Chapter 7

Throughout his life, Stuart had seen some pretty awesome stuff. They ranged from a real-life sighting of Douglas Adams to a tour of Cyberspaz Tilesetv2, which he had the honour of masking (did you think it was auto-masked? Wrong!). Stuart has also seen some awesomely weird things too and sightings ranged from a Spaz Jackrabbit from JJ1 to jungle cactuses. The latest thing he saw, a wild Fquist, demanded to be put into the ‘weird’ category simply because Fquists weren’t supposed to live on Carrotus, but it also demanded to be put into the ‘awesome’ category because meeting the founder of J2LC was not something you did every day (easy access to #jj2 was not easy back in those days).
Unigma had also seen some weird and awesome things in his lifetime, but since he got them from the Internet, most, if not all, are not appropriate to be described in this story.
Fquist felt ill at ease when he realized that he was being referred to as Frank, Fquist and Frank Quist for no readily apparent reason. Despite this, he welcomed the two visitors in that ‘wild Fquist’ way he learnt to do while still living in the harsh jungles of the Low Countries.

The door opened soundlessly, but crashed shut the moment they stepped in. The door was suddenly locked itself. Unigma didn’t like this one bit. He was surrounded by darkness when the lights turned off. He was subjected to the heat of the mid-August sun when the air conditioning stopped working. He was very aware of the slight rumbling of the ground every few seconds.
‘Now what?’ asked Unigma.
‘We can start by switching on the lights,’ said Stuart, so he did.
There was just one rocket still inside the spaceport. The pair was disappointed. They were, however, instantly cheered up by the fact that the rocket was attached, if in a rather strange way, to the back of a spaceship. It was by no means an ugly spaceship. Some people, mainly humans, would’ve even thought it as beautiful but in the eyes of rabbits and faulty modems the spaceship looked as good as a Ford Taurus (which is a very average car).

Author’s note: For more information on the average car of Ford Taurus, visit: http://www.mensetmanus.net/average-car/ Thank you.

Fortunately for the two friends in the spaceport hangar, ML did not design the spaceship. If you want to know why this was fortunate, what a non-ML spaceship was doing in a ML hangar and who exactly made the ship, scroll way down. For more patient readers, just keep reading normally.
The smell of newly perfumed liquid oxygen was thick. The ship was actually quite amazing. It had some shark-like fins at the back, a beautifully smooth, curved and pointy nose, some ridiculously over-sized engines at the two sides and the rockets, or rocket exhausts, were placed on the fins. These made the fins look rather fat in the middle and very thin at the top and bottom ends, which was why this good-looking spaceship was downgraded to bad looking. On further inspection, the ship was upgraded to average looking because the turquoise colour fitted its body perfectly while the fins were of a lightly shaded teal, which disappeared into the turquoise colour with a gentle gradient.

The giant white rabbit shrugged off a couple billion gamma rays and a few hundred million alpha particles. Not being familiar with nuclear physics and being far too stupid to comprehend it, the scientific laws of the Universe decided to give the giant white rabbit a brake, make an exception, and turn its whole body into an impermeable shell of anti-radiation. The rabbit did, however, understand the meaning of indigestion, because it often had indigestion.
The best way a giant white rabbit relieves its indigestion is a complicated process although it almost always starts with one simple thing: eat a lot and eat it fast. The next two steps are a bit more complex: the rabbit has to burp. If it doesn’t burp, it should pat its stomach gently until it does. Giant white rabbits tend to do things human biologists thought was biologically impossible, so I would like to say, very respectfully, ‘Go roast yourselves’ to every single one of them. After releasing its sizeable quantity of methane, the digestion of food starts. As everyone knows, indigestion is caused by ‘gaps’ in the stomach’s layer of mucus and can be worsened by heavy meals. In order to ‘repair’ those gaps, the rabbit needs to eat some dirt, chew it in a manner which human physicists thought was physically impossible and swallow it. The dirt will stick to the stomach walls and block off the stomach tissues from harmful acid. Dirt, however, causes abnormally, or alarmingly, high rates of digestion and absorption of food (see the second non-existant footnote as to why this is so). This, naturally, makes the giant white rabbit hungry, which it uses as en excuse to eat yet another major city, which causes indigestion, which then prompts the rabbit to eat dirt, and so on.
It was the hunger that caused the occasional rumbling of the ground and the reason why trees sometimes fell down in the area of the rumbling. By the way, the weak earthquakes and the tree felling were hurtling towards Zero-one-one Omega.

Chapter 8

Stuart gave up trying to open the door and instead operated the nearest ML No-time-for-Stalin vending machine. The machine explained that it was still in the process of switching ownership, couldn’t perform its usual functions and wished Stuart a nice day.
The control panel of one of the hangar’s landing pads began to flash and caught Unigma’s interest. Before Stuart could respond, a Nil-cal turtsandwich popped out of the vending machine and landed neatly into his hands.
‘Unigma, do you want me to plug you into the control panel?’ asked Stuart while chewing on a mouthful of disgusting ML sandwich. ‘And while I’m at it, I should plug myself into the vending machine and beat it up.’
‘It’s ok. There’s nothing you or I can’t see directly. A ship is just about to land.’
Stuart spat out his turtsandwich, not because of what Unigma just said (although he was surprised by a strange ship landing here), but because he just couldn’t take the taste anymore. The sandwich started to work its way into the nervous system. Stuart picked up a Concise Carrot-o-xford Letnian Dictionary just for fun and put it in his satchel. Oh, did the author not mention that Stuart had with him a satchel? Never mind. ‘Can you find any information about the ship?’
‘Nope. There seems to be something that causes the system to malfunction. The computer tells me that ‘seismic tremours’ are disturbing its wires.’ Stuart could indeed feel a lot of tremours at this point.
He glanced at the screen. ‘The ship has slowed down a lot. How high up is it?’
‘500 metres.’
‘That leaves us 90 seconds to prepare an appropriate welcome ceremony.’ They decided to spend those valuable seconds wandering around.
While Stuart tried his luck at getting on of those yummy-looking Multipotent-Chinese-newspaper doughnuts, Unigma went in search for an Arjan’s Supah-capacity modem-cable and one of the new Arjan’s Blind-o-shine metal cases. Failing that, he looked at himself using the reflective metal of a wheat barrel, which was next to the wooden one with nuclear waste.
Unigma was covered with black plastic. He was standing on 4 little legs, each with 3 tiny toes, which were suitable for walking to the battery re-charger but not over any long distances. He was a bit thin, had a rectangular shape when looked from the side and a trapezium shape when looked from the front. Basically, Unigma’s top was thinner than his bottom. Closer examinations revealed 5 lights on his case, of which only 1 was on. That was the ‘Power’ indicator. 4 lights were labelled ‘Connection’, ‘Connection’ and ‘Data’, which kept flashing on and off despite the fact that there was no connection with (…). There was no connection with (…) either. The fifth button was not, and had not ever been, on. It was unlabelled. Unigma thought about this and his ‘Data’ light flashed faster, which made him hot, but his case was completely solid. Unigma had no openings whatsoever, except for his speaker and power cable and telephone cable connection points. The lack of proper ventilation would cause numerous heating problems, especially when the air conditioning was turned off. Last time Unigma went to the Bahamas, he needed 5 doctors to peel the plastic off his internal circuits. Basically, Unigma couldn’t go very far, had unknown uses for his lights, couldn’t handle heat and, adding to his faults, he got kicked by DethMan once. It turns out that Unigma was a ML Alwa-y-sa-wrong Modem, which also explains the presence of the ‘Mystic Legends, Inc’ logo on Unigma’s right side.
The machine had finished switching owernship and now sold mainly Gorbu-chews (if you ever have the pleasure of tasting it, make sure that you do not chew). ‘Sorry. This J2LC Time-for-Gorbachev vending machine does not accept notes,’ the replied after Stuart tried putting in some silver coins.
‘Please make sure that you only pay with the appropriate type of cash. The new Time-for-Gorbachev vending machines, however, also accept spent RF fuel.’ Stuart started to put in gold coins now, with the result of never seeing those coins again and listening to the message of ‘Thank you for your most welcome donation to J2LC. May I interest you in actually buying something this time?’