Episode 9:1- Children of Mars
"This is mortifying!" Rose yelled.
"Shut up and hop!" Hobbes yelled back.
Once again, they were on another madcap adventure. But this time, it was anything but normal 'running for your life'. They were on a planet where the surface was made of an extremely elastic material. Therefore, the only way to move around effectively was... to hop. Calvin bounded along effortlessly, yelling insults at the planet's police.
"Rule 21," Hobbes called to Calvin. "Don't aggravate the evil dictator's army!"
"I thought that was Rule 20!" Rose interjected.
"No, Rule 20 is, 'Don't aggravate the evil dictator'."
"Oh, right. And Rule 22?"
"Don't aggravate his social workers. Seriously. They're terrifying."
They got to the Time Machine quickly, and Rose hit the button on her key. They bounced one last time, and dropped into the interior. Calvin ricocheted off the wall, and landed on the dematerialization button quite on purpose. The groaning and creaking of ethereal gears as they rocketed off into the Vortex was a relief to all of them.
The quiet moment didn't last long. Hobbes sprang to his feet, and began to pace around the console. "Where to next?"
"Give me a moment to recover," Rose requested. She thought for a moment. "What about... we go to J.K. Rowling's first book signing."
This suggestion was met with silence. She shrugged. "Okay, maybe not."
"HECK, YES!" Calvin and Hobbes cheered at once.
"That is a brilliant idea!" Hobbes enthused, already setting the coordinates. "GRAB THE BOOKS."
Minutes later, Calvin, Hobbes, Rose, and Charles, all dressed in wizard robes and clutching a book, bounced out of the Time Machine and glanced around.
"...this doesn't look like a book signing," Hobbes noted.
Indeed it didn't. It looked very much like an old black-and-white photograph, except with touches of color. The grey sky had a hint of pink to it. The buildings had ripped shreds of what used to be colorful advertisements attached to the doors. A missing dog poster flapped on a lamp post like an afterthought.
"Maybe we should leave," Rose suggested after a moment's gloomy contemplation.
"Yeah," Calvin said. "yeah, that sounds like a good idea." He had been staring at what looked suspiciously like the dead body of a dog, complete with buzzing flies circling it lazily.
"Right," Hobbes turned quickly back to the Time Machine. "Let's go, then."
As one, they strode back quickly to their bigger-on-the-inside cardboard box, hoping to get away as quickly as possible.
Charles, however, had other plans. He tilted his head up to the sky, hopped off Calvin's shoulder, and sniffed the air, before scuttling off.
"Charles!" Rose shrieked, and looked at Hobbes. "We have to go get him!"
And she ran off after him. Hobbes looked at Calvin. Calvin looked at Hobbes.
There was a long, awkward silence.
"...do we have to follow her?" Calvin sighed.
"Yep."
"Darn."
"My sentiments exactly."
They decided to split up, like they usually did, and search for her. Calvin went one way. Hobbes went the other. Not much to say, really.
The first thing Calvin noticed was that the streets were completely deserted. The second thing he noticed was that there were still people in the shops, even though the lights were all off. So he did the logical thing, and dashed into a shop.
It was a typical British general store. It sold tea, tea, and a completely different type of tea to the first two.
"Hello!" he called out, in an excitable manner. "Has anyone seen a blonde with a Hufflepuff robe on, possibly chasing a dinosaur?" He swished his own Gryffindor robe back and forth pointedly.
Everyone stared at him, and then went back to what they were doing.
"What?" he asked.
"Kid," said a guy with a tired-looking expression. "Why don't you go and find your mommy and daddy, and stop bothering us with fantasies? We've got enough to deal with at the moment."
"Why?" Calvin asked, tilting his head. "What's happening?"
Everyone in the shop turned to look at him.
"Seriously?" said a man in a leather jacket, his Northern accent making the words come out oddly. "Where have you been?"
"Saturn," said Calvin, completely seriously.
The man sighed. "Kid, we're in the middle of the Blitz. This is the least most fantastic time to be here. I suggest you clear out."
Calvin hurriedly backed out. They apparently hadn't seen Rose around. "The Blitz?" he directed at his wrist computer.
"Searching... searching... do you mean, the Alpha Centauri Snowball Blitz (39134) or the London Blitz?"
"Uh... London Blitz."
The computer began to speak, and Calvin's eyes grew wider. When the file had finished being read, he hurried off.
"I need to find them. Quickly."
Hobbes wasn't having much success, either. For the most part, he had been just strolling around, calling out Rose's name, with no result. He couldn't exactly walk into a shop and ask around. After about half an hour of searching, he sighed, and prepared to give up.
"She can take care of herself," he muttered darkly.
He turned the corner, and noted casually that a group of children were gathered in a circle, as if about to play 'Ring Around the Roses'. They varied in age from 7 to 12, and all had blank looks on their faces. They turned to look at Hobbes all together, which wasn't that odd. They were children, after all, and probably could see him. He waved, but got no reaction.
Shrugging, the tiger continued walking.
The group of roughly twenty children followed him.
He stopped again.
The children stopped too.
You could practically hear the dramatic music playing in the background. Like, the theme from Jaws.
You didn't get to be a time traveller without learning some key rules about creepy things along the way, and Hobbes was no exception. He knew exactly what was going to happen. In a moment, they'd attack. Because they were aliens, of course.
It was a huge surprise when they simply opened their mouths, and began to chant in a quiet, sinister whisper.
"Close your eyes and sleep,
There are demons in your dreams,
Go to sleep my darling,
there's a demon underneath your bed,
Demons in your bed,
are going to eat you up."
Hobbes shuddered involuntarily, and tried to break out of the circle, but to no avail. The children all smiled in an extremely creepy unison.
"Stay in your bed,
There are landmines on the floor.
The demons in your bed,
are going to eat you up."
The poem wasn't actually that poetic, but still sent shivers down your spine. It actually seemed like the sky was growing darker around Hobbes.
Thank Merlin that the universe knows sometimes when to send a deus ex machina your way.
A small canister hit the ground about a meter away from the circle, and all the children, plus Hobbes turned towards it. Hobbes knew exactly what it was from the ticking, and hit the ground instantly, but the pale-faced, gaunt looking children didn't. They took a few steps towards it.
Hobbes cringed slightly.
BOOM!
"Ooh," commented Ace, stepping out from behind a building. "I may have to work on that timer a bit more."
"You have the best timing ever," Hobbes gasped, jumping up and grabbing her in a tight hug. He drew back and grinned at her. "Where the hell have you been?"
"Around," she quipped. "Seriously. I leave you for a month, and you've already been attacked by creepy children from Mars? Is this what you do with your spare time, get into trouble?"
"Yup!" Hobbes said, bouncing a bit. "And about an hour ago, we were chased by a whole army. Beat that."
She tilted her head. "I kissed Zaphod Beeblebrox."
Hobbes frowned. "Wait, both of his heads?"
"Yeah."
He pulled a face. "Ugh. His left mouth has horrible hygiene, you know."
"I kissed him. Of course I know."
"By the way, you win."
"Obviously."
They got up, and began to walk down the street together. Hobbes glanced curiously at the ground. "Where are the creepy children?"
"Transmat," Ace said. "Every time I blow them, they just," she waved a hand around vaguely. "teleport back to their ship."
"So they are aliens."
"Yeah. Now, what are you doing here? Tracking down aliens, too?"
Hobbes shook his head. "No, actually. Attempting to get to a Harry Potter book signing." He tugged on his Ravenclaw robes.
Ace spun around, a gleam in her eye. "Ooh, Harry Potter? You know the bit where Hermione-"
"Focus," Hobbes snapped. "What's this about aliens?"
She shrugged. "Oh, you know. The usual. Children from Mars."
Rose, by this point, had found Charles easily. She scooped him up onto the top of her wizard robe, and glanced around. The sky had become just that little bit darker.
Charles chewed on a stray strand of peroxide-blonde hair.
"Right," she said aloud, more for her benefit than for Charles. "We'd better get back to the Time Machine."
She looked nervously around. A few stray children were milling around, but they didn't look like normal children, exactly. Their faces were pale like sour milk. And they were beginning to gather around her.
"Sugar and spice and everything nice,
Why do you think we say that?" they chanted.
So the demons in your bed,
will want to eat you up."
Since her encounter with Calvin in the (now blown-up) shop, she had since gone past the stage of thinking that anything out of the ordinary was a student prank. But at this point, she was now hoping desperately that this was a prank. Because the world was growing dark.
"You used to have a sister,
She wouldn't go to sleep,
The demons in her bed,
Ate her up."
Why was everything going out of focus? she wondered absently, stumbling slightly. The children got closer and closer. She could see their eyes now. There were no whites. Just black.
Black.
Black.
A fizzling sensation started at the tips of her fingers, and spread up to her arms. Rose stared down at her body, which was beginning to flicker, and sparkle slightly. She raised her eyes back to one little girl who stared at her with endless black pools where her sockets should be. The little girl grinned a gruesome smile, and raised an arm out.
Just before skin met skin, Rose disappeared.
And Calvin, who was just at the end of the street, and had just seen her, yelled out in alarm, and began to run as fast as he could to the children.
"Rose!" Calvin called, staring at the spot where she had been. A tiny wisp of smoke drifted up serenely. "You had better not be dead. What will I tell your mother?"
The children shifted, and began to circle Calvin instead.
"Go to sleep my darling,
there's a demon underneath your bed,
Demons in your bed,
are going to eat you up."
Calvin crossed his arms. "Yes, yes, very scary. Now, I'd like you lot to tell me just one thing. What have you done with my friend?"
They ignored him question, and continued, forming an undulating circle.
"Do not call for your mother;
Who is it you think who let the demons in,
to eat you up?"
The blackness was creeping in again. Calvin sniffed, tossing his head back, and stood defiantly against it.
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves!" he yelled. "Did gyre and gimble in the wabe! All mimsy were the borogoves!"
The nonsense poem seemed to have some effect. Calvin raised a fist in triumph, and a can of Nitro-Nine sailed through the air.
Calvin caught it, and peered at it. The timer was already ticking.
"Oh," he said, and dropped it.
BOOM!
DIrt flew everywhere.
"Blah," Calvin said, shaking himself. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son...! Oh, hi, Ace. That's your name, right?"
"Yeah," Ace said. "I decided that having a minor mid-life crisis over what my name actually was going to be was overrated, and just went with Ace. Nice to see you too, Calvin."
Hobbes bounded in. "Look who I found! You seen Rose? We have a new alien threat to destroy!"
Calvin blinked. "Yeah... I think I just met it. And so did Rose."
Ace patted her bag. "Yup. I have perfect timing, as usual."
"No," he shook his head. "You threw the nitro after she disappeared."
"Blondie disappeared?"
"I think the alien children things did something to her. She... fizzled out of existence."
"WHAT?" Hobbes and Ace exclaimed together.
"That's bad," said Ace, shaking her head. "That's really, really, bad. That's so incredibly bad I can't even say fully how bad it is."
"What? Why?"
"She's been erased from existence," Ace said, with a bit of a panicked look. "That's what those things do. She doesn't exist anymore. And there's no way to bring her back."
"Quick overview," Ace explained shortly. "There's actually a race of aliens on Mars. Quite a few, really. But this species doesn't have a name. They communicate purely by poetry, which is quite nice if you like that sort of thing. The children are immature, and a ship of them crash landed here, in the middle of the London Blitz. They have no idea what's going on, so their primary idea is to feed. And they do that by erasing their, ah, victim from 3-D space, and feeding off their energy."
"Right," Calvin said, looking unusually serious. "What do we do?"
"Every time I throw Nitro at them, they teleport back to their home ship. So, when I do that the next time, someone will have to grab on to one of them, and follow them back... and work it out from there."
"Did you know we'd be here?" Hobbes asked, tilting his head.
Ace grimaced. "I had a suspicion. You usually are."
"True," Calvin acknowledged. "Who's going to be the unlucky person?"
Hobbes and Ace looked at him pointedly.
"Oh no," he realized. "Not me. Why me?"
"Because I don't want to," Hobbes sniffed. "And Ace needs to throw the Nitro."
"Right," Calvin groaned. "I'll be bait."
They were distracting themselves from the fact that Rose didn't exist anymore with banter. It wasn't working well.
"I'll just stand in the middle of the street, and we'll take it from there," Hobbes said.
"Great." Calvin ran up to him, and gave him a quick hug around the middle. "Don't get killed."
Anyone else would have taken it as a joke, but the situation was serious. Hobbes returned the hug. "Don't worry. I'm too amazingly handsome to die."
Hobbes ran into the middle of the street, and glanced around a bit. "Ho-hum. I'll just walk along the road like...so. There's nothing odd about me narrating everything I do."
There were no children around.
He walked carefully down the road, noting the fact that no one was outside, again. And then he decided to not so much throw caution to the winds as to chuck it in as violently as he could, screaming a battle cry at the top of his lungs.
"I'M OUT HERE, YOU MARTIAN FREAKS!"
Instantly, eleven white-faced children flickered into existence around him. Hobbes stared. "Woah."
"Close your eyes and sleep,
There are demons in your dreams,
Snakes and Snails and Puppydog tails..." the children here paused. Hobbes motioned wildly behind his back, hoping that Ace and Calvin were ready.
"Who can account for the tastes of demons?"
A single can of Nitro-Nine flew through the air, and Calvin jumped out from behind a building, and clung tightly to a young boy's arm.
There was a very loud noise that signaled the arrival of a very loud explosion. When the smoke cleared, Calvin was gone, along with the children
Hobbes and Ace looked at each other.
"Well," Hobbes said at last. "Why don't we go stop other people being erased from existence."
There was a long silence.
"Yeah," Ace said. "That sounds good."
Wordlessly, she reached into her bag and tossed him a handful of explosives. Hobbes tucked them under his arm.
As soon as Calvin's feet touched the ground, he spun around, and ran as fast as he could. The Martian children hadn't even noticed he was there. He turned a corner, and looked for anything that was vaguely familiar. He spotted a cupboard and ducked into it, locking the door behind him. Inside, there were all sorts of weird alien appliances that he didn't know the use of, although he did see something that looked a lot like a hairdryer.
"The plan," he told himself firmly. "is sabotage. Sabotage is easy. I'm good at sabotage."
He sighed, and slid down the door. "I just go into the first technologically filled place I can find, and..."
I'm only here because someone blew up my workplace!
"Yep, that's right." He gave the empty blackness a melancholy smile. "I'm so mentally zonked out because of my friend's death that I'm hearing," he kicked uselessly at the floor. "I'm hearing things that she's said to me."
Why the HELL did you turn me into a BAT?
"Because it was fun to see your expression."
The plan? What plan? We'll just run in there, and get rid of the godly body parts. No one will expect us to make a move without thinking about it first.
He laughed aloud then, recalling that little adventure. "Well, it did work. Eventually."
An awful lot of running...
Calvin suddenly made a decision, and stood up. "Right. This is going to be the biggest, best explosion I've ever made. Better than the one at Hendrick's. This is for you, Rose," he added.
He dug the Transmogrifier Gun from his pocket, and flipped it over twice, thoughtfully, before his expression hardened. "Let's do this."
Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
(A/N-
Okay, so. Creepiness aside, what did you think?
A lot of poetry in this story arc, so here's the proper credit.
Close Your Eyes- Daniel Glasser
Jabberwocky- Lewis Carol
Antigonish- William Mearns
There ya go. It's holidays, which usually means I have more time to write, but nooooo, Mum says we need to do more family activities. So this was a struggle to get out. The story arc is coming along!
There were... uh, a grand total of TWO references this chapter.
~Kitty)