Chapter 3

A Bumpy Arrival With Some Pretty Good Gags

After quite a long while, a small alarm clock in Brain's knapsack went off. The sound jolted Brain out of a half-sleep (and a rather pleasant dream involving the hamster Snowball and a vat of hot lava), sending him scurrying across the luggage compartment to where Pinky was also dozing.

"PINKY!" Brain urged, shaking him awake. "It's TIME! We must drop to the area where Mousseau's carriage is!"

Yawning widely, Pinky shrugged on his own backpack as the Brain heaved the door to the compartment open. The wind resistance outside the airplane nearly tugged the little mouse out the door, but Brain held on to the frame as Pinky stumbled up behind him. Strapping on their crash helmets, Brain surveyed the clouds and lay of the land below. "3..." he muttered, glancing quickly at the clock again before shoving it back into his knapsack, "2...1...GO!"

He and Pinky jumped out of the compartment and into the open air, opening their parachutes as they plummeted. Yelling over the sound of the slipstream tugging them along, Pinky asked, "HEY BRAIN, HOW DO YOU KNOW WE'LL LAND WHERE THE CARRIAGE IS?"

Brain squirmed in midair, trying to steady himself against the queasy feeling of vertigo he was getting. "IT'S RATHER SIMPLE, PINKY," he replied, also forced to yell over the roaring wind. "BEFORE WE LEFT, I TOOK THE LIBERTY OF HACKING INTO ACME AIRLINES' FILES. I FOUND THE ROUTE THEIR EUROPEAN FLIGHT TAKES AND MAPPED IT OUT, TIMING EVERYTHING DOWN TO THE SPLIT-SECOND TO LAND US WHERE WE WANT TO GO."

Shading his eyes, Pinky looked up at the airplane far above them. "UM, BRAIN..." he yelled nervously, "IS 'ACME' SPELLED 'A-J-A-X'?"

The queasy feeling in Brain's stomach grew, and he got the distinct impression that not all of it was vertigo. "NO, OF COURSE NOT!" he replied.

Pinky pointed upwards at the rapidly receding plane. "THEN I THINK WE MIGHT HAVE GOTTEN MIXED UP AT THE AIRPORT!"

The two mice looked downwards as one. The landscape coming up rather quickly to meet them was certainly not a rural countryside. Instead, it was the point on top of the Eiffel Tower.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"

In accordance with Tex Avery's Rules and Regulations for Falling Characters, Pinky and the Brain landed directly on the very sharp point of the building. And, when you added in Chuck Jones's chapter, both mice's parachutes were snagged on the point and ripped off. So, falling (and screaming) quite freely, Pinky and the Brain landed solidly on the awning of a café below and bounced directly into a mug of boiling hot coffee for an impeccably-timed Friz Freleng finish.

Scalded and out of breath, Brain floundered to the top of the cup and grasped the rim, panting heavily. Pinky joined him in a moment, spitting out droplets of coffee that he had accidentally inhaled. Brain blinked in amazement, his eyes widening. "I can't believe it," he spluttered. "We're—we're alive! We're ALIVE!"

At that moment, the owner of the coffee returned to the small café table, a woman with dark brown hair, a red suit and skirt as well as a matching beret. Grasping the handle of the mug, she started to lift it up when suddenly she shrieked and dropped the cup. "Le EEEEEEEEK!" she screeched as Pinky and Brain scrambled dazedly out of the cup. Soon enough, the owner of the café had run out with a broom, shouting things in French and swinging at the mice.

"Zort! Watch out!" Pinky cried pointlessly as he and Brain scurried out of reach of the café master, gaining a few more bruises to their credit. Once they had finally outrun him, the two collapsed on a nearby sidewalk...of course, getting stepped on by random passerby. At long last, however, Brain pointed out a secluded back alley where they would hopefully be left alone long enough to gather their wits. Dragging their battered and beaten selves into the shadows, they finally were able to lie down and regain their usual lung capacity without too much physical pain.

At length, Brain sat up and pulled a map out of his backpack, still breathing heavily. He spread the map and stared at it, trying to make sense of where they were. Groggily trying to recall as much as possible from their fall, Brain calculated their trajectory off of the Eiffel Tower and attempted to approximate their current location. Paris was a big city, though, and the Tower was completely surrounded on all possible sides by cafés, any one of which might have been where they had landed. But whichever alleyway it was that they were in now, they were still quite a long ways from the province of Auvergne, the location of Mousseau's carriage. Brain sighed and looked up to see if Pinky could possibly have been any help in finding out where they were—but then he gasped.

Pinky had disappeared.

Brain began to panic, shoving the map flusteredly back into his pack as he scrambled out to the mouth of the alley. "PINKY?" he cried, glancing wildly from side to side. The streets were littered with dozens of humans, but no gangly lab mouse could be seen. Brain's pulse raced. Pinky couldn't even go outside back at the lab without getting into trouble, so who knew what kind of predicament he could get into alone in a foreign country?

"PINKY!" Brain yelled again as he took off into the middle of the street, only narrowly missing getting run down by trampling feet and cars. He started running aimlessly, looking everywhere about him for a trace of Pinky's presence. Had he used his immensely superior frontal lobe, locating his companion would have been a simple task; however, Pinky's sudden disappearance combined with the recent merry-go-round of pain had clouded his judgment. "PINKY!" The streets remained unresponsive. "PINKY!"

Just as the Brain was about to break down, a clue came down from heaven.

"Narf!"

Brain sat up in a second and whirled around. Directly behind him was an arcade, and through the window he could spot Pinky tackling a French claw machine with little success. Yes, sure enough, that was without a doubt Pinky. His panic giving way to annoyance, Brain stomped into the arcade. Pinky looked up and gave Brain a jovial wave.

"Oh! Hello, Brain! Zort!" he called happily, inserting a few salvaged Euros into the slot reading "Introduisez votre pièce ici", which translation should seem obvious in the given context. Humming pleasantly to the tune of "The Cheese Roll Call", he maneuvered the joystick on the machine in an attempt to salvage a stuffed Runt doll. The claw continually lost its grip, though, and refused to give up any of its bounty no matter how many Euros Pinky fed it. Just as the mouse was about to scramble beneath the machine to get more, the Brain clambered up onto the controls next to him. Pinky glanced up expectantly, only to be delivered another blow to the head.

"Utter nitwit!" Brain reprimanded angrily as Pinky rubbed his head in confusion. Brain was almost never this mad. "I had no idea where you'd gone off to! Could you even imagine that it would matter if the two of us were separated?"

Pinky was speechless. "Br-Brain," he gasped. "Do you mean—you actually do care about me?" He amended his request. "Even a little?"

Brain conked him again before turning his back on Pinky. "Of course not, Pinky," he grumbled. "You're the one that has our passports."

Pinky's ears drooped as the Brain descended from the machine. "Oh," he responded dejectedly—then he suddenly remembered that they had stowed away on the plane. Ergo, they had no passports, much less any that Pinky had with him.

"Troz!" he beamed as he dropped down off of the machine and followed Brain out the door.

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In the seclusion of a window ledge at another café, Brain unfurled the map again and began to study it while Pinky innocently swiped morsels of food from passing waiters' trays. After much contemplation, the use of a ruler and a street sign standing outside, Brain finally conjectured a rough idea of where they were. However, they were still extremely far away from the location of Mousseau's carriage and, he hoped, the location of the Pink Porcupine. Finally, Brain sat up with a sigh and turned to Pinky, who at that moment was ingesting something that looked disturbingly like tar. Brain turned back again quickly.

"Well, Pinky," he asked, at a loss for any constructive ideas, "how would you propose we get to Auvergne?"

Pinky scratched his head, also sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as though that would help loosen up the machinations of his mind. "Ummm..." he tried, "well, what if we walked?"

Brain shot him a withering look. "Pinky, it's nearly three hundred miles from here."

Pondering a little more, Pinky cocked his head. "Well, if we don't start now, we'll never get there, will we?" he pointed out.

Obviously Pinky had no idea that a mile was quite a bit longer than a foot.

The Brain sighed as Yakko, Wakko and Dot ran by in the background for no apparent reason. "Hmmm..." he mulled. Back at Acme Labs, there was usually a convenient motorcycle or minivan sitting outside that they could temporarily borrow, making use of several of Brain's mechanisms to allow them to reach the pedals and the steering wheels at the same time. But Paris was a crowded city, and he wasn't sure if a few lab mice could even enter an empty car without somebody noticing. Besides which, he didn't have the proper materials to construct any long-reach steering mechanisms. He sighed annoyedly. Even with his immensely superior brain, he hadn't foreseen taking the wrong plane and landing in Paris—if he had, he would have brought more supplies.

Brain's stomach rumbled slightly, but he tried his best to ignore it. Just the sight of Pinky gobbling down morsel after morsel of repugnant-looking food was enough to dissuade him from eating anyways. He sat back, nearly defeated, trying desperately to think of a way to get to Mousseau's carriage, find the diamond and return to the cheese and food pellets at the lab before he starved to death. He didn't think that a cab would go as far as Auvergne (though in one of those idiotic Three Stooges shorts that Pinky watched, they had taken a cab straight from America to Egypt), and the same story with a bus. If they could just get to the general area of Auvergne, he was sure they could manage the rest of the way to the wreck of the carriage...

"Poit!" Pinky interjected, interrupting Brain's line of thought. Brain glanced upwards in annoyance to see Pinky pressed against the window with his tongue sticking out. Pinky began to jump up and down, staring gleefully out at the barges loading up at the river. "That looks like fun, Brain!" he prattled enthusiastically. "Can we please go on a boat ride? I've never been on a real boat before...well, there was that submarine when we raised the Titanic and all, and some other stuff I can't remember because of my short attention spa—Oh hey look, there's a butterfly!—Oh, wait...Oh yeah, but can we please go on the boat? Pleeeeeeeeeeeease, Brain?"

The Brain was about to pass a comment on Pinky's stupidity on wanting a boat ride while they were stranded in the middle of Paris when the revelation suddenly struck him. He scurried up to the window and pressed himself against it, squinting to see the boats through the layer of glass. The idea grew more solid now, and trembling in the thought of triumph Brain pulled open the map. He hardly dared believe his eyes—France was filled with intersecting rivers and waterways, making a pathway that could lead them to Auvergne!

"YES!" Brain cried aloud. And again. "YESSSSSSS!"

Pinky turned around dejectedly. "Oh, come on, Brain, why do you have to say 'no'? Zort!" he complained. "Every time I want to do something, you—" He broke off in realization and his eyes lit up. "Did...Brain, did you say 'yes'? Did I ask something irrelevant and silly and did you say yes?"

Brain was shoving the map back into his backpack with megalomaniacal fervor. "Of course I did, Pinky!" he replied somewhat giddily. "Your childish whims actually solved our problem of transport!"

Pinky scratched his head. "We're going to swim there?"

"YES!" Brain responded automatically, then shook his head. "No! We'll hitch a ride on the barges! We'll end up in Auvergne in no time!"

"YAY! Narf!" Pinky whooped, skipping across the windowledge. Unfortunately, he skipped too close to the edge of the sill and fell off. Lying on his back on the floor, he started to laugh uncontrollably—that is, until he paused in thought. "No no no...that won't work, Brain."

Brain looked down at him from the ledge. "Why not?"

"Well," his companion answered as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, "if you row row row a boat gently down the stream, and life is but a dream, you can't really be on the stream...right?"

Not a moment afterwards, Pinky became temporarily incapacitated by the weight of a mouse-sized army green backpack landing directly on his cranium.