, fire." He crushes RJ in an avalanche of soppy apologies, but RJ gets out of the frigid snow unharmed by frostbite. He finds a lighter in his bag and starts up another rich flame as nonchalantly as that. Verne immediately silences.
"Don't let everything get yo tail twisted, c'mon man, just hand me some marshmallows."
Verne's panic died out far more abruptly than the fire, and now he's simply dead inside. "…Not a problem at all, RJ. Not a problem at all." Maybe… it's lost its truth.
ACT III: Approaching
The next time Verne jolts awake after another bout against the nightmare-scape, Ozzie drools all over his arm instead. The man snores up an avalanche. Verne's reaction remains the same. This time Ozzie shoots his eyes open too.
This might be starting to break what RJ once called "the bro code".
Warm colors in the sky arise, cool, and harden into white adornment to begin the day. What day becomes the needle in the haystack for Verne. "Ughhh…" For the first time in his life he feels as though he's forgotten, rubbing out a headache installed by the more eye-drugging palette Awesomeland offers like one TV screen he cannot keep his eyes from. "Is it 200-... 200-something…?"
Verne lost track of this day, in this season.
As he stumbles almost peg-legged in mud, Heather passes to the blue cooler, splattering her roasted marshmallows over her grubby, sluggish face. "Oh, morning Heather!" Verne greets rather jocosely. "What's the 'goods'... or something?"
"Sleep-eating." She flops all but her feet and tail inside the cooler. "No joke, RJ had to carry me outta bed."
"Is that any different from your… eating-eating?"
"Nope." On that second note, she lifts her chin over the brim as her eyes wander into a blue sky daydream. "Hey don't snitch, but when RJ holds me like a baby I'm kinda into it…"
Verne spends minutes kicking back in a lawn chair - his man-made turtle's best friend - before her comment leaves him wondering, "So where is R-?"
RUSTLE!
Rustle…
A boom overhead first, then a worrisome crackle. The hollow end of a log, a massive brown contraption, juts in from the dense brush. RJ's hands carry forth first and flip Verne's jolly mood off the chair. The lawn chair folds like a bear trap that snaps him into the mouth before he can eject. He wasn't prepared for the payload over RJ's back, but to RJ he was acclimated. Not until ten feet of moss spurt into Verne's sight crawling over an ancient pillar. Debunk architecture, a myth that all stone must remain grounded in stone. For RJ - along with the porcupines at the rear - flash alarmingly onto the screen. Cracked and chipped at the seams, it is revealed: THE Log unearthed, covered over the underside in mud oozing down their backs.
Another wound HAS to be added when they throw the Log carelessly to the ground not far from his nose. He gasps. He inhales a bleeding whiff of history. They flail their limbs about relieved, and nothing else comes from the rest of the awoken family, naively nonchalant. RJ stakes the painted mailbox of Team Oak next to it. The vibrating sound, like a wall-bound door stop, rings of bendy wood. Verne lets a tremble stutter through his bottom jaw just like that. Sensual specks - no, the opposite once again - pop all over his tail. It tingles in the old way. The bad way. Mouth full, Heather lingers unfazed, he knows it, putting a dangerous, unnerving stress over his neck like a backstabber's taking her place, no matter how tame, or even unknowing of the knife she holds. Everyone collects nearby, and on a matted island past the moat of them, he finally remembers: He's losing all of them to her. The moat doesn't protect him. It snares him. It awaits the flood. It awaits the day a beaver's dam will come down. The whole world turns red for one second.
"WEW! Can you BELIEVE how ripped a few protein shakes makes a fella?" RJ exclaims.
"You-... You all-…" Verne's ears elevate into a rupturing siren. "Are you INSANE?!"
The sun crashes through the treeline. His furrowing spout of words fully drowns the family into the blazing light of day, cranky at him already just to have been in the peaceful morning. Everyone else becomes drawn into his berserk behavior, especially Heather, baffled beyond belief.
"Take it back, take it BACK!" Verne waves furiously.
"WHAT?!" Irritated alongside Lou and Penny, RJ yanks out the other end of a tight argument. "We just spent an hour breaking our spines to get it here!" Verne lifts his foot up, and RJ jumps back defensively. "Woah, hey, no no no, PUT AWAY THE FOOT-"
"Wuh?" Heather pipes up, frittering over Verne's hardened stance. "I thought if we (like) brought home here, you'd like-"
"This was YOUR idea?!" Verne threatens his finger her way.
Heather can't defend herself. She just plays with her hands. Fortunately, Ozzie spins and throws himself into the scene between Verne and her, bumping her around.
"Dad?" she inhales.
"My daughter has served her LIFE for the good of the family here, and you, Verne, have NO right to be dumping a thunderstorm of CRRRAP on her good intentions." He knots his tail onto hers again. "'Awesomeland'… is a wonderful name."
"Dad…" she exhales over her shoulder.
Stella wags a finger. "Uh-huh, show 'em 'Oz. We're just tryin' to do what's best for yuh, Verne."
"NO-O!" Verne shakes his head vigorously with his hands. He rocks to every flank, banishing the spirits crowding in on him. "NO, none of you know what's 'best' for me!"
He trips over his own toes to trample into the Log. Roughness on the chipped surface ruins the flatness of his feet that once brought such balance. In the darkest part of the tunnel where light struggles to penetrate into his typical sleeping nook near the back end, he tears every hanging overgrowth and blanket of leaves away that conceals an inscription on that side of the bark. He grips his hand onto a big patch of moss and rips it apart like innards, then scrapes his fingers at damp mud so fresh he must be replacing it regularly. Beneath it all, the archaeologist uncovers his past.
Hand stencils, plenty of them, precisely turtle-shaped and recorded on the bark in purple berry juice dried as blood, halfway faded from existence. Most of them are smaller, but one has a similar size to his own hand right now, which he fits onto reasonably well still. It's haunting. But the one at the end of the row is tinier than the rest, and the most aged. Wiser, yet. Wiser than him. Wise, small, helpless. Terrified. Verne trips back. His bones lose substance.
Nonetheless, they are all intact. He dresses the area back up in layer upon layer of leaves, dead and alive, before Verne sighs in relief and puts the top of his head onto the spot. One hand goes to his heart.
"Hey, umm, hold the mayo on this one," Hammy announces loudly, "I see weird thing."
"Wow. That is VERY weird thing," Fred confirms for Verne to hear.
Verne joins outside to watch in speechlessness. For in the base of Hammy's rollercoaster, underneath the largest hill, a bundle of unstable chili peppers hidden within the beams smoke and fizz. VERNE REMEMBERS.
Too late. The instant explosion cannons pepper juices over the faces of all onlookers, who become impaired, somehow begging to watch it happen even with the hearts it might break. Verne survives the blast. He watches the end of an empire, the last alive to witness a world's end. If they can't see it, they'll at least hear it - twigs snap and shred like the full felling of a frantic forest; boxes crash to the ground and dent; glass ornaments shatter. Dominos - Just because the largest stands at the end of the line does not mean it cannot fall first. Once the family is able to wipe off their eyes, it's ashes. Everything. GONE. Nothing, what one day of passion and love and admiration created. Nothing but a toxic landfill in a toxic land-filled place.
"So check out this HUUUUGE piece of popcorn in my front teeth-" Before Hammy digs it out, he lets out a bloodcurdling scream at a real weird thing just spawned before them.
"Verne, was that a… chili bomb?" Penny puzzles.
Hammy doesn't believe it. Who would? He runs laps around the area trying to fling everything back together, but it's no use. A pink flamingo's head snaps off when he digs its legs into the earth. He smothers his face in himself, curled up in somber song.
In everyone else's bewildered silence at the wreckage of Awesomeland, Heather takes her sadness Verne's way. Breathless, dead- No, it's not. It's very much alive. And breathing… She breathes deeply, trembles a bit in the lip, pale on it too. Her ears dip without any wetness to make the tips as soggy as they appear. Fingers on one hand creep towards her chin like she's ready to say SOMETHING, but now Verne can only speculate what she would, had she the will to.
Despite the look she gives him, and the family gives her, Verne locks his feet in place and stands his ground, backed into this corner at the stump of a tree. "We're NOT HUMANS. The humans are after our HEADS. We are foragers. Have all of you forgotten that?"
One by one the agents of regret approach, and one by one he shuts them down:
"Ozzie, you quote this Shakespeare guy because the HUMANS like him."
"Stella, I don't wanna ruin that action movie but spoiler alert: the HUMANS watch it."
"And RJ… Shut your mouth. Right now."
RJ hides away and fiddles with himself. He forms some cloud of a scheme in his head, and despite it all, he lets it rain. "Verne, Verne, Verne." His wingspan spreads to the family. "C'mon folks, I'm tellin' ya: If they WANTED to kill us THAT BADLY, they'd pick their bahooties off their couches already and do it themselves-!"
Verne knocks his shell into the trunk of the skinny tree behind him. One 'decoration' of theirs - a deer's head mounted on a wooden plaque - crashes beside his foot. There's a hollow hole in its styrofoam forehead, gray smoke stained around it. "And one day they'll do it… themselves."
That's how RJ looks - brain-dead, head empty, a bullet shot through his skull by the bitter looks given by the family after that. Suddenly they can't feel so benign anymore.
"So pluck the marshmallows from your ears. Come on, I'm waiting."
Everyone hesitates, but they pluck the invisible marshmallows from their ears.
"Don't you see? This parasocial relationship you've formed with those… CREATURES… See, they- They decorate their houses out of our likenesses!"
A gasp.
"They could make clothes from our skin!"
Another.
"They want to kill us, USE us for whatever their sick gEniUs brains want, and you think you can be one of them? Shame on you. As foragers… Shame." It comes with a cold eye. "What's our motto this season? We look out for who we love…"
"…and where we live." Thus, the children of him admit defeat.
"We haven't actually used that motto all spring," RJ retorts to himself.
"Take everything home," Verne orders the slumped pack. "Right now. I'm sticking my foot down where it always ought to be." And he does into the dirt, releasing a stunning quake.
"No," Tiger gasps, "Verne, not the foot-"
"Yes Tiger, the foot." He does it again to send a shockwave into everyone that blasts them to the ground. Then he grinds it, and their bones twist. By now they've settled on it, shaking against each other. Verne marches through the crowd and begins the long trek back through the forest from where they came, motioning assertively for them to do the same.
They can't do anything now to climb out of this hole. Just sigh, and pack some bags.
"Nice try there, Heather." Lou pats her shoulder as he passes.
"But Verne's right - we got nothin' done." Stella shakes her head. "I shouldn't of tried to stop 'im. I just didn't want another tussle, dat's all."
"Do not take it harshly," comes Tiger. "The attractions were what you would call… fun!... Well, too fun."
"We know what we are, but not what we may be-" Her dad quits quoting Shakespeare. "I'm… weak, aren't I?"
RJ doesn't even stop by. Instead, over his shoulder, he claps two fingers in front of his nose and spreads them apart, twiddles his lips, then flaps his arms while spitting out bird calls. She absorbs his secret code - finds herself nodding very crossly to him out of instinct. She submits her authority right back into his own by signing his pact, fusing into a bilious solution. Verne must be stopped.
Still, Heather puts her shoulders down. "…Why didn't I ask what Verne wanted?"
Awesomeland will have to wait for the inevitable Christmas special headed their way. Heather scoops up RJ's journal, open face down in a pit of mud. She grieves at the ends of her mouth depressing off her face when, flipping it over, the Awesomeland she drew has been murdered by brown splotches over all she'd made to end up wrecking the family's fun and RJ's entire operation. She loses all focus diving into it, and jumps back when a squirrel's hands slap onto the pages and rub the mud off in a second, leaving just faint, painted tracks.
"I liked Awesomeland, Heather." Hammy grasps his muddy hands tightly around her waist, dips his head in her fur. She flinches at first when Fred climbs to her cheek to hug too, but settles into it. For the lucky moment the little guy's on her, her mood improves, but goes numb, happy, and dumb at that. She killed her thoughts like they killed her dreams.
As Hammy leaves, his nuts startle her. Literally. Hammy takes a bag of a million acorns with him that he gathered here. He speeds his sad legs towards the others, one ton of weight behind him. What goes out may never come back in, she fears.
But when they finally reach home after enduring the mile with no song or dance, Verne does not meet them there… No, under the smell of empty shame diluted by fresh cardboard boxes, the food fortresses don't stir. The vacancy becomes a point of quick concern… Stella doesn't find him in Team Oak's fort. Heather doesn't find him at the willow tree.
"Don't bother, he left us." Hammy must've scouted it out beforehand as he sobs to report. The apologetic bag of chips he prepared for Verne is now worthless. "He's gone, oh, GOOONE…" He sniffles. "The only thing he left to remember him by are these convenient footprints tracking his exact path of exodus."
RJ jerks his torso down to investigate this trail of fat, flat mud-prints in his magnifying glass starting to trail from the entrance of the Team RPS fort up along the side of the Hedge, in the directions of the crossroads on the other edge… towards the main construction site. Why he went, nobody knows, but he has a motive. What motive? Lungs start to work faster. Can more knowledge really lead to being more clueless?
He has to take matters into his own hands. Snuff out the mysteries of ground zero. Inside his fort, inside the tower, grass covers the whole carpet. However, a little surprise - damp from the night, a bulky patch spreads the floor apart from the dropping of an empty bomb, an artifact stolen from its pedestal. The very first footprint flees the scene from where his golf bag was.
"I left it right in here, where's-? …NoooOOOOOO! The bag, the bag, the BAG! That's the most POWERFUL object in the UNIVERSE!"
"A disgrace! We will not stand for this!" Quick on the trigger, Tiger clomps to the door behind him first, a full rebellion to join next.
"Right-o - He's got our endless supply of Milk Duds and hot fries in his clutches," RJ rallies the group. "Not just that - our dignity. So come on! Our perfect-o paradise will NOT die in vain! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, for Awesomeland, it's time to riiiIIISE UP!" he sings.
The incited mob rushes westward by wagon, united underneath RJ's banner.
XXX
Verne senses their arrival here as commotion builds like mold between bushes in the dark verdure in front of him. At the corner of suburbia, he stands firm at the very naked edge of the old tall hill, one step from getting to 'think about it' all over again. On the red wagon, the family wheels in from the brush just on time for him to say "Now, I brought you here to remind you all that two weeks might seem like nothing for us, but THIS… is two weeks for them."
Verne steps aside to let the sun through the dark gray clouds reveal the peril. Over the edge of the old cliff, what once was a one-acre project has developed into a land of devastation and construction as far as the eye can see past the road. From dead to deathly frightening.
Whereas nature allows for tranquility to be nested and secure, man overhauls the peace just to make war. To bang a drum, break its skin, hammer the earth in a resounding quake of deadly innovation. An endless reverse sound alarms their progression in hatching the start of a suburban city over there on the flipside. A whole neighborhood has almost been put up by now, but desolate as a ghost town. Mechanical beasts haunt the streets - those completed by concrete and those still tarnished by sediment and rubble in a lifeless realm. All vehicle windows are pitch-black, opaque. They hide the evil spirits underneath, or lack thereof. The process seems automatic. Like this is how it's meant to be.
But it's not. It can't be meant to be. Unless they're still accepting their end of this one-way street, this group of specks on a cliff. Even when all tails go high, they refuse to believe. Even when the forest they knew dies from the infectious plague of humanity, they refuse to yield. Even though their noses become clogged with smog, they are united subconsciously, forming a union between fur, quills and paws set on conserving the gift of naivety. This is the good life.
"Oh please, just give it up, Verne," RJ yells. "You know only an aficionado can wield that kinda power."
Verne just chuckles. "Y'know, you've always been a kidder, RJ." He thereby exposes the golf bag on his back. "Come at me."
RJ's rage lunges immediately, but from one scooch to the side Verne dooms him to take the plunge head-first off the cliff. Verne hooks him to the ledge by stomping onto RJ's last foot… again, staring straight at the family when he does. Right at the signal, church bells ring stressfully at the hour.
Hanging by his crushed toes over the verge of disaster, the dirty horizon unveils to RJ. One foot closer to burning in the light, he comes one inch closer to the truth. Now he knows it - This is not merely a portrait. He lives inside the painting, suppressed to a two-dimensional image making his crooked neck dizzy. His tail faces the gravity over his back, scratching at it. His heart pumps three times faster now that he's at the bottom instead of the top, after his act to Verne last week. His arms - no part of him - can reach anything in his freefalling state, somehow stationary. He dangles like a fish on a line he knows must be slowly being cut.
A sign plants into the ground opposite the intersection leading into El Rancho Camelot Estates, reading:
'Welcome to
Gran Reino Pandora
Suburbia just got newer-ia!'
"New Suburbia…"
All interest he has plummets down when his foot slips a bit. Nervous moisture forms on the pad of it. He silently pleads for his life, flicks his head all over the place, and ends up staring at the back of Verne's shell. He can't see his eyes. Not even facing the victim, it is far more insulting. Terrified bursts of air fall from RJ's throat and out his mouth like his golf bag Verne wears capsized. Upside-down. A new perspective. Vulnerable.
Meanwhile, the family retreats from Verne after his deed. On the edge of the cliff, he'd be thought to be the wolf of the sheep.
"Uncle Verne, we are foragers," Heather hesitates, pupils diminished. "Like you said? Y'know?"
"That's right, and we- we forage food," Ozzie shivers.
Everyone suddenly acts so apologetic, huh? That prehistoric virus, now thawed out of the ice in Verne's brain. Not much has changed since the outsider arrived on his perch. Existing since the very birth of its being, left to remain contained for so long.
"Food? Well then…"
RJ jerks his head up to the ledge once Verne - the boulder - moves a fraction of an inch from the mountain. He crunches his eyebrows tensely into his face at the golf bag on Verne's back, and readies his foot underneath his sole.
Verne fixes eyes on the family.
The family fixes eyes on him.
RJ fixes his eyes on a completely different target.
No one moves.
"…Five second rule."
Everyone gasps when Verne lifts his foot into the air. They gasp louder when RJ thrusts his freed leg up, latches his toes onto the corner of the golf bag and takes Verne down in a kamikaze, the strap strangling his neck.
Ozzie dies.