Rose left through the back door.
Nearby was the transformer which distributed electricity from the underground generator powered by the river flowing beneath her house.
The transformer had been struck by lightning though and no longer worked. She wondered if her mother had any plans to have it fixed. Rose guessed she'd rather just play her mind games in a dark house like a weirdo.
Rose looked across the back yard and she could see the mausoleum and the portable generator. She was almost there.
She got out her umbrella to protect her from the rain, but this caused all of her other items to be dumped onto the ground.
Regathering her things, she began the soggy trek mausoleum-ward.
'GET UP JOHN, THIS IS NO TIME FOR SLUMBER.'
John opened his eyes. He had been knocked out for a couple seconds.
The imp still stood before him, clutching the bunny in its claws.
The hammer head had fallen off when John had dropped it, so he picked up the handle and whacked the imp with it a few times. It seemed to be having an effect, as the imp yelped in pain.
However, it retaliated by shoving the bunny in John's face, knocking him off his feet.
"Argh!" he yelled in frustration.
As she walked through the yard, fighting the rain, Rose realized that she had forgotten the magnetic W back at the door, as it had stuck onto the transformer when it was dumped by her sylladex.
But it was just a stupid magnet, so she decided to just forget about it and continue on.
The sky poured forth sparks from the meteor storm, and the forest fire crept ever closer to her backyard, but Rose pressed on. It was not much farther now.
'JOHN, SALVAGE YOUR WEAPON AND FIGHT ON!'
STRIFE AGAIN!
John picked up the discarded hammer head and added it to his sylladex, which caused a fanciful harlequin to be ejected and hit the imp in the face.
Perhaps there was something to all this!
After bouncing off the imp, the harlequin figure landed on the floor and broke in two. John picked it back up, and his sylladex fired the hammer handle at the imp.
Picking that up again, ejected the towel. That one didn't really seem to help any.
And so, John continued to pick up and subsequently fire items out of his sylladex in an effort to defeat the shale imp.
Finally, after being hit with the PDA, the imp reached the end of its health supply and burst into an array of blue and purple grist.
John went about collecting them with gleeful abandon. It appeared to be some Build Grist and Shale.
Next, he turned his attention to the stuffed bunny which had been dropped by the imp before it exploded. John picked it up.
"I said…put the bunny…back in…the box!" He yelled as he raised the bunny to put it back in the box. But, he was so overcome with passion that he missed and ended up throwing it on the floor instead.
'NOW EXULT. VICTORY, SPOILS ARE YOURS.'
The amazing victory allowed John to scale the first two Achievement Rungs on his Echeladder. He was now a Plucky Tot, with a new feather in his cap to show for it.
The Echeladder rewarded his bold ascent with 125 Boondollars. John wasted little time in storing them in his Ceramic Porkhollow.
Additionally, climbing the rungs had boosted his Gel Viscosity and Cache Limit.
By expanding the Cache Limit, he had made room for all that nice grist he just collected. He now had 32 fragments of Build Grist and 10 fragments of Shale.
'WHAT ABOUT THAT CARD.'
It seemed that the shale imp had allocated the bunny to its strife specibus, leaving behind a card for the bunnykind abstratus.
Sort of a stupid thing to use as a weapon, but John figured he might as well grab it and stick the bunny in his strife deck while he was at it. It would at the very least be safer there.
He grouped the two specibi, handlekind and bunnykind, in his strife portfolio.
No self-respecting strifer would be caught dead without one.
Oddly enough, it seemed breaking the sledgehammer had altered the abstratus from hammerkind to handlekind, even going so far as expelling the head of his smaller hammer from his deck to force compliance. John hadn't even noticed in the heat of the battle.
He grabbed the sledgehammer handle, expelling the useless harlequin figurine.
Then he merged the sledgehammer head with its handle, and returned it to his strife deck, repairing the hammerkind abstratus in the process.
The smaller hammer handle was ejected from the deck, since of course handles of any sort no longer belonged in there. Obviously.
'FINE. NOW WHAT.'
Dave was pestering him, but John didn't have time to deal with his nonsense right now.
Something was amiss in his room, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it…
Once she arrived at the mausoleum, Rose fired up the generator and drug a cord inside with her.
It of course would have been foolish to run the generator inside a confined space. Generator safety was everyone's business.
Rose then jumped and kicked the small coffin off of the pedestal in the center of the small mausoleum where it had been.
"Sorry Jaspers. Have to make room for the laptop." She said to her dearly departed cat.
Besides, his final resting place was already a mockery. He should have decomposed years ago under a bed of petunias like a normal cat. Not given to a taxidermist and fitted with a tiny, custom-tailored suit, and then stuffed in a coffin built for infants.
Rose plugged in her laptop and connected to the internet signal again.
Everything predictably fell out of her sylladex, but she was not about to get bent out of shape about it. She had bigger fish to fry.
On her screen, it looked like Dave had noticed she was back online. He pestered her like clockwork.
And then there was John, standing in his room. What on earth was he up to now?