Chapter 5
How To Have A Mental Breakdown In Ten Easy Steps
A torrent of water liberally doused on his face rose Brain from his fainting spell. He groaned and massaged his temples, sitting upwards rather slowly. Pinky leaned over him worriedly, watching him in case he passed out again. "Are you all right, Brain?" he asked.
Brain groaned again and opened one eye. He spotted the Paris harbor and immediately shut it again. "Oh my aching occipital lobe," he moaned. His ego was crumbling before his very eyes. How could he, the Brain, and his superior intellect miscalculate their location? It was impossible!
In his admittedly conceited panic, Brain stared up at the sky. The sun was directly overhead, signifying quite rightly that at Paris time it was now noon. However, as was stated before, the Brain's internal chronometer was not on Paris time—and now, because of his recent trauma, he was now running in synch with Tokyo.
"Even the sky mocks me!" he despaired. "It insists on claiming that it's noon when quite clearly it is nine PM at night!"
The Brain began to have a mental breakdown, and because of his humongous mind it was quite a severe one. Watching his companion fall to his knees and roll crazily across the ground, Pinky began to get a little concerned.
"What if he goes insane?" Pinky wondered aloud. "If this fanfiction has two looney characters in it, we won't have anyone to do straight lines against! Nothing will happen! No one will review and everyone will stop writing about us because it won't be any fun! We'll become the abandoned characters that nobody would ever want!" The little mouse gasped in horror as he followed this train of thought to its natural conclusion. "WE'LL BECOME THE OLSEN TWINS!"
Pinky simply could not allow this to happen. So realizing, he began to run full-tilt towards his prone friend. "I'M COMING, BRAIN! TROZ!"
As heroic as his intentions may have been, though, Pinky was still Pinky; therefore, in his mad dash to save the Brain, he inadvertently tripped over a blade of grass—he was a mouse—and tumbled headlong into Brain. Before Hurricane Pinky could be stopped, he, Brain and Brain's backpack had rolled straight down the shore and landed with a massive splash in the water.
A few seconds passed, then both Pinky and Brain's heads broke through the surface of the water, completely and thoroughly soaked. The weight of their wet fur was so heavy, their eyes were covered completely by drooped-over forelocks. Brain lifted his out of the way and turned to face Pinky.
"Thank you, Pinky," he glowered sarcastically.
Pinky beamed proudly from beneath his mop of fur. "You're welcome, Brain. Poit!"
In order to better show his appreciation of his companion's heroic deed, the Brain reached out from the very depths of his heart and throttled Pinky.
So wrapped up was he in this all-consuming task that it wasn't until his now-empty backpack floated by him that the Brain remembered where they were. "My equipment!" he gasped, releasing Pinky's throat and scrabbling for the odd devices he'd brought from the lab, shoving them into his backpack as he grabbed each one. Pinky rubbed his neck gingerly and also started picking the things up from where they floated on the surface of the water. He made sure to be especially careful this time.
Finally, all of the gadgets had been rescued from the possibility of rust or other water-related damage and the two mice had returned to shore. Brain shot a brief glare at Pinky, then laid the equipment out in a patch of grass to dry. "Ignorant buffoon," he muttered. "Letting my carefully-constructed tools be exposed to water, what was he—" He suddenly stopped short as he took out the alarm clock that he'd previously programmed to awaken them when the correct flight would have been over Auvergne. The numbers of the digital clock quite clearly read "12:05". Brain's eyes widened, then he looked from the clock to the sky and then down at the clock again. A missing variable in his mental equation suddenly fell into place, causing him first to laugh in triumph out and then to whack himself upside the head. Pinky looked up.
"Why'd you hit yourself, Brain?" he asked concernedly, walking over. His eyes became big. "Do you not want to hit me? Am I being a bad punching bag lackey?"
Brain shook his head, torn between irritation at himself for not realizing it before and feeling triumphant for having figured it out at last. "It's not you, Pinky, it's me," he began without further contemplation. "I—"
Pinky cut him off with a sudden sniffle. "That's what they all say," he lamented, rubbing his nose as he turned away from the Brain. His shoulders drooped. "Narf! 'It's not you, it's me.' Admit it, Brain, you have a new whackable lackey. You don't want me anymore. You want to hit someone else. Oh, just say it, Brain. I won't take it badly." Whatever his promises, though, at this point Pinky began to sob into his palms.
A little fuse ignited in Brain's mind as he gritted his teeth. He was already in a bad mood from being confronted with a mistake he'd made, and he was utterly sick of Pinky cutting him off with something stupid every time throughout the story that he had an important statement to make. "WILL YOU BE QUIET AND LISTEN?" he shouted irritably, whacking Pinky a good one over the head.
Pinky stiffened as he felt the blow. First confusion, then ecstasy crossed his face as his ears perked up. "He hit me! He doesn't want a new whackable lackey after all!" he rejoiced, running around laughing like a loon. However, the force of Brain's fist on his skull again was enough to quiet him down in time for the Brain's delayed proclamation.
"You see, Pinky," he explained proudly, "my superior intellect did not calculate our trajectory incorrectly; it was simply that my data was wrong. When we were first attacked by those ruffians at the harbor, my internal chronometer became jostled and simply presented me with a false idea of the hour! Don't you see?"
Pinky blinked, then scratched his head. "Welllllllllllll...what's your big discovery then, Brain?" he asked.
The Brain paused. This was slower than Pinky usually was. "...That was it, Pinky. That was my important proclamation!"
His companion still seemed confused, but then something clicked in his (seldom-used) mind and he began to chuckle. "Oh, was that all, Brain?" he guffawed, seeming amused at what he apparently saw as the Brain's oversight. "Oh, I've known that the whole time!"
More and more bits of Brain's vanity crumbled into dust as Pinky continued to laugh. "But...but Pinky!" he protested, stammering almost incoherently. "That's—how could—it's not—" Finally the sentence forced itself out indignantly. "How could you possibly have known that?"
"Zort! Easy, Brain!" Pinky replied, pointing at a string of text. "I read the story as we went along!"
The concept was accepted into the Brain's frontal lobe like a turkey dinner is accepted by the National Society of Vegetarians. "Read...the...story?" he asked, rubbing the side of his head as though warming up the cells would speed his thinking process.
"Yeah! Poit!" Pinky was really excited now, his chuckles subsiding only a little as he went on. "Y'see, Brain, there's this website, you know, And there's this story of us on here by someone named 'The Illustrious Crackpot' that's exactly the same as what's happening now! Isn't that narfy? Oh, and just last chapter it said, ummm, 'while Brain was usually possessed of an internal chronometer correct to within ten seconds of any atomic clock, the fact that he had only just recovered from being beaten senseless by a crew of strong Frenchmen had affected his sense of time (as well as some of the calculating sectors of his mind), meaning that he was, at the current moment in our story, running two and a half hours behind Paris time'." Pinky then giggled some more and then pointed at another string of text. "And there's me saying that again just now!"
As the gawky mouse collapsed into more laughter, Brain decided that the best idea would be to simply ignore the whole thing. For one thing, it was completely impossible that any stories about them could be anywhere in cyberspace, much less written by someone as dodgy-sounding as "The Illustrious Crackpot", who certainly did not control their copyright. And Who could expect him to believe that something like that could ever exist? It was much too ridiculous.
"At any rate, Pinky," the Brain interrupted abruptly, "we now know the source of the problem—which was certainly not my incredibly superior mind—so all we must do is reenact our exact steps from before with the exception of us arriving successfully in Auvergne!"
So saying, the two mice gathered up their equipment and returned to the docks, where they once again accidentally insulted a group of muscular coal-haulers, experienced a scene of extraordinary violence, were knocked out and thrown on a coal barge, stayed unconscious for the entire round trip back to Paris and returned to shore again right next to the same harbor that they'd left from.
"...Well," the Brain amended woozily, rubbing his painfully throbbing head, "perhaps we don't have to do things exactly the same as before."
Once this statement had been made, they promptly fell unconscious again and didn't wake up until the next chapter.
