Chapter 4:The Story Continues

“Ned!”

No answer.

“Ned!”

No answer.

“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You NED!”

No answer.

The old woman pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she pulled them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy, or young man for that matter; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and they were built for ‘style,’ not service—she could have seen through a pair of stove lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the street to here:

“Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll—,”

But as a matter of fact Ned wasn’t home, in fact he hasn’t been home all night; his grandmother’s cries are just wasted in the mornings chill. But before her worry begins to truly set in, let us take a journey to the place where Ned truly lies, and we shall experience the possibly immanent peril that awaits him and his very future.

Deep in the darkest basements of Grant McEwan College, a stir broke out in Ned’s mind. Where am I? Why does my head hurt like crap? Because crap hurts a lot. Speaking of crap, what kind of a crap hole is this?

“Ah, I see that you are awake”

“What the hell are you?” Ned said. Heh heh, Ned rhymes with said.

“Never mind that. I hit you pretty hard, don’t worry I checked for blood. You humans sure are not out as long as us, but still, none-the-less you have been out awhile. By the way, my name is Flurada.”

Ned, still stunned by the enormous figure of the CENSORED, didn’t speak.

“I believe you will remember me from Meadiam Sirose. You sure look different on this planet. Is this your own planet or are you just out to destroy it like you destroyed mine?” Flurada said through gritted teeth.

Finally Ned got the strength enough to say something, “I don’t know who you think I am, but I am not the one you’re looking for. I have never been off this rock let alone some planet called ‘Meejum Serose’!”

“Why should I trust you?”

“I don’t know, but it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea according to how big a mess you seem to be in.”

“You know you are right I was just so anxious that my hunt had at last ended, that Doctor Rock was finally in my clutches. In my own heart it seemed that this madness had at long last ended.”

“Wait, did you just say Doctor Rock?”

“Yes, do you know him?”

“No… well yes, but not closely. Only from a distance” Yah, Like behind a garbage bin.

“Oh, okay” Flurada looked down at his feet as the sudden hope vanished as quickly as it had come.

“So, what brings you to earth?”

“I am hunting down Doctor Rock, I told you.”

“Oh, yah, sorry, I forgot. What did Doctor Rock do to you to make it so you wanna extract revenge upon him?”

“You mean besides blowing up my planet? Well it all started when…”

And so Flurada told Ned of his epic adventure back in the fields of Meadiam Sirose up to the part where he rescued the last innocent victim of Doctor Rocks wrath.


“Huh, so why didn’t you want to let all those creatures join you as you marched to over throw Doctor Rock?”

“I would fly there and they would slow me down as well as when I’m in the fortress they would just get in my way.”

“Wouldn’t the thief have been good for picking the locks?”

“If he were on my side yes, but what would the point of that be if I can just fly right over the wall of the castle. Its not like anyone ever locks the next doors, I mean if they get by the first one then they most definitely will get by all the others therefore you might as well save some energy and time by only locking the first one.”

“Wouldn’t it be better enforce the fact that your enemy couldn’t get in by placing doors that got progressively harder to unlock?”

“If you do that then the further they get in the more skilled they get and by the time they reach you they are able to defeat you. No, it is better to have their experience increase no more than the novice that they were at the beginning of their trek and get them to the very centre of the laboratory where it is very close to an impossible chance of getting out of there anymore than half alive.”

“Touché. How about before you got to the fortress and after you left the penal complex, did you ever get as engulfed in pain as it had done those many times before?”

“Yes but this time it was a lot less violent, so I was able to stay awake, unfortunately. For three days I walked the forest floor; the pain, not strong enough to knock me out, yet still strong enough to overwhelm me in excruciating wrenching pain. Those were the longest hours of my life. Never will I forget how I wondered around so, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sooth the gentle cramping of my achingly sore back and jaw. It didn’t seem at the time that my jaw could get any different but now, because of the change that took place inside my mouth I am fluent in German, Italian, French, Spanish, Latin, Polish, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Surfer-dude accent, and of course your language!”

“Is that true?”

“No, I was only kidding around. Well, except for being able to speak your language of course.”

“So its almost as if that stone was preparing you to come to earth.”

“Oh, it’s exactly like that, but if you’ll let me continue with my story it will all be explained in the end. So there I was meandering through the dense jungley-forest. Stumbling in pain I plodded upon a small stream, I jumped in hoping it would sooth the never ceasing pain of my flipside and mouth. As you can probably tell, this point in my story gets us nowhere, or so it seems, let us continue. So there I was relaxing in the sweet water, when all of a sudden two creatures came cruising down the flow of the water in a giant raft-type-thingy. I sprang from the water getting a good glimpse of the hurried creatures. One was a Red Klort, a greater Dragon, and a lacer, which is a sort of stringy-type creature. They were heading in the direction of where Doctor Rock is.

“I started walking along the stream. Still in pain from my lesser mutation, I didn’t fly, but instead I set forth on the trail that awaited me. Soon my prayers to tLarf seemed to be working as the sharp pain in my back shrank into a dull numbness, and the throbbing of my jaw, or make that jaws, was beginning to wither away in the lateness of the day.”

“So when you say clorf…” Ned began but Flurada swiftly corrected him with an explanation of how to say it properly.

“It is tLarf, not clorf. It is a ‘T’ sound not a ‘C’ sound. You know how to make a ‘T’ sound, right? I know you made one before: you take the very tip of your tongue and put it not right up to the teeth but very close by and…”

“Yes, yes I know how to make a ‘T’ sound and I’m sorry that I miss pronounced tLarf, but what is tLarf anyway? Is it a god on your planet or something?”

“Well he used to be, but then we started researching outer space and we eventually realized that tLarf is just like all the other large burning balls of hot flaming matter out there beyond our solar system. We still give up part of our meals, and pray every once and a while, but everyone knows that he is truly fictional.”

“That’s actually pretty amazing, especially how you managed to keep your traditions alive over a long period of time. You can’t imagine how many times we’ve ditched old traditions to get the much more modernized ones.

“I remember you saying something about the Fralt side what’s the difference?”

“The Fralt side is the dark side of the planet. You see my planet’s orbit and rotation around tLarf, our ‘sun’, is coincidentally synchronized therefore making it so one side of the planet is always day and the other side is always night. The side that’s always day is the tLarf side and the creatures there have a ‘god’ named tLarf, and the side that’s night is the Fralt side in which the creature there look to a being called ‘Fralt’. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes.”

“So as I was saying, there I was in the midst of following the creatures in the raft when all the pain in my body had been thrown out of my system and I could finally fly once more. So I took to the air and grazed the treetops with the gentle beating of my gargantuan wings.”

“You must really like our technology, don’t you?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Well, you keep using big words like gargantuan and stupendous…”

“I never said ‘stupendous’.”

“You’re missing the point. You have only known the English language long enough to understand the grammar and most of the lesser words. In yet you are able to say these large and complex words that a lot of my species don’t even say in their every day forms of communication. Another thing is that somehow you were able to say something in many different forms of human tongue and yet you were only able to learn one specific human language, which was English. It seems that you really enjoy typing up speeches on word and googling up ways to say one word in many different languages. Sounds to me like you love our technology and you have a lot of spare time on your hands.”

“I live in the basement of an Edmontonian college, I have no friends on this planet; and…wait a minute, I never said yes...”

“I never said you said yes.”

“Well I never said any word in several different languages I just said I could and then I admitted that I was only kidding around.”

“Alright so continue on with your story.”

“Alright, so I flew up in the air with such grace that only a whiff of breeze brushed through the majestic tops of the trees. From this height I saw for miles, from the soft grasslands to the north, to the cascading mountains of the south. Creatures from far and wide dancing around in their daily task with no suspicion of the possibly immanent danger that awaited them in their very near future. To them this was a brand new lazy day that would continue till eclipse when the new day would most indubitably begin.

“I looked behind me and saw a shadow with a figure very much like mine and two weird cre…” Flurada stopped; something was blocking the words in his mouth from coming out and finishing the sentence. “Never mind. So I flew until I found their raft-type-thingy and I saw footprints in the mud leading to the castle in the close distance. Mists shrouded the spires and though there is almost never ceasing daylight there was an imminent darkness about the fortress that would stop any timid creature in his tracks where he would then turn around and run for his life. Unfortunately, I had a job to do, so I mustered up all my courage and headed in.

“Getting in was easy, the door was left wide open. The Klort and Lacer were out of sight, but the result of their break in was evident as the laboratory was swarming with guards. It did not take much to capture me, as I was already tired out from flying so much.

“They cast me into one of the holding cells within the castle. A few guards escorted Doctor Rock to my cell. He said that he would not send me back to the prison towers because I would soon not even exist; and with that he walked away. I opened the door and followed him in a stealth like manner.”

“Wait, didn’t Doctor rock lock the door?”

“Did I say anything about him locking the door? No, he just walked off. I followed them, got distracted a few times, but finally ended up where the Klort and Lacer were attempting to stop Doctor Rock once and for all.

“‘We’re not going to let you get away with this’ the Klort said as well as a whole bunch of other heroic crap. Doctor Rock answered ‘you and that lacer, I believe you called him Strnt. What kind of a name is Strnt anyway?’

This time the lacer, or Strnt answered by saying: ‘its short for Strntpkjhdwqubcxzmfglvy.’”

“How do you pronounce that?” Ned asked

“I am not quite sure, but Doctor Rock continued ‘as I was saying, you and Strntpkjhdw… your friend are too late, fore your planet is about to explode and I am going to jump through this time portal which will lead me to safety while you die a horrible flaming death!’ So he jumped through the portal and with a few seconds to spare before my whole world collapsed into a million pieces I jumped into the portal after Doctor Rock.

For a very brief moment there was nothing and yet there was something. I cannot really describe it, you know, but in that instant it was like I knew everything, there was a feeling of hope, there was a feeling of absolute misery. I knew where I was, I knew what was happening, and in a strange sense I knew where I was going, you know?”

“No, I don’t. What was happening? Where were you?”

“It is hard to explain, but I’ll try my best. I was in… well I was outside the limits of the universe, but it is not like a whole new world it is... nothing… and everything. You see out side this universe there is a place made completely of time, its called no-space if you will, and so because it is made of time it would be in the fourth dimension.

“So if you can get into no-space that means that you can either go forward in time or backward which proves that time is an actual vector. There is another part of the theory that states that time has no thickness only a place, which is how I could go from one part of the galaxy all the way across to the other side and beyond in less than a second. Being that time is only a place it describes how in the theory of a black hole, time slows down the closer you get and once you are in the centre there is no time and that is because the centre of a black hole is the only place time does not exist.

“As for how I knew everything, well time knows all, it has unlocked all of the universes secrets. No-space is what fuels this universe with time, without no-space this universe would be at a standstill.”

“Wow…that’s deep. Where the hell is Zapblapoman? It’s three in the afternoon and he hasn’t shown up looking for me? I mean it isn’t like Grant McEwan college basement is an obvious place to find me, but still. I’m going to call him.” And with that Ned whipped out his cell phone and called Zapblapoman, and Zapblapoman was there within the hour.

Zapblapoman entered the room with noisy-ness. “Why do you get a cell phone? Why does everyone on this freaking planet have a cell phone, but me? And what the heck is that thing?!”

“I am Flurada from the planet Meadiam Sirose…” And so Flurada told Zapblapoman of his epic adventure back in the fields of Meadiam Sirose up to the part where he rescued the last innocent victim of Doctor Rocks wrath.

And then he continued the story up to the definition of no-space. And then Zapblapoman declared that he would help Flurada in his quest to kill Doctor Rock. And with that Ned cringed for some unexplainable reason that neither Zapblapoman nor Flurada could get out of him. And with that Zapblapoman added in his last contribution to the situation:

“So that is that. We will be like pie. No, not that ordinary store bought pie like Banana Cream Pie. I’m talking pi, like 3.14159… type of pi.”

And so the friendship was bonded! Ned and Zapblapoman left to the Lab of Electrocution after having some tea and cookies with Flurada. Flurada was left to his own confinements to uncover clues to the whereabouts of Doctor Rock. Zapblapoman and Ned carried on with there regularly daily lives.