Chapter 5: Contouring the Face of the Earth – Day 3: Step 10
"Dude, hey duude. Aw come on, MH. Don't be so melodramatic…" Crazy Hand shook the right hand, who attempted to swat him away.
"No…" he groaned. "Let me die…"
Oh bother, Crazy Hand sighed. "You're overreacting."
"You're underreacting," came the muffled reply.
Crazy Hand flicked Master Hand in the side. "Get uuuppppp!" he whined. "You haven't even seen it!"
I don't need to see it to know how it looks, Master Hand thought regretfully. But he was going to have to see it sooner or later, so he might as well just get it over with.
Crazy Hand lit up with joy as he saw his brother begin to shift, slowly lifting himself up off the dirt. He busied himself with fanning the soot off the other's glove, flitting about him excitedly and chattering away about something or other to do with super-fast jellyfish. For his part, Master Hand could do nothing but stare blankly at the expanse of dirt around him—it was worse than he'd thought. The terrain around him, which had previously been covered in grass, was entirely exposed; he was standing in the middle of a large crater, the walls of which appeared to be miles away all around.
"Hey Master, you ok?"
Master Hand looked over at his brother, too flustered to actually respond. Crazy Hand frowned. "You didn't hear a thing I said did you? Jeeze just because I talk to myself a lot doesn't mean I always want to!"
Master Hand sighed. "I'm sorry, Crazy. I'm just having a hard time wrapping my mind around all this…destruction." Crazy Hand gave him an odd look.
"You'd think you'd be used to it by now," he said doubtingly. "I mean hellooo. It's what I dooo."
Master Hand chuckled nervously. Crazy had a point.
"I always have a point," Crazy Hand beamed. "For instance, I made this huge crater so we'd get a head start on the next step, despite being nothing but disembodied hands."
Ignoring Crazy Hand's comment on their state as hands, Master Hand asked, rather unconvinced, "You're trying to do the next step again?" If the next step was blowing up the entire universe, then sure, Crazy Hand could keep doing what he was doing.
"Oh we're not going to blow up the entire universe," Crazy Hand piped up, much to his right-handed counterpart's surprise. "But that was a good guess!"
How does he do that? Master Hand wondered for what felt like the umpteenth time. He knew Crazy Hand wasn't psychic—if he was he would've destroyed everyone's minds a long time ago when they went around visiting some of the other worlds—but he knew no other explanation. But what if he really is psychic? He peered over at his brother, and the left hand wiggled his fingers at him gleefully.
"You find step 10 yet?" Crazy Hand asked. Master Hand chuckled nervously before busying himself with flipping through the book. Crazy Hand was pleased to see he was starting to convince his brother that he was psychic. He wished it were true, but the real reason he knew Master Hand's thoughts was just so boring and average: all he was doing was reading the narration. Everyone could do that. He grumbled to himself bitterly until he heard Master Hand speak up in surprise.
"'Step 10: Terraform your earth,'" he began. "'Although the mainland planet you have created has several characteristics of earth, for your planet to truly qualify in the "earth" category it must first have the landscapes and environments typical of an earth.'" He gave Crazy Hand a bewildered look. "Do you mean to tell me earths have giant craters?"
"Well duh," Crazy Hand said. "We've been to plenty of earths. Remember that one place with the giant chasm? The really cold one? It's the same world that has talking trees! And what about that You're Gone place with that huge crater lake?" He gestured around at the crater they were in. "That's what this crater is for. Once we add water this crater can be a lake!"
"Wait what, Crazy slow down!" Master Hand exclaimed, overwhelmed by the amount of information Crazy Hand was sputtering out. "What step does water come in?"
"Step 12!" The Hand of Destruction let out an exasperated sigh. "Get your head in the game, MH! And don't give me any lip about not having a head either!" he added sternly before Master Hand could protest. "There are people out there who can gijinkify us at the drop of a pin! And by golly they will!" He turned his palm up to sky dramatically, his fingers shaking with emotion. "I can just imagine it. They'll make us into extremely boss train conductors wearing fancy white gloves that we use to point with a lot! And we'll have intense battles in subway cars after forcing our challengers through multiple stages of combat before finally gracing them with our presence! It shall be called Classic Mode and it shall have epic music and YOU, Mr. Hand of Creation, shall make it so!" He pointed triumphantly at Master Hand only to see that the right hand had metaphorically buried his nose in the World Creation book. He had pretty much stopped listening to the crazy hand's rambling after he mentioned gijink-whatever-it-was. He wasn't trying to seem rude, but he was fairly certain listening to a destructive hand blathering for extended periods of time was bad for your health.
"So I've finished familiarizing myself with the steps," Master Hand began, looking up from the book. "I want to make sure we don't have any more misunderstandings like this."
"Good, good, good," Crazy Hand said. He knew his brother never meant to be rude, but it still kind of stung to feel ignored. Ah well! he thought. I can always bring it up again later!
"It has a list of some of the features we can add in here," Master Hand was saying. "Besides lakes there are whole oceans we need to make." He rubbed his fingers together in thought. "I guess I'll leave all the placeholders for bodies of water to you."
"And the trenches and canyons and volcanos!"
"Don't we have to build up volcanos?" Master Hand asked.
"Well ok then if you want to make the volcanos—"
"No, no that's quite alright!" Master Hand interjected. "I'll leave all the destructive landforms to you as well!"
"Wunderbar!" Crazy Hand beamed. "What else do I get to destroy?" he asked merrily.
"The trees, for one."
There was a tense silence as the left hand stared at the right. Master Hand started to sweat nervously. He fidgeted, looking around a couple of times before peering back at his left counterpart, who for once was being completely still. It just felt wrong.
Master Hand attempted to break the silence. "Um, Crazy—"
"Bad!"
Master Hand was taken aback by this. "What do you mean—"
"Bad!" Crazy Hand repeated, wagging his finger. "Bad hand!"
"Ow!" Master Hand yelled as Crazy Hand flicked his pointer finger.
"Don't you know deforestation is bad?" Crazy Hand lectured. "Heck, even I know it's bad! Me."
"Hold it!" Master Hand said. "There are too many trees on this earth."
"It's beautreeful."
"Too much of anything is a very bad thing," Master Hand continued, ignoring Crazy Hand's commentary. "Besides, you said you wanted more variety, and we can't do that unless we get rid of some of these trees first. A lot of these trees." Crazy Hand nodded thoughtfully; he had a point there.
Master Hand conjured up a large blank sheet of paper. "This is going to be our map," he told Crazy Hand. He took out a pen and made a small black dot in the center. "We are here. Right now, this entire earth is covered in grass. …With the exception of this crater, which will become a lake." He marked it on the map. "I'll be building land up and you'll be tearing it down. So I'll be making things like hills and mountains while you'll be making things like the oceans. Now, if I've understood correctly—"
"Now hold up!" Crazy Hand yelled out. "You want me to make all the oceans? Are you crazy!? I mean, I'm Crazy, I know you're not because I am, unless we're really the same person, like clones or something, except not really clones because we have different movesets—" He shook himself roughly. "No! No rambling!"
"Crazy, I thought we'd agreed that you'd be forming the oceans," Master Hand said, somewhat amazed that Crazy Hand had managed to stop himself from going off on a tangent.
"By making trenches and messing up the sea floor so it isn't so weirdly flat, not making the whole gosh darned fishbowl! That would take forever," Crazy Hand whined. Besides, he thought, multiple tangents in one chapter would be overdoing it.
"Well I don't know what to say to you," Master Hand sighed. "World creation is serious business, Crazy."
A/N: He's right! Worldbuilding is hard! [weeps]
"Oh great!" Crazy Hand said. "Look what you've done, MH. You've given the author a reason to make an author's note in the middle of a story. I mean just look at it!" He gestured disbelievingly at the bolded words. "It's one of the worst things you could do with this writing medium! What were you thinking?"
"Me?" Master Hand asked, baffled. "You're asking me? I don't even know what you're talking about."
"No, not you," Crazy Hand said. "The author. Boy, it seems like everyone's going crazy today." He wilted, hovering lower to the ground. "That's my job," he muttered.
"Your job is also to make the oceans."
Crazy Hand's fingers twitched. He snatched the world creation book from his brother and rifled through the pages before coming upon another blank one. It was at this point he gave the book back to his brother, who looked between the barren paper surface and the left hand with a perplexed expression.
"You're the Hand of Creation, right?" Crazy Hand prompted, nudging Master Hand slightly. "You do this part first, and then I'll get to destroying things!" He beamed brightly at his brother. "Go on," he said. "Just push the button."
"What button—?" And then Master Hand saw the large red button occupying the space where the blank page had been just a few seconds before. He stared at it blankly—likely with the blankness that once existed where the button was—and, for once not questioning the sequence of events, pressed the button.
To really understand the full effects of The Button, it is necessary to focus not on the individual trees, but on the entire forest—in this case, the entire world. Had the Hands completed step 10 by…hand, it would've required them to first uproot several thousand trees in order to make space to dig out the cavity of the ocean. However, what Master Hand failed to understand was how that would defeat the entire purpose of "World Creation 101: An Introduction to Basic World Creation (for Dummies)", the textbook for the introductory level course of (nearly) the same name in the discipline of world creation. No, to terraform the entire world completely by hand would require first taking the appropriate courses, of which there were several, followed by a research project spanning two full semesters of study. Thus, The Button was created for first-years to have a firsthand (and secondhand) experience of the mechanics of geological world creation. With its use of a state-of-the-art random number generator, The Button creates a new seed to be used as a template, forming a few basic structures and allowing students space to make more of their own, much like a child in a sandbox. Or, as it were, a sandbox video game.
What Crazy Hand failed to understand was how that would get rid of all his trees.
"NOOOOO!" Crazy Hand screamed out. He fell upon the ground and clawed at the dirt, sobbing heavily. "My trees! My beautiful trees!"
"Huh," Master Hand mused as he looked over the map, which The Button had so graciously filled out for him to show the newly-seeded earth. "That was easy."
"Too easy!" Crazy Hand balled himself into a fist and shook it at the sky. "Daaaamn you, deus ex machina! Daaaaamn you!" If he had teeth, he would've been grinding them together furiously, much to his dentist's dismay, but he had neither teeth nor a dentist, and so he fumed to himself, quietly cursing someone he called "the author" for what he considered lazy writing. I was going to remove all the trees myself, he thought sorrowfully. I had a katamari ready and everything… I was going to sing the song too!
Master Hand floated over to his weeping brother and patted him on the back. "There, there, Crazy. It's alright. We can add trees again during the next step."
"It just won't be the same," Crazy Hand muttered. Master Hand sighed.
"No, you're right," he said. "It will be much better." Crazy Hand gazed up at him, wiping away his tears from wherever it was they were, and leapt up and gave him a tight hug.
"Aw you promise?" he bubbled. "Aw, MH! I love you too!"
The Hand of Creation made a choking sound as his destructive twin continued to squeeze him. "Crazy," he gasped, "Can't…breathe…"
"Aw ya silly, it's not like I'm restricting your windpipe or anything! You are a hand after all!"
"Crazy…please…"
"Oh alright."
As soon as Crazy Hand let go of him, Master Hand dropped to the ground and took deep gulps of air. Air, he gasped. Beautiful, savory air! Crazy Hand shook himself in disbelief. Air had never been so important to them when they lived up in space.
Once Master Hand finally regained his composure, he went about examining the map, explaining to Crazy Hand that even though most of the work had been done for them already, they still needed to build and break some things to really make the world their own.
"You know, add some pizzazz to it," Master Hand said. "Make it…lively, interesting."
"So I never have to tell you I'm bored again, you mean?"
"Something like that, yes."
Master Hand took out a pen and started marking up the map, motioning to Crazy Hand places that would look better with some destroying. Crazy Hand took out a pen of his own—a Sharpie, for emphasis—and started pointing out places he thought would do better with more standing landforms. The brothers shared a look of camaraderie as they sorted out their plan. Crazy Hand would raze away the grass to make deserts and savannas, smush the land together to get mountains, and for artistic effect, ravage a couple of places in a chaotic manner to mess them up just right. And Master Hand would be peacefully sculpting hills and valleys and little mesas as far away from him as possible.
"Do you get it?" he asked Crazy Hand.
"Yesh!" Crazy Hand gave him a salute before zipping away to start his reign of destruction on the other side of the earth.
Master Hand let out a heavy sigh. Now he was alone. Now there was peace. He floated up into the sky and surveyed the area below him, using the lake as his point of reference. A hill would look nice over there…and a forest around the lake, he thought. And the mansion can go right over there by the hill… Maybe a large city on the other side? Hmm, and the ocean is just a ways off in that direction, too. A loud cackling erupted from the north, but Master Hand was too enveloped in his daydreams to notice. "A large mansion…" The idea was really starting to grow on him. "It could have seven floors and enough rooms to fit an army… Wait, no." Would seven floors even be enough for that? Maybe a couple of basements. That sounds about right. Oh and I'd love to have a garden! Mother had beautiful flowers in her garden. He smiled to himself, contented by the idea. Things were finally working out.
A/N: This chapter was brought to you by a sudden burst of inspiration! My plan is to work on this and another story at the same time, and it's starting to seem feasible, but we'll see. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! Seeing as you're now at the bottom of the page, that is.