Chapter 8

Is Pretty Long. Sorry.

After a quick consultation with the Animal Rights Activist section of the workforce, the coal processing workers dropped the two mice out in the rolling fields of Auvergne—yet another unbelievable coincidence, and Pinky said so.

"So!" Pinky said, taking the above paragraph a bit too literally. Then he rubbed his neck. "Why d'you suppose that last chapter was so short and meaningless, Brain?"

Brain had finally caved in on Pinky's theory, seeing the overwhelming plot-related evidence in its favor. "It looks as though the coal processing plant was supposed to be the climax of the story," he scoffed, rubbing grass and coal stains out of his fur. "However, it has appeared that there wasn't quite enough material to make for an exciting climax, so we were randomly deposited here in preparation for the end."

Pinky ruminated on this for a moment, then nodded. "Plus, the story's gettin' a bit too long anyway."

A triumphant glow lit up the Brain's eyes. "But it's almost over, for soon I shall rule the world!" he proclaimed, then scampered over a grassy ridge. The sky had darkened with the evening, so Brain dug a small flashlight out of his somehow-intact knapsack and turned it on. Directly below them was what looked like a nineteenth-century horse and cart without the horse...as one would hope. The paint was peeling and the wood was quite old, but it was unquestionably the historically-preserved carriage of Inspector Jacques Mousseau.

Pinky was the first to speak, doing so with a yelp as he leapt into the air. "WEEEEEEEE DID IT!" he cried, then realized that he had jumped into the air above the carriage and that therefore he was plummeting down towards it.

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHOOF!"

Brain regarded with disdain Pinky's struggling back legs sticking out of the top of the carriage. "Pinky, I would appreciate that you not destroy the carriage yet," he sighed, descending to the roof of the rotten old carriage and pulling his companion out of the wood. "Besides," he continued as Pinky dug some splinters out of his ears, "finding the carriage was only the first part. Finding the Pink Porcupine Diamond is the second."

The Brain flipped open his knapsack again and grabbed a small contraption that looked like a fishing pole without the pole—basically, just the hook and line with the reel attached at the end that looked suspiciously like the grappling hook from the first chapter. Placing the hook in a sturdy cleft of the above hillside, Brain took hold of the reel and jumped off the top of the carriage, descending gracefully with the slowly-unraveling line until he'd reached the ground. Pinky climbed monkeylike down the string after him, only stumbling once or twice.

"Ummmmm, well, I forgot to ask earlier, Brain," Pinky began as he touched down on solid earth, "but how come you think the diamond is going to be in the carriage?"

Reeling the hook back in, the Brain snorted derisively. "The criminals who'd attacked Mousseau couldn't possibly have sold the diamond before being caught by the police, as they would not have had the time to do so, and the diamond wasn't found on them. Mousseau's amnesia would have prevented him from retrieving the diamond from its hiding spot after he'd come to, and not even he would have been stupid enough to keep the diamond on his person."

"Zort! But you said they'd searched the carriage!" Pinky protested, showing an unusual amount of intelligence. This image was soon dissipated, however, as he grabbed two blades of grass and began mock-swordfighting with them.

"Yes, I did." Even though it had not lasted long, Brain had been somewhat impressed with Pinky's random recollection of memory. "However, they are humans. They could not search the smaller places that we mice can get to easily."

Brain was about to embark on another self-important monologue, but was interrupted by a gigantic rumbling sound. He glanced about panickedly, scanning the skies for signs of thunderclouds. There were none in sight, but the rumbling kept going for a full three minutes. By then, Brain had flung himself to the ground and covered his head with his arms. At last the rumbling passed, and Brain pushed himself up to his elbows.

"What was THAT?" he demanded.

Pinky grinned apologetically and rubbed his stomach. "Sorry, Brain. I'm really hungry."

The Brain raised an irritated eyebrow at the author for having used such a stupid and overworked gag.

"Well, Brain, I mean," Pinky continued, wandering over towards Brain, "I haven't had anything to eat since chapter three, and that was a long time ago!"

Brain decided not to point out the fact that he himself had been starving since the morning's food pellets at the lab, seeing as he was still in what he considered to be the land of nauseating food. In his case, though, egotism and mental control had allowed him to conceal the noises of stomach rumblings except under the most extreme of pressures. "I'm sorry, Pinky," he apologized gruffly yet at least a little sincerely, "but you can't eat anything until we've finished with the carriage. I am not about to go through all of that tedious torture again just because you feel peckish."

The Brain scrabbled onto the single remaining back wheel of the carriage and up into the rotted-open back, causing the boards to creak ominously. Pinky followed close behind, stumbling a bit on the ledge. "Narf!" he exhaled as he slammed face-down on the floor of the carriage, proceeding to make the framework of the entire carriage wobble. The movement dislodged a small ceramic pot from a rotted overhead shelf, which promptly bounced off of the both Pinky's and Brain's respective heads and shattered on the floor. A pungent and thoroughly repulsive odor leaked out of the chipped urn as a liquidy glop the color of vomit congealed on the floorboards, actually burning a small hole through it. Pinky clapped his hands around his nose, but the Brain's eyes were tearing and he was practically on the verge of swooning.

"What is that?" Pinky coughed, stooping over to examine it. The Brain leaned against the side of the carriage for support, grasping his gut.

"Mousseau...was fond of an...incredibly repugnant...form of escargot," the Brain gasped. His normally pure white fur, beneath its coating of coal, sand and travel-sweat, was beginning to turn green from the fumes. "He was...carrying it...in the carriage...to eat when he...returned home." He paused to wheeze violently. "As can be surmised...no one was...brave enough to remove...any of it after the...carriage was discovered."

"Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmoh," Pinky replied cryptically, creeping cautiously over to the glop. Bending over carefully, he scraped some of it onto his finger—ignoring the sensation of the corrosive material eating through his flesh—and sampled it with a quick lick. The Brain immediately turned blue and had to cover his mouth to hold back the contents of his stomach. Pinky mused over the taste for a moment, then began shoveling even more into his mouth. "This is great, Brain!" he proclaimed through massive mouthfuls of the stuff. He held out a gooey handful to the Brain. "Want some?"

There was nothing else for it—the Brain got sick over the edge of the carriage. (And with some pretty wild sound effects, I might add.)

"Pinky," he wheezed, not facing his companion, "please remove that vile substance from my sight."

Pinky looked from the centuries-old escargot to the Brain, then back again. "You really should acquire a taste for foreign food, Brain," he informed him, but nevertheless he disposed of the escargot through the trash receptacle he fondly called his mouth. He burped, then waved at Brain. "It's gone now, Brain!"

Just to be on the safe side, Brain waited a few more moments before turning around to look into the carriage again. What he saw was absolutely incredible. This was obviously where Mousseau had kept the criminals on his fateful journey across the plains, as there were the remains of old handcuffs and other restraining devices scattered across the floor. A solitary padlock rested against the back wall, rusting and decrepit. There was a window communicating between this section of the carriage and the "driver's seat", one with bars across it, and scrawled across the wall next to it were various old, rude French missives carved into the wood in nearly illegible text. There was also another "section" of the carriage, a half-room that looked like there used to be a divide between it and the chamber they were in currently. This was apparently where Mousseau had kept his necessary tools, out of reach from his criminal passengers but not up front where they could be lost by a sudden bump in the road. This was also where the escargot had fallen from, as the shelf had in the hijacking presumably been knocked haphazardly through the long-rotted wall and was settled at an odd angle over the room they were in now. The Brain sighed. The romantic in him might have liked to sit there quietly for a while, simply taking in the influence of cultures long past—but his business side sharply told the romantic to shut up, as there was work to be done and a diamond to be found.

Without any further opportunities for his whimsical side to say something hopelessly inspiring, the Brain opened his backpack and removed what looked quite a bit like a small magnet with a belt and a few switches attached. When Brain pulled the device out, Pinky's eyes lit up and he began to applaud.

"E-gad!" he cried, jumping up and down. "You've really done it, Brain! You've found a magnet that attracts diamonds to it!" Pinky made several nasally noises in his glee. "Oh, this is just like on The Tick!" he announced—but then paused in confusion. "Or did that one attract fish?"

The Brain glared witheringly at him, an effect that was more unnerving than usual since he still had unusually massive bags beneath his eyes. "Try to think, Pinky," he suggested tartly, buckling the belt around his waist. "It might prove beneficial."

So saying, he repositioned the magnet so the poles were pointed towards the ceiling, then flipped on a few of the switches clipped to the belt. Within a moment, the electrically-amplified magnetic current had pulled the magnet up to the metal reinforcers in the roof of the carriage, tugging the Brain up along after it. His point fully made, he crossed his arms and looked down at Pinky.

"Well, Pinky?" he called down, seeing as he was quite a ways up from the gawky mouse. "It's simply a normal magnet with an incredibly large range! This way, I can hang from the ceiling and have a unique vantage point that might allow me to view the diamond!"

"Haha! Fjord!" Pinky called back in awe, chuckling a little at the sight of Brain suspended from the ceiling by a magnet. That would be one to tell the guys at his weekly "Fifty-Two Pickup" game. Actually, "the guys" were just some old napkins and a moldy cheese crumb he'd found in the lab kitchen, but he didn't tell them that in case it hurt their feelings. Pinky was thinking all this rather merrily, having a pretty good time, then suddenly he paused mid-laugh as he looked back up at the Brain on the ceiling. "Wait a minute, no no no!" he realized, then cupped his hands around his mouth as he shouted up to his companion. "But Brain, if that's such a strong magnet, wouldn't it attract more of the metal stuff in the room than just—"

At that moment Pinky was interrupted by a large clash as physics was reminded of its minor error and summoned everything metal in the entire carriage to the Brain's skull. And although Brain's skull had gradually become very strong to protect the brilliant mind inside, it's a bit hard to ignore the sensation of being attacked by a series of wrenches, several pairs of old rusted handcuffs, the metal bars in the window, a small unlit gas lamp, the rusted padlock that had been in the corner and a lot of the bolts in the roof reinforcers, not to mention numerous other equally painful things that I've momentarily forgotten but may suddenly recall twenty years from now. A strangled, sarcastic moan escaped from beneath the wreckage.

"Thank you, Pinky."

Pinky beamed and stood straight up, saluting at the pile of metal implements stuck to the ceiling. "You're welcome, Brain! Narf!" He grinned. "It was nothing, really, I mean, there're already so many fanfictions that just forget that sort of stuff."

Somehow an arm reached out from within the pile on the ceiling and flicked the switch again. The magnet was turned off, and as one the attracted items, the magnet and the mouse belted to it fell to the floor. Most of the debris crashed perilously close to where Pinky was standing, but in the interest of keeping queasy readers from having fatal attacks of stress, I hasten to add that the little mouse was able to avoid most injury except for the problem of sustaining a bruise to the upper arm. (It's perfectly safe for me to tell you this, as it has no bearing on the story whatsoever.) As for the Brain, he was able to open his backpack in mid-fall and pull out a handkerchief, opening it for easy descent—

—about a second after he hit the floor.

Pinky ambled over to the Brain and removed the handkerchief from the air, blowing his nose on it and handing it back to his prone companion. With a heady grunt that may well have been a sigh, Brain peeled himself back off the floor and removed the magnet from the U-shaped dent it had made in his back. He glared accusingly at the magnet, as though the sudden reinstatement of the laws of physics had been its fault, then disgustedly unfastened the belt and heaved the contraption carelessly into a corner. Not so carelessly, however, that it didn't land on something soft.

"Perhaps this should be attempted again," the Brain grumbled, rummaging about in his backpack again. This time he came up with what looked like television anttenae attached to a digital clock with a lot of spare wires scattered around the frame and what appeared to be parts of a metal detector and—Pinky was afraid to ask whether or not one of the pieces had come off of a Thighmaster.

"What's that, Brain?" Pinky asked curiously, prodding the antenna. There was a large ZZZZZZZAT!, and the small mouse was then quite surprised to be suddenly conducting over twenty thousand volts of electricity through his body, which he was also surprised to find lighting up and portraying his skeletal system through his skin. After about half a minute of this, the current was broken by a small jolt and Pinky collapsed, smoking, to the floor, whereupon the contraption promptly exploded.

"That was," Brain replied a moment later, looking down at his soot-soaked, scorched hands and the twisted black wreckage in them, "a revolutionary new device I had invented that could detect the invisible wavelengths of minerals, which had taken me months to design and which I had just last night programmed to the smallest detail to pick up the waves of carbonic crystals, of which diamonds are made."

There was a long pause following this.

"I hope you went to the patent office with it already, Brain," Pinky commented somewhat weakly from the floor.

The Brain remained silent a while longer in mourning of the passage of an incredibly sophisticated machine, then with an almost heart-shattering sigh placed it reverentially on the floor and turned back to his knapsack. Within another moment, he had produced something that looked very much like a universal TV remote with a vacuum bag, satellite dish and Ronco food dehydrator attached to it. While Pinky strained to get up from the floor, the Brain adjusted several bizarre-looking settings on the remote and then gripped a hole in the floor with his jagged tail. "Hold on to something solid, Pinky!" he ordered, then as Pinky dug his fingernails into the floor, Brain pressed the "Cable" button.

Immediately the Ronco whirred like mad and everything in the carriage was lifted off the ground, floating lazily in midair while the vacuum bag inflated almost to breaking point. The Brain's tail strained and clenched, but it succeeded in holding him mostly on the ground. Pinky, however, had always been imbued with a somewhat poor grip and was soon sailing about in midair with the rest of the items in the carriage. His eyes were squeezed shut for fear of catastrophe, but once he'd opened his eyes and realized his predicament the little mouse began to enjoy himself, doing a quick backstroke, a midair somersault, a few bars of the Macarena and a quick weightless rendition of "Swan Lake".

"Zort!" Pinky observed, turning upside down beneath a floating pair of handcuffs. He looked down at the Brain as he continued to make slow, semi-graceful flips. "What's this, Brain?"

The Brain was tremendously proud of this invention, and this pride was clearly etched in every line of his triumphant grin. "An anti-gravity field, Pinky!" he proclaimed impressively, easing his tail's hold on the floor and floating gently upwards. He patted his contraption with the same air as a man rewarding his favorite son. "It took an incredible amount of work to create this at the lab without those scientists noticing the necessary components missing, but after all this long time I have finally made it!"

Brain had wanted to hype this device for quite some time, so he just kept going with it although Pinky was clearly paying more attention to the steps of a levitational polka. "The principle it works upon, you realize, is that a remote control can send commands virtually through empty air to a receiving area. With a few molecular adjustments, the remote could act as a transmitter to any sort of atom in existence. As well, the addition of the satellite dish would increase the range of the device, meaning that the orders given would be received by all nearby atoms and not merely the ones that the remote is directed towards."

While the Brain's back was turned, Pinky stifled a small yawn, instead focusing on moving in interesting and inventive ways through the empty air. The Brain continued regardless. "And that is where the food dehydrator comes in. In order to lessen the air pressure bearing down on the objects in question, some components of a Ronco were required...although not to remove liquids, but to remove an atmospheric gas! But as matter cannot be created or destroyed, the air is instead temporarily redirected to another location—the vacuum bag." The Brain laughed in an intellectual manner. "It sounds like a foolishly simple concept, but it actually required an incredibly long time for the idea to come into my superior mind and longer to build and perfect this machine! And now, with its advent, we shall be able to search the entire carriage without having to move any heavy objects of any sort!"

Sensing that Brain's speech was over, Pinky applauded vigorously to convey the impression that he had been listening appreciatively the entire time. Brain wasn't fooled, but welcomed the applause with forced modesty. "And the most vital component," he added self-importantly, "is that any slight changes in atmospheric pressure will have no effect on the field, as the dehydrator is programmed to regulate itself according to various environmental conditions." The promotion of his invention finally at an end, Brain proceeded to get down to business. "Now, Pinky, let's find that diamond!"

Regretfully abandoning his attempt at tapping out "La Cucaracha" in midair, Pinky floated over to another section of the room and began to look around. The Brain waited a moment to make sure all would go well and that this invention wouldn't also prove faulty, then made his way to the opposite end of the room.

Unfortunately, at that moment a strong gust of wind outside blew a large and very old tree down on the ridge above the carriage. Although the obvious catastrophe of it landing on the carriage never came to pass, it did however manage to convince Brain's anti-gravity conductor that a very large amount of air pressure had just descended upon the carriage. So with a sudden jolt, the dehydrator sucked up even more air to (it thought) balance out the atmosphere, and with no one to witness it but a solitary cow out for a last graze, the entire wreckage of Mousseau's coach suffered a tremendous loss of gravity and shot up into the air.

A foreboding rumble alerted the danger sections in the Brain's, well, brain, and he decided to look up. Not much appeared amiss, however, so Brain ignored it. Pinky, on the other hand, had happened to be floating in the direction of the back door and chanced to see the plains of Auvergne a worrying distance down from them.

"Nice view! Troz!" Pinky remarked before drifting away again—then he paused in midair. He looked again. The ground definitely was a little farther away than he would have liked.

"Ummmm...Brain?" he began hesitantly, attempting to make his way over to his companion. However, it was hard to deliberately move in a single direction, so he was forced to call to Brain instead of tapping him on the shoulder. "Braaaaaaaa-aaaaaaain!"

The Brain's head shot up from inside a tool kit he'd found. "What is it?" he demanded eagerly. "Did you find the diamond?"

"Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnno, not as such," Pinky was forced to admit, then began gesticulating wildly. "But the—"

He was cut off by the Brain, who was fed up with what he only saw as Pinky's latest pointless distraction. "If you have not found the diamond, then I do not desire to hear it, Pinky!" he snapped, diving back into the toolbox. A wayward wrench happened to sail towards Pinky, but because of the lower gravity it became suspended in midair rather than dealing any sort of damage. Pinky worried, twisting his tail nervously in his hands, then spotted the anti-gravity projector. The vacuum bag was unbelievably full now, and some of the seams were actually popping as even more air pressure was relocated from the interior and exterior of the carriage.

"Braaaaaaaaaiiin..." Pinky began again, and was once more rudely interrupted.

"Pinky, what did I tell you?" Brain shot back, a hard edge in his voice as he ducked his head back down into the bin.

His fur on end and small teeth chattering, Pinky glanced wildly between the ground rapidly receding behind them and the vacuum bag expanding further and further. What to do, what to do, what to do...The little mouse was about to take matters into his own hands when he spotted Elvis, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster in a plane with Amelia Earhart, dragging in the jetstream behind them a coffin plainly labeled "Jimmy Hoffa".

"BRAIN!" Pinky gasped, pointing at the incredible spectacle. "BRAIN, OH, OH OH, OH LOOK OH LOOK OH LOOOOOOK! NARF!"

This time the Brain didn't even grant Pinky the satisfaction of looking up. "I'm sure it's utterly insignificant, like your mind!" he shouted irritably. "Now look for that diamond or I shall have to hurt you!"

Pinky whimpered and covered his head, his large ears flattening against his skull. The ground got further away, the vacuum bag continued to inflate past its capacity, the last clue to the major unsolved mysteries retreated into the distance and the escargot Pinky had had was deciding that it might want to make a return visit.

In a split second the vacuum bag popped, and the historically-preserved carriage with its sudden new influx of gravity began to make a screaming reentry into the earth's atmosphere.

KRA-BOOOOOOM!

That night the Parisians, looking out of their windows, viewed a spectacular explosion from somewhere to their south and wondered if those pesky Spaniards would stop celebrating their national holidays when decent people were trying to get a bit of sleep.

The carriage was utterly destroyed. The entire roof had caved in, all of the previously floating implements were piled in unnatural positions on top of each other and the carriage's last remaining back wheel had actually managed to go into orbit around the earth and would, in twenty years' time, make a somewhat disastrous impact with an alien space probe, causing a huge and terrible interplanetary war. But that's all in the future. And hopefully we should all be slightly more concerned that at the bottom of the rubble were two very small, genetically-altered lab mice.

Groaning and rubbing his cranium, the Brain heaved himself out from under a collapsed metal roof reinforcer and rooted tensely around in the debris for Pinky. He found the gawky mouse twittering like a bird with an empty gas lamp on his head. With a grunt, Brain managed to pull the lantern off of his companion, then leaving his Pinky to regain quasi-sensibility went with a pounding heart to check the anti-gravitational projector. It had been utterly destroyed, buried beneath a shelf full of eleven ceramic jars of escargot.

"NOOOOO!" Brain howled when he spotted the wreckage of his most prized invention. He ran over to the still form of the machine, the vacuum bag punctured with massive holes, the universal remote no longer quite so universal, and the Ronco far beyond being resalable at a flea market. "It's—it's all right," Brain whimpered, patting the machine. "You had a good life, and you...you served me very well. I'm very proud of you. But...you'll be going somewhere better now."

Pinky sat up abruptly. "Really, Brain?" he interrupted. "I always wanted to go to Memphis!"

Brain sighed and slumped over in defeat. "We're not going anywhere, Pinky," he moaned. "It's over. We're finished. Nothing matters anymore."

Confused beyond measure, Pinky walked over to his companion. "What do you mean, Brain?" he asked. His ears drooped slightly at the tips, and he took on a concerned expression. "It's not all over," he tried to console the Brain. "We c'n still find the diamond, can't we?"

"No, Pinky," Brain replied brokenly. He turned to face Pinky, his face lined with utter downfall. "That was the last piece of equipment I had that could have helped us find it. The only other things in my pack were fake IDs in case we were caught, that French phrasebook and a copy of The Origin of Species for light reading on the plane!" The Brain then swept a dejected hand over the entire scene about them. "We can't search this ourselves. We're too small to move most of the wreckage, and if we involved humans, they'd take the diamond for themselves. We can't win...We simply can't win." Completely crushed, Brain took a seat on the grassy knoll and stared emptily into space.

The situation was frightful to Pinky. Barring his mental breakdown in chapter 5, the Brain had never seemed quite so desolate. The tall mouse reached out a hand to comfort his companion—but then his stomach rumbled. Pinky cranked out a queasy smile.

"Um, Brain? As...as long as we're not going anywhere, wellllll...can I eat some of that escargot?"

He decided worriedly to take the Brain's utter silence as a "yes" and grabbed one of the small ceramic pots. Heaving it off of the collapsed shelf, Pinky eased the lid open and began messily—but quietly, out of respect to his companion—to devour the contents. Soon enough that jar was empty, but Pinky's stomach wasn't and he cracked open another one. Momentarily he considered offering some to Brain, but decided that that might not be the best move at the current time. So instead he finished off that jar as well, and had just opened another one when something made him stop. Pinky stared, his eyes widening. He rubbed them vigorously, blinking several times. He attempted to say something, but no sound came out no matter how hard he tried. Shaking like a leaf with his knees knocking, Pinky reached behind him and tapped the Brain's shoulder. Brain sighed heavily.

"It's useless, Pinky," he lamented, turning away. "We never should have come here at all. Nothing is worth it."

Pinky quivered even more, his vision spinning. He tapped the Brain's shoulder again, harder and more insistently this time. "Ahwahl—glibblerug—trozzicius—spizzerinctum—" he babbled incoherently. Once more, Brain waved him off.

"It couldn't have worked," Brain went on. "It never would have worked. We were fools to think we could succeed where men and a century of decomposition have failed. The plan was flawed from the beginning. The trip was unnecessary. The pain and torture was unnecessary. Having to enact an amateur writer's whims was completely unnecessary." If that was possible, he slumped even further over. "Perhaps we should simply return to the lab."

It was at this point that Pinky simply had to take charge himself, which he did by bodily lifting Brain up and plopping him down again in front of the escargot jar. The Brain gazed dejectedly at the bile-colored glop—then his heart stopped as a stray beam of moonlight glinted off of something inside the jar. With trembling hands, the mouse reached into the depths of the corrosive food and found something unexpectedly hard, something larger even than his own head.

Lifting it slowly out, the Brain became aware of the sensation that after over one hundred years, he was the first to touch the legendary Pink Porcupine Diamond.

"Mousseau wasn't quite as stupid as he had seemed," the Brain exhaled breathlessly in a voice no louder than a whisper. The diamond, with the moonlight playing through it, was indeed a beautiful iridescent rose with the aforementioned porcupine-shaped flaw in the center. Both mice were completely enraptured. "He knew the criminals he was conveying would try to steal the diamond, so he placed it inside one of the jars of his repugnant escargot. Not even an honest man would want to open one of those, unless it was Mousseau himself."

The silence lasted a bit longer until Brain broke it again, turning to Pinky. "Pinky," he stated unbelievingly, "the world is ours."