Chapter Four: ... And Deeper Still
"Where am I?" Boyd asked a passing driver, not caring if the landspeeder was moving at 120 kilometers per hour.
"You're on Interstate 101 in downtown Theed," the driver replied with a strange Doppler effect.
"Ah, thanks. Cheerio," Boyd replied, looking about him and sidestepping another passing landspeeder with unusual grace. He heard movement behind him somehow (never mind the ambient freeway noise) and quickly turned about to see Liet lining up for another shot.
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"I really wish they would quit doing that," Liet muttered. "Never fails to screw up my aim." A vehicle on the other side of the highway turned into a giant raspberry as he pulled the trigger on his phallic weapon, which splattered into a red pulp spread across the entire road.
After pausing to scratch his head at the bizarre sentence structure, Liet checked his weapon to make sure that it was still in one piece, then looked down at his Palm VII PDA, and read the message that was displayed on its screen:
The leprechaun hits! -more-
Your purse feels lighter!
"Aw, damn," he muttered again, ignoring the vehicles speeding by only six inches away from him as he reached for his wallet. As he pulled it out of his pocket, however, a passing groundcar struck his arm, causing the wallet to go flying. Muttering an incoherent curse concerning a sheep and Chex cereal, he fired his phallic weapon at the offending groundcar, which instantly plummeted into a bottomless pit and burst into flames at the bottom.
"Kudos to whoever recognizes that irony," Liet commented with a smile on his face as he looked back at the Palm VII, where a new message was displayed:
The leprechaun picks up some gold!
Liet chucked the PDA at a groundcar, cursing as he saw Boyd nab his wallet and run off through the rush-hour traffic. NetHack was terribly frustrating sometimes. It was about time he gave up trying to use it as a predictor of real life.
A groundcar chose that moment to run over his exposed foot.
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ELSEWHERE
"Tenel Ka?"
"Mmm?" came the response from the other side of the bed.
"I think we're in deep shit."
The redheaded warrior stirred. "Hmm?"
"Just what I mean."
Tenel Ka lifted her head from the pillow, looked at the area surrounding the bed, and flopped back down. For good reason, too. Some rare form of guano had been piled high around the bed, and the reek of the processed matter was enough to knock a Gundark unconscious.
"I think it's from the Naboo pigeon. See that berry seed-"
The Dathomirian quickly interrupted him. "Jacen," she said in a muffled tone due to her head being buried in the pillow, "I think you need to reconsider your choice of career."
He took the clue and shut up.
NEITHERSPACE
A large anvil fell on an unsuspecting coyote. Through a little-known principle that Nikola Tesla discovered, combined with Einstein's Unified Field Theory, it induced a chain reaction that caused 10,294 stars to simultaneously go nova across the googleplex of stars that make up the universe. This in turn created 2,038 new black holes and 2.4 supermassive black holes (the other 6/10ths of a black hole were too unimportant to be counted). A cascading-flux improbability isowave then spread through spacetime, causing 109,388 nerfs to become infected with Mad Nerf Disease. The mad Nerfs staged a protest in front of Mattel Headquarters, armed with small foam dartguns. By the end of the protest, the toy company's headquarters was covered in over a million Nerf darts. Their combined mass caused the building to reach critical mass and collapse in on itself, causing millions of wannabe Jedi to cry out in shock. Their shouts, all centered within the New York Metropolitan Area, knocked several jumbo jetliners off course, which then proceeded to crash into the city's skyline. Jar-Jar Binks, infamous French terrorist, was promptly blamed for the collisions, even though he was engaged in a game of Pong on his Playstation-2 supercomputer at the time. Later, the Ministry of Something Unimportant apologized for the mistaken blame, but their apology never made it to CNN because they were too unimportant. As a result, millions of C4-loaded frogs were sent across the English Channel, even though England is *not* a state of America. The frogs were turned back by a border guard wearing red underwear, who found a quarantined medfly in the stomach of a frog. Indignant, they proceeded back to Paris and tried to blow up the Eiffel Tower, but were unsuccessful as their mini C4 packs were not sufficient to bring the steel to its melting point. Most Parisians thought it was simply a fireworks display celebrating the end of the Mattel Empire, and they joined in the fun by prancing around naked as usual. However, the sight of several thousand naked bearded ladies did not set well with the Q Continuum, who promptly deposited all the French on New Zealand. Their combined weight, however, proved to be too much for the small island to support, and it sank as fast as it could. The displaced magma from the island then caused every volcano in the Pacific Rim of Fire to blow simultaneously. One Mexican farm laborer's comment on the eruption was "Popo goes Poo-Poo!" Somewhere in the Himalayas, a Tibetan monk was quick to ask who farted. That caused Confucius to get up and begin asking people at random what the gravitational constant of the universe was. A superstitious Vulcan then tried to use the Stone of Gol on himself for no particular reason, and phased his nads out of the continuum. When they returned, they ended up in the mouth of a severe malnourised crossbreed who liked to call himself PROMETHEUS. However, the tough Vulcan nuts proved too much to chew, and he spit them out with blinding speed. They tore through several blastdoors, scaring several mouse-droids, and finally landed in front of Seven of Nine. That caused her to reconsider her purpose in life, and she decided to arm herself and hunt down Brannon and Braga. This in turn meant that she would never meet Luke Skywalker, who would then go on to marry some random love interest. And someplace completely random at some random point in time, a redhead giggled and vanished back into the temporal mists.
THEED PALACE
"Did you just feel a disturbance in the Force?"
"You mean as if millions of Frenchmen cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced?" Jacen rhetorically asked.
Tenel Ka nodded. "Exactly."
"I fear it is a time for great rejoicing," he replied in a monotone.
"Whatever," the Dathomirian commented. "Have you figured out why there's all this shit surrounding us?"
"Look up."
She did so, and discovered that the roof was missing from the building. The culprit turned out to be a very large robot, which was standing over and inspecting the contents of the palace. It carefully reached down and plucked a single turkey drumstick from some other part of the palace, then ate it. To top it off, the robot let out a loud belch that blew out all the windows in the palace that weren't already broken.
"Have any idea on what that thing is?" Tenel Ka asked as a flock of pigeons dive-bombed the robot.
Jacen groaned. "It's the Power Rangers' latest Zord or something stupid like that."
"It doesn't have X-ray vision, does it?" She grabbed one of her lizard-hide armor suits, and dove under the covers.
"Not that I know of," he replied as the bed was shaken free of the pigeon guano, moving about an inch out of it. Jacen promptly looked out the window, and Tenel Ka soon did the same.
"Another robot?" she asked.
"Voltron." He watched the large mecha begin walking toward the Power Ranger robot, shaking the city up as it did so. "I think they've got a copyright dispute to settle."
"You bet we do!" the person running the Black Lion shouted in reply.
The show's director popped out of the back of the cockpit. "You aren't supposed to hear Jacen speak," it shouted at the Voltron leader.
"Oh. Sorry, my bad."
"No problem. We'll do that part over again," the director said before realizing that the tape was still rolling. His voice rose to a crescendo that sounded like an egg beater, culminating in his shouting the word "cut" at the top of his lungs. The cameraman simply blinked.
"I should have known better than to hire a deaf assistant," the director (who incidentally was named James Cameron) muttered under his breath. Failing to find a solution, he pulled out a scale model of the Titanic and threw it at the Saban Entertainment Zord. The Titanic split in two and sank, while the Zord unfortunately was not harmed. Cameron scratched his head. That wasn't what the Titanic was supposed to do... or was it?
"Hey, Director, just get your butt back inside. We're going to haul some serious ass here in a moment," the Voltron leader shouted somewhere toward the posterior of his lion.
INTERSTATE 101 - DOWNTOWN THEED
"Drat that Boyd," Liet muttered as he hopped along the 101 on his one good foot. That idiot groundcar driver /would/ have had to run over his right foot!
"Pardon me, sir," a hovercar driver pulled alongside him and slowed to a halt, "but do you need any assistance?"
"No, and go fuck yourself," Liet replied. If there was one thing he hated more than Boyd, it was these self-righteous "good Samaritans."
"Why, fuck you too, sir," the driver replied in an oddly British accent as he accelerated away, leaving Liet in the middle of a cloud of noxious exhaust fumes. Liet coughed and continued on to Grandma's house...
Oops, wrong story.
COMING NEXT CHAPTER...
Power Rangers vs. Voltron: Live on Pay-Per-View
Little Red Riding Liet
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Dealing with 3 Feet of Pigeon Droppings
What does all this have to do with chicken and a crossdressing Swede?