4.
The hours passed.
Life returned to comparative normalcy in the Griffin household. Peter's pants were located after considerable detective work (in the back yard; no explanation provided), and the children returned home as expected. Meg complained about being unpopular; Chris about the unusual taste of glue. It was business as usual until around six o'clock when the lights abruptly came back on.
"Finally!" Meg groaned, bounding down the stairs from her room and into the living room. "Now I can finally watch TV."
"What do you mean we can finally watch TV?" Chris asked, horrified. He'd been watching television for the past two hours. Admittedly, not much had happened and all the shows were starting to look alike, but he'd credited that to an unprecedented decline in the production quality of most modern sitcoms.
Meg flopped on the counch and, after a few minutes of fumbling for the remote control in the uncharted depths of the couch, smiled as the television turned on and the handsome face of news anchor Tom Tucker came into focus. Chris stared in awe. "But he's not in According To Jim!," he protested. "I've heard of celebrity casting, but this is ridiculous!"
Meg rolled her eyes.
Her gargantuan brother eased himself off of the couch. "I'm going to get a drink," he explained helpfully, apparently under the impression she cared, and ambled into the kitchen. What he discovered there banished delectable Mountain Dew from his mind for the rest of the afternoon. It was staring at him, and it had a knife.
"EVIL MONKEY!" he screamed.
The evil monkey that, for whatever reason, was an unwelcome resident in Chris's closet had been his arch-nemesis for some time, but it appeared that lumbering Chris had for once caught the monkey off his guard. Startled, the monkey brandished his weapon and, with a primal growl, leaped towards the helpless boy with every intention of ending their rivalry once and for all.
The boy screamed again. His massive arms flailing in panic, Chris hit the monkey soundly in the chest and sent the whimpering animal flying into the corner of the room. Predictably, he landed with a crash atop Stewie's machine and it soon began to sputter, belching out plimes of foul-smelling black smoke and erratic showers of sparks.
The monkey, sensing the balance of power had shifted, allowed the knife to clatter to the floor and fled up the stairs. He slipped into the comparative safety of Chris's closet and, expertly navigating the heaps of dirty clothing and softcore pornography, entered his secret base of operations. He stepped into a tastefully decorated room that made considerable use of a minimalist's approach to interior decoration and a dazzling array of high-tech surveillance equipment. A wall of television screens displayed rotating images of every room in the house--Meg watching television, Lois teaching piano--until every screen came to display the same innocent, unexpecting face: Chris Griffin. The monkey, sliding back into his oversized armchair, started to laugh.
The presence of a monkey streaking up the stairs was more than enough to get Stewie's attention, but it was the shrieking from Meg that the television was on the fritz again that convinced him he had a problem. Scrambling into the kitchen as quickly as he could, he collapsed to his hands and knees in disbelief. "No!" he cried as his machine began to groan. "It hasn't been properly calibrated!"
Chris lay unconscious on the kitchen floor. He'd fainted.
Stewie ducked under a table. He was aware that most of his inventioned had the potential to flatten Quahog and permanently disfigure most of the eastern seaboard, depending on how far the radiation carried. But was it honestly his fault that reality jumping required that much uranium?
The machine coughed, and there was light.