Chapter 6
The Next Chapter
Being the next chapter, Pinky and the Brain awoke with a start in the same patch of grass where they'd landed before. The Brain brushed as much coal dust off of him as he could comfortably manage and stood up. Just to make a double-check of the time—his internal chronometer was now insisting that he was running on Alaska hours—he pulled out the digital clock and reassured himself that it was not four-thirty AM on the next day. With a sigh of relief, he headed back towards the harbor, redirected Pinky's wandering attention from a purple female skunk back to their target craft, and waited for an opportunity. Making sure his companion held his mouth shut as they walked, the two finally made a successful sneak onto the coal barge.
Once they were on board and successfully hidden beneath the piles of raw coal, Pinky let out a large breath. "Phew! That was a close one, wa'in't it, Brain?" he asked.
"Shhhh!" Brain admonished him as a burly coal-hauler walked by. They ducked further down into the coal pile as the oblivious Frenchman continued along, then popped their heads back up once he'd gone. Both mice spit out a large quantity of coal they'd accidentally swallowed, trying desperately to rub the terrible taste off of their tongues.
"Thith plot ith thnot doing much thfor my appethite," the Brain complained irritably, holding his tongue out at arm's length in an attempt to pick every speck of coal dust off of his taste buds.
"You're juthst doin' it the hward way, Brwainh," Pinky informed him, spraying something from a human-sized bottle on his outstretched tongue. "Thsee?" he asked, shaking the bottle vigorously. "Thsome human hleft thith breath frethshenerh out! Trozth! Thith maketh it hmuch eathier!"
Leaving his tongue sticking out so the substance would dry and successfully cover up the coal taste, Pinky handed the bottle to Brain. "Here! Thtry it!" he lisped.
Brain took the bottle, which he didn't use immediately—the mark of that rarest of beings, a logically-thinking cartoon character. He wasn't completely sure whether it was actually breath freshener, as throughout the rest of the adventure he and Pinky had had the most extraordinarily bad luck. Rolling the bottle around, Brain found a label and squinted at it. His superior intellect couldn't help him at all with language, but he was certain of the fact that he had enough common sense to realize what "Une Bombe Insecticide" meant.
"Pinky," he began slowly, carefully putting his own tongue back in his mouth, "that's not breath freshener."
"Poit?" Pinky inquired, looking over Brain's shoulder at the bottle. When his eyes spotted the label and the last word in the description, he swiftly turned green, then blue, then finally went completely plaid before spitting hard in every direction and running around like a mouse who'd gotten his tail chopped off by a farmer's wife. "WAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" he cried, finally jumping off the side of the boat and submerging his tongue into the water with a relieved sigh.
The Brain witnessed these proceedings with severe disdain. "That was an utterly pointless interlude," he commented to no one in particular.
No one in particular replied, "What do you expect at such short notice?"
The Brain resolved to ignore random disembodied voices as Pinky, gasping and wheezing, clambered back up onto the barge. While the Brain helped haul him back on board, Pinky asked him breathlessly, "Gee, Brain, d'you think we're in another one of those 'Duck Amuck' parodies that everyone keeps doing even though it's not funny anymore?"
When Pinky was safely on board, the Brain scoffed at the suggestion. "Of course not, Pinky," he replied. "This is much too stupid."
His companion paused for a moment, then had to agree. "Yeah. Fjord!"
Free from any more irrelevant catastrophes—at least for the moment—they stayed hidden on board the barge until, at last, it departed, chugging away down the river. As this was the first time he'd been conscious for the journey, Pinky was jubilant, jumping up and down on top of the coal pile as soon as they were out of sight of the harbor. "This is so much fun!" he cried—then he started dancing. "We made it!" he sang out happily, doing a little jig. "We maaaaaade it, we maaaaaade it, we maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaade it!"
Brain looked up irritably from the map he'd been poring over. "Could you stop that, Pinky?" he demanded. "I'm trying to—GYAAH!"
He was interrupted roughly as Pinky grabbed his hands and hauled him on top of the pile with him, giggling. The little mouse, nearly drunk with joy, then began to twirl about, dragging his short companion along with him. "We MADE it, Brain!" he cried. "We're ON the BOAT! Hahahahanarf!"
"Pinky—stop—I don't—PINKY!" Brain yelled, attempting to escape Pinky's grip on his wrists. Pinky, however, didn't want to let go, whirling around in sheer ecstasy with the Brain fighting desperately to get away. At long last, Brain succeeded in wrenching himself away—but the violent movement resulted in both mice tumbling down the coal heap. With a couple of bumps and more than a few internal organs rupturing, Pinky and Brain bounced all the way down the pile and out over the rim of the boat, landing with a splash in the very wide and very wet river as the boat chugged along and disappeared around a bend. After a moment, a few bubbles surfaced from the depths somewhere in the middle.
"Pinky..." came the Brain's unmistakable voice, logged with water. "Pinky, I am going to hurt you."
Another bubble surfaced, popping with a sound very like a heavy mallet landing on something's skull.
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Much later, the two were back at the harbor, waiting once more for the same coal barge to arrive. This time, the Brain had taken all possible precautions by taping Pinky's mouth shut and tying each of his arms and legs together. Therefore, when they attempted to sneak on the boat again, Pinky was forced to hop along haphazardly behind instead of simply walking.
"Quickly, Pinky!" Brain urged once he was next to the boat. He turned to his now-mute companion and waved frantically towards the rim of the barge. "Hurry! Get on!"
Pinky hopped forward, appeared to be looking at something behind the Brain, and then suddenly stiffened. Immediately following this, he began to jump up and down in place while "Mmmmmph!"ing frantically past the gag. Brain glared at him, tapping his foot.
"I'm losing my patience, Pinky!" he warned his companion, an edge to his voice as he pointed at the barge. "GET ON."
The lanky mouse didn't even appear to register that the Brain had spoken, jumping even quicker and thrusting his head desperately towards something behind Brain. "MMMMMMMPH! MMMPH MMMM MMMMMGGGH!"
The Brain curled his paws into fists and began stalking towards Pinky, having had thoroughly enough. "PINKY—" he began, but got no further as at that moment his spine was compressed rather painfully by the force of one of the burly Frenchman absently stepping on it. When the boot lifted, what had been Brain had quickly morphed into a compressed and quite surprised puddle of laboratory mouse.
"I am...in intense...pain," the puddle squeaked haltingly as the last vestiges of air was forcibly driven out of what was left of its lungs.
Pinky, at last thinking coherently, managed to wriggle out of his bonds and remove the gag, at which point he hurried over to Brain and peeled him off the docks. The Brain then popped back to his normal dimensions, albeit a bit woozily and with several ribs missing. "I did try to warn you," Pinky pointed out a bit lamely.
And, as such things go, that exact moment marked the next departure of the boat from Paris.
Muttering words that should not see print in a K-rated story, the Brain shoved Pinky aside and stood up. He glared first at his companion, then at the discarded gag and twine, then at the back of the departed coal barge. Following this, he sat down again and repeatedly whacked his head against the dock.
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Much, much later, they had finally managed to board the coal barge on its last trip and were hiding placidly in the piles of coal. Pinky, by order of his superior, was sitting as still and as quietly as he could, all the while thinking up amusing combinations of things to do with a bowl of mustard, a length of metal piping and a very small goat. The Brain, in direct and intended contrast, divided his time between watching their route, double-checking his map and making sure that Pinky didn't do anything excessively stupid. This last one proved somewhat harder than it might appear.
At long last, the barge chugged to a stop at the same harbor where Pinky had regained consciousness during their first trip. Having survived this far into the journey, the Brain heaved a mighty sigh of relief—and his ears perked up when he spotted a giant sign on shore.
"TOUT DROIT: AUVERGNE"
The Brain jumped up in an uncharacteristic show of excitement, snatching his French phrasebook out of his backpack. With trembling fingers, he rifled through the pages until he found the appropriate phrase listing. The pages appeared to be glowing with a holy light, and Brain swore that he heard a chorus of holy voices singing in the background.
Then he realized that it was only Pinky warbling "The Improbable Scheme" in a strained falsetto, but with a sharp look he made his companion shut up.
Returning to his moment of dramatic revelation, Brain traced the phrase in the guidebook with his forefinger, then traced the phrase on the sign in the air. "Tout droit"—straight on.
Straight on, Auvergne.
"We made it," Brain breathed, a genuine smile traveling hesitantly across his face. His eyes were ringed with massive bags and his body was still covered with countless bruises, but the realization that his quest was almost at an end was enough to soften the testimony of the hardship he'd faced for the past four chapters.
Brain paused, then mentally backpedaled for a moment. " 'For the past four chapters'?" he repeated confusedly, then shook his head irritably. "I really must stop thinking like Pinky." He snorted in derision. " 'The past four chapters'. This isn't some idiotic fan fiction."
Still, the elation of one of his plans almost being completed was enough to allow him to sit on the coal barge for a while and savor the moment. How coal smelled much less like fossilized plant material when happiness was in the air!
Pinky, meanwhile, was struggling with the functions of one of his faulty memory-retrieval units. This place seemed somehow familiar to the lanky mouse, but he couldn't tell where. Could it have been in an episode of Clutch Cargo? Was it the vacation resort advertised as the winning prize on Gyp-Parody? Maybe it had been on Letterman...
In the spirit of self-preservation, what was left of Pinky's frontal lobe gave him a quick reality check and reminded him that he had been there during their first trip on the boat. However, just as the tiny smudge of gray matter was about to reveal something even more crucial to the mouse, it spontaneously shut down on account of union hours.
Pinky blinked several times as he felt the queer sensation of his brain having turned on and then turned itself back off. He scratched his head, prodded his nose a few times and spat experimentally for good measure. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was forgetting something of dreadful importance, so important that his entire existence might depend on it. So saying, Pinky tried to concentrate on what it might be—but was very quickly distracted by the sight of an arcade across the street and forgot all about it.
"Oooooooh," he whispered, his eyes glazing over as he watched the flashing lights through the window. He wondered if they had Pac-man in France. Maybe he could convince Brain to let him try Sonic once they'd found the Pink Porcupine—OOH! Or the claw machine!
He was salivating over the thought of a claw machine when a rumbling noise from above distracted him. The Brain was still lost in thought as Pinky looked up curiously and remembered what it was he'd forgotten.
"Hey, look, Brain!" he cried excitedly. "It's the giant claw machine!"
Snapping out of his reverie, Brain looked over at his companion. "What are you talking about, Pinky?" he demanded, but at that moment a gargantuan shadow had passed over the coal heap. Brain stared upwards for a moment before his internal processors registered what was going on.
"GAAAAAAH!" he yelled, trying to scramble for cover. But it was much too late by now. The mechanical claw plunged downwards and scooped up the very mound of coal upon which Pinky and the Brain were seated. Closing its salvage up tight, the claw encompassed them in darkness and began to rise.
"Oh dear," Pinky said from somewhere inside the grip of the ascending claw. "This sounds like exactly the sort of cliffhanger people end chapters with."
The Brain grunted. "What are you talking about, Pinky? No one ends chapters with these sorts of cliffhangers!"
A deep astral voice paused at the keyboard and remarked sardonically, "Wanna bet?"
