TREASURE
Mineta flopped ashore like a dead fish. He crawled, plowing through the sand, until he reached a big stone X.
"Right where the old man said it would be," Mineta breathed.
He scooped sand and dirt with his bare hands, scraping skin and breaking nails, until his fingers brushed a wooden lid. He tore the rotting wood apart and tenderly reached inside for his prize.
"Diamonds!" Mineta cried, seeing the glittering gems. "So beautiful. So radiant. So worthless!"
He hurled the lumps of shiny carbon aside and dug deeper. "Now we're talking. Gems with actual value!"
The rubies, emeralds and sapphires danced across his palm. A stiff breeze blew across the island, and the gems blew away into dust.
Further down inside the box, the glimmer of gold caught his eye. Mineta greedily grabbed on and pulled. Straining with all his might, Mineta heaved and heaved, until something popped in his back. Looking closer, the bars of gold had melted together, forming an immovable lump wedged into the bedrock. He tried chipping away pieces, but the diamonds broke before the gold.
Paper rustled deeper within. Mineta pulled out stacks of bills. He leafed through them, smelling the stacks like a sommelier, until he noticed the faces on them. "Monopoly money? Come on!"
At the very bottom, just as Mineta started losing hope, he stumbled upon a single flashdrive. He held it aloft like Excalibur, like the Holy Grail, basking in the reverent glow cast by its reflective plastic casing. He plugged it into the computer washed up on the shore, salivating at the thoughts of swiss bank accounts and cryptocurrency that surely made it worth burying on a remote island.
What greeted him was a folder full of sloppily made stock images.
"Aw, come on! It's not even porn!"
He smashed it to pieces and chucked them into the ocean. Defeated, Mineta sulked back into the hole. "All that swimming, all that digging, all that rubbing that old man's back, for this?" Mineta punched down. "It's all worthless!"
The chest buckled, revealing a false bottom. Mineta carefully scraped the worthless detritus aside, reaching further down for the treasure at the bottom of the stash. His fingers brushed against fabric, and he carefully held his finding up to the sunlight.
The beady eyes of a Beanie Baby stared back at him.
Hours later, a private jet landed in Japan. A chauffeur opened the door, and another offered his back for Mineta to step upon. Brandishing an elm cane topped with a deep purple sapphire, wearing a wolverine fur coat, and striding upon synthetic leg stilts to make him seven feet tall, Mineta took one step, tumbled to the ground, and dusted himself off after four men rushed to pick him back up.
A limousine pulled up. Two scantily clad women took seats on either side, while the driver said in a thick New York accent, "Where to boss?"
"Monte Cristo Academy," Mineta said. "I have business with the headmaster."
498
I guess we're doing the Mineta Dantes revenge arc then.