"I've been looking everywhere for you, son!"
A hulking, shaggy coated beast sprung forward immediately to hug Burgerpants when he answered the door, and the jaded fast food server let out a deflated sigh as though he were a balloon with the air being squeezed out of it. A monster with a blue jay's head and otherwise human appearance with a leg warmer strapped around its neck like a scarf looked on expectantly, holding up dual thumbs up signals from the sidelines.
"I'm willing to bet my crippling depression that you ain't my pops," Burgerpants said, and promptly pushed away from the paternal poser. "Rocket! Stop bringing every homeless guy in the Underworld that says he's my dad to my door or – holy!"
Burgerpants was cut off when, all of a sudden, the shaggy monster started to relieve its bowels all over his coveted "Welcome...or Not!" mat he received as an ironic birthday present a few years back; basking the first two words in a viscous brown liquid with the approximate consistency of chunky chili sauce.
"It's the gunk...they give us at the...shelter, man," shaggy monster tried to explain amid constipated groans, but the owner of the mat that was just permanently defiled was too busy holding back the urge to puke to hear it, as the foul surge of sewage continued.
Burgerpants reminded Rocket of this incident when he showed up at his door that morning claiming to have found "the one" yet again. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table, the former mulling over the letter and a photograph – of a timidly smiling orange monster with large blank, expressionless eyes, and whose lips were slathered with rose pink lip balm – that originally prompted the search for his long lost parents, while the latter helped himself to a bowl of assorted bird seeds Burgerpants kept stashed in a cupboard just for his sake.
"I mean, you're a great friend for doing this, but," he takes a particularly long draw from his cigarette, "even if we did find my parents, they would probably just disown a piece of trash like me."
The confusing words of the letter never left his head, like the lyrics of Metaton's latest hit single, or ideas for his own next humorously cynical catchphrase:
"In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hell. I promised you I'd take you there again someday. But I never did. Well, I'm alone there now... In our 'special place'... Waiting for you..."
What stuck out the most about the letter was that it was addressed to his real name, which not a soul in all of the underworld called him since that fateful day. Truth be told, it made him feel a little warm and tingly inside. Quite a treat to find in his usually empty mailbox on his twentieth birthday, on which he received not even an ironic gift, but could vaguely recall being knocked out by a customer at the Burger Emporium over a dispute about unwanted pickles that same day, if that counts.
"Silent Hell," Burgerpants considered aloud. "Could she be referring to my life?"
Rocket, after cracking down on two sunflower seeds, chirped a suggestion.
"An abstract representation of my internal anguish manifested by ambient external dark forces? What exactly d'ya mean by that, birdbrain?"