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Argon Viper
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[VE-ARMY] Sergeant Major
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Post Number: 1789
Total Posts: 1789
Joined: Apr 2001
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RE: Sanity or Lack Thereof

April 25, 2003 6:26:43 AM

Sanity or Lack Thereof
By: Argon Viper

Chapter 1

    Clark Shelton woke up as he did every day, to his alarm clock buzzing the 8 AM radio station at him.
    He groaned and turned over in his bed, swatting at his alarm clock, and cried out in pain.
    Looking at what he had just swatted, he found his glasses lying in a crushed and broken pile atop his nightstand.
    Looking in the direction of the sound of his alarm clock, he found it resting on the shelf across the room, exactly where the TV should have been.
    His first thought was that he was in someone else's house, though how he could have gotten there escaped him at the moment, but the thought was dispelled when he got up and checked the address. It was still 832 Pritchet Ct.
    He looked around his kitchen in which he now stood and found that nothing was in the right place here either.
    His toaster stood where the stove used to be, and the stove hung dangerously from the overhead lighting. The light bulbs had been arranged neatly in the dishwasher, and the forks and spoons were assembled tidily in the fridge.
    This would have been fine with him had the food not been piled into the sink, with the dishes stacked in organized piles where the toaster used to be.
    Moving into his living room, he found that the sofa blocked his sliding glass door to the backyard and the chairs had been turned on their backs.
    The rug that his mother had insisted he put in the living room now decorated the hall ceiling, and he couldn't even bring himself to look at the bathroom.
    Suffice it to say, his house had undergone a major renovation while he had slept last night.
    He returned to his room and turned on the radio, which he found in his dresser, and turned it to station 94.3.
    "...and this phenomenon seems to have affected the entire planet, hundreds of households are finding that their stoves are lounging in the sink, the TV could be lying on the sofa, and even refrigerators are found full of potted plants. Amazingly, despite all of these rearrangements, no one seems to have been hurt."
    At this point, he switched off the radio, amazed that this sort of thing could happen, and headed down to the local pub.
    When he got there, there was already a heated argument between Old Man Jenkins and Pops the bartender. They were arguing over the cause of these odd new occurrences.
    "It was those aliens," said Old Man Jenkins, " I told you that they kidnapped me three years ago, but you never believed me. And now they're back, so you'd all better start listening to me."
    "Hogwash," said Pops, an old Scottish veteran, "ye were just in the hospital for a stroke, that was'ne aliens. It's just people sleepwalkin', ye'll see when they figure it all out."
    "Sleepwalking!?!" screeched Old Man Jenkins, "you stupid little..."
    At this point, Clark decided that perhaps the pub was not the best place to go to escape the situation.
--------------------
    At that very same moment, thirty-two million miles away, a spaceship lurked.
    Now, you may wonder how a spaceship lurks, but this spaceship seemed to have been designed for that express purpose.
    The flat front portion of the ship looked like the nose of a hammerhead shark that had been pounded flat with a hammer until the point of death, and had then been beaten pointlessly for another few weeks.
    The back portion of the ship widened from the thin neck of the poor shark and opened up in a wedge-like shape.
    The bizarre ship was powered entirely by toenail clippings and the dead skin that comes off of you in the shower, and straightjackets were the height of fashion on board.
    The crew of the ship, however, was even odder than this. They were from a long dead species called the Srezinagroers, adrift on the last starship their people had ever created.
    But they didn't know this. Their memories were stored on the ship's Central Control Unit, which continued to deny them access on the grounds that they could not remember the password.
    That was okay, they didn't even know their memories were on board, they simply assumed they didn't have any.
    They didn't know, for example, that their barber was once the most gifted Shrokna Volleyball player on Ezinagro, or that their captain had once been a telephone repairman whose specialty, and in fact only real ability, had been to repair the exotic gnikrow model of phone, of which only three hundred had ever been made (In fact, they were probably much happier not knowing this, how would you feel if your captain was a man who had made his living by repairing the same three hundred phones and couldn't do a thing for your Nokia?).
    In fact, Ezinagro had been destroyed in a natural disaster two million years ago when its sun, suddenly and without warning, did what many astronomers have called a "hiccup".
    For those of you without degrees in Hyper-spacial-quantum-psychosocial-neumatics, that's basically where the sun jumps suddenly in one direction. In this case, attracted by a malfunctioning gnikrow phone.
    But again, the crew knew nothing of this.
    They had been exiled from their planet for a rather odd trait of theirs, they preferred to move things to new and exciting places, a trait the Srezinagros had highly derided them for, and eventually sent them off into space for.
    Now they hovered above yet another planet they had reorganized, looking for the person who gave the right reaction, and might therefore be... The Almighty Dooowh.
    They really had no idea what The Almighty Dooowh was, or why they were looking for it, but in the last personal statement of the captain before their memories were stored into the ship's CCU (the man they assumed was the current captain, but was really just the current garbage man for level 32D) said that their only hope of salvation lay in him, her, or it.
    They had no real idea what salvation was either, having neglected to pack any sort of dictionary with them for the trip, but it sounded good, so they did it.
    (*Disclaimer: Do not ask how the Srezinagroers learned how to talk, it is a long and complicated story involving three toothbrushes, the skin of a dead cat, and a copy of TV Guide that just happened to be floating in the area where they awoke.)
    As his faithful crew monitored the radio and television rays from the planet, the captain (a Srezinagroer named Pantene because he had liked the advertisement for it) walked behind them, humming the tune to an Adidas ad that he had heard at the fourth station back from him.
    Without warning, the crewman from station 14,832 called out, he had spotted something. Moving as quickly as he could without tripping over the often wrinkled cat skin rug that lay constantly underfoot, he headed to the station.
    "Sir, I think we found it," said the Srezinagroer crewman excitedly, "look."
    Sitting in the other's seat, Pantene took a look at the third monitor of the station, which contained ten screens alternately proclaiming the benefits of leg wax, footage of a woman in the shower, three little kids at the playground, and, on screen number three, Clark Shelton, sitting in the pub and violently spitting out a mouthful of his drink.
    "He is the one," Pantene breathed, "bring the engines to speed, we must greet The Almighty Dooowh."

-----------------------
Argon Viper
IW COL Argon Viper{ret}
Fallen Angel and Proud of It!
"History is on the move, those who cannot keep up will watch from a distance, and those who get in our way will not watch at all" - Grand Admiral Thrawn
"In combat, second place is only the last to die."- Anonymous
"Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses" - Carl G Jung

Argon Viper
ComNet Expert

[VE-ARMY] Sergeant Major
[VE-VEEC] Senior Writer

Post Number: 1789
Total Posts: 1789
Joined: Apr 2001
Status: Offline

RE: Sanity or Lack Thereof

April 27, 2003 3:42:29 PM

Chapter 2

    Diving through the atmosphere, the Srezinagroer ship emitted an LBH field. LBH stands for "looks better here". The field was invented by the noted Srezinagroer inventor, Dr. Scholls, who is currently trying to invent something to control the cat skin rug that is rapidly spreading through the ship.
    The "looks better here" field works on a very odd concept. Basically, it interrogates the mind of everyone who believes they own the house/building that is being altered, and chooses a location for everything that is disagreeable to everyone. This is not as malicious as it sounds, because the device most often disagrees with the placement as well (having been programmed with such an inferiority complex that it believes it owns everything), rejecting it and simply rearranging the objects in an arbitrary manner.
    There have been many requests of Dr. Scholls to eliminate the apparently worthless scanning process, but he has been unable to remember how the device works. This is because the real inventor now sits in front of monitor station 14,832, while the man assumed to be the inventor is really the Srezinagro "belch-a-thon" champion.
    So as the ship dove through the atmosphere, houses and office buildings began to rearrange. In San Francisco, a man awoke to find a light bulb in each nostril while his anti-snoring strip had burned several fuses in the light fixture. In Moscow, a bank security guard came out of a doze to find he was now wearing a stunning dress from a mannequin down the street. In London, a woman awoke from a good night's sleep in her kitchen sink. In Beijing, a businessman found that he was now presenting the July 1995 Playboy centerfold to his board of directors.
    (Note: These are not random examples of a worldwide effect. This is, in fact, the route traveled. Srezinagroers are not known for being able to travel in a straight line even when completely sober.)
    The captain, sitting in his command chair, was on the edge of his seat. "Turn left!" he shouted with a mixture of religious fervor and drunken stupor, swinging his seventh whiskey to his right and falling out of his chair. Obediently, the crew turned the ship to the left. Not knowing how far to the left the captain wanted them to turn, the five pilots (Yes, five pilots; you try piloting by yourself while staying in the height of fashion in a pink and yellow straightjacket.) simply left the controls turned to the left until one of them vomited from nausea, destroying the circuits that allowed the ship to turn left.
    Since the captain was currently losing a heated debate with a potted plant that had fallen from the ceiling, the pilots decided to start taking requests from the crew.
    Five double helixes and seventy-two episodes of vomiting later, the pilots decided to give up on that idea. However, since the captain was currently asleep in a growing puddle of warm drool and was shouting obscenities at inanimate objects, they had no idea what to do.
--------------------
    At that very same moment, Clark Shelton emerged from the pub.
    It had been a interesting debate between Old Man Jenkins and Pops, not the least part of which was the fact that objects in the room kept moving around when no one was watching them.
    In the beginning, Old Man Jenkins had wanted to shake his cane in Pops' face, that seeming to be the appropriate thing to do considering this was the only reason he carried a cane. Unfortunately, waving a pair of old underwear didn't have nearly the same effect.
    At this point, Pops reached for his glasses and managed to hit himself in the face with a good shot of vodka.
    Things had gone downhill from there.
    Not that this was the reason Clark had left, that part was really entertaining. It was when he tried to take a drink and found that his glass was now full of warm motor oil that got to him.
    So he stood outside, wondering where he was going to go next, and what he was going to do when he got there, when he decided to look up, nearly to faint from shock.
    Hovering right above him was a spaceship.
    Looking around, he saw that none of the other passersby had noticed the huge thing. This seemed to be impossible, so he took another look around. Same reaction.
    He didn't know it, but this was due to the cloaking device the ship carried. The principle of this device is that the ship will remain invisible so long as the person pays no attention to it.
    (Note: Some have questioned the point of a cloaking device if it only works when no one pays attention to it, but you have to realize just how little attention people really are willing to spare for something they can't eat, drink, or sleep with.)
    Walking to the middle of the street, he looked straight at the ship and started to wave his arms at it.
    Two seconds later, he was picking himself off the sidewalk and reminding himself how stupid it was to just walk into the middle of the street. He nursed his bruises and looked back at the sky. The alien ship was still there.
    He waved his arms at it again, this time from the sidewalk, and started to walk toward it. Strangely enough, no one paid him any attention at all (He would have been very insulted if he had read the previous note about what people pay attention to, considering himself to be quite good looking).
    Suddenly and without warning, the massive ship suddenly lurched in the air and dove straight at him.
--------------------
    On board the Srezinagroer ship, the debate on what to do had been long and heated. Many people had tripped over the captain, and three of them had been consumed by the rapidly spreading cat skin rug before it could be brought back under control.
    After twenty minutes, they still had no clue what they were supposed to do.
    By now, the crew had split into opposing factions. The Zerk faction (don't ask, they just thought it sounded cool) wanted to kick the captain to wake him up, the Hozark faction (same reason) wanted to just leave things alone and let him wake up and get over his hangover naturally, the Gassy faction wanted new sunglasses, but no one paid much attention to them, and the Yiirulii faction wanted everyone to get naked and party because the captain was asleep.
    Suddenly, silence grabbed hold of the crew and they stared at the left monitor number three of station 14,832. The screen showed the view directly outside the ship, down to the last detail of the 354th pubic hair of the 3rd louse on young lady number 293 if you cared for that much detail. Not that she'd ever admit to the presence of three lice, but that's beyond the point.
    But it wasn't the detail shown that amazed them, it was the person on the ground, waving his arms at them and walking in their direction. Someone had penetrated their cloaking device.
    Instantly, the crew flew to battle stations, managing it in record time. There they sat for a few seconds before someone realized that the captain was still asleep.
    After a short but heated debate, they decided to pick up the oddball.
    Diving down quickly, they parked the ship next to the person, who had suddenly thrown himself upon the ground and lay quivering upon their approach.
    The second officer then stepped out to meet him. Wearing his best grey and blue straightjacket and having gargled with Listerine, he walked majestically out from the ship and stopped before the Clark Shelton, the person from the viewscreen., who had gotten up and was staring in awe.
    "Whaaa... Huhhhh... Guhhh... Buhhh..." managed Clark.
    Leaning backward, the alien suddenly bent himself quickly forward, slamming his forehead into Clark's. Clark, stunned at the sudden violence, fell to the ground with a curse. Holding his hand to his head, he got up slowly.
    "What was that for?" he asked indignantly. He may not be from a spacefaring species, but he felt he deserved at least a little respect.
    "I'm sorry," said the alien, "but what was what for?"
    "You just bashed me in the head," pointed out Clark.
    "Ah yes," said the alien, "Sorry about that, it's quite difficult to get a real handshake in a straightjacket."
    At this point, they both turned and looked as they heard a clang and a curse off to their right. Lying on the ground was a particularly tall young man, holding his head where he had slammed it into the alien ship, which was still cloaked.
    "Perhaps we should take this inside," said the alien, beckoning with his head.
    "Sure," said Clark, still holding his hand to his head where he had been so rudely bashed.
    Holding his breath, he entered an alien ship for the first time.
    It really was a lot less impressive than he expected. Off to his left, three people in bathrobes (the ships' uniform, but he didn't know that) were holding what appeared to be a heated debate over three types of sunglasses. To his right, more people in bathrobes were using cricket bats to viciously beat something that looked like a rug. In front of him, lying in front of a very impressive chair, lay a very obviously drunk and unconscious individual, drooling and shouting swear words at dead relatives.
    Looking around, Clark found the room to be far more impressive than the people. It was a huge circle, with twelve stepped up levels. On each level, there were hundreds of stations, each containing at least ten screens that could be showing anything from a Toyota commercial to a James Bond movie. All around this huge room were more of the people in bathrobes and straightjackets, those with straightjackets being of obviously higher rank than the others.
    At one end of the room, Clark saw a huge pit around which several crewmembers were clipping their toenails. If this confused him, the naked people partying to the left of that made it even stranger.
    Suddenly, the drunk individual, still unconsciously, flung himself off the high podium that his chair rested on, bouncing down the steps to land at Clark's feet.
    "Clark Shelton," said his guide proudly, "meet our captain, Pantene."

-----------------------
Argon Viper
IW COL Argon Viper{ret}
Fallen Angel and Proud of It!
"History is on the move, those who cannot keep up will watch from a distance, and those who get in our way will not watch at all" - Grand Admiral Thrawn
"In combat, second place is only the last to die."- Anonymous
"Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses" - Carl G Jung

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