So, as I attempted to say: Ben Garment, Lorenzo, and Jockey were here-and-there around their encampature, an unremarkable place with no features or use, but simply their original locale in the giant’s darkful safe, and so they assumed it to be the fair base to use until a better one was enstablished—they were right to ashrine as holy the arbitrary origin, but a little embellishment would go ahit. But, there they waited for Roby for a length of time bordering on the comical but not daring to cross the line, when Lorenzo depicted the obvious.
“Wait a moment,” he said, needlessly, for they’d been inactive for that time already. “We needn’t sit idle waiting for Roby. We know she’s gone east. We can move that way and follow her trail. Thus we’ll speed the rejoining, and find her report—or, if she’s found egress, follow her escape plan.”
“Two years to the day we’ve waited for that answer!” said Ben Garment, who could not count to three.
Jockey packed her beach towel and her usuta and said, “This was awaited for.” She glared ominously at a red carpet.
They all agreed that this was the most fair and wise plan any bee had ever concocted in this whole chapter, and so they embarked for the eastish paths. However, unakin to Roby, all their names had ees in them, and so their route was diverted from hers in more ways than two, and their footsteps found hers not, and the path they took veered by but a second, but one was enough to spell another number, and the place of their arrival was different in toto.
“Not a sole Roby-sign,” said Ben Garment, “but at least we know where we are, and where we aren’t—safe, in both cases.”
“We’re never safe,” said Jockey glumly. “No one is. Life is a risk—or rather, a certainty... as there’s no making it out alive.”
“As I’ve recently said,” said Ben Garment. “But, yonder stick bug seems to think otherwise.”
In the nearist bush a stick bug was munching on a leaf. Taking notice of their taking notice of it, it waved, and resumed its snack.
Even unaccounted for was the sheer fact that the east was vast, as usual, and as they travailed, they were soon beset with openness and sprawlation, and Roby’s trail could not be discerned from the refuse-strewn paths of typical consumers. They strode forth, and certainly something happened to them—something must, for although an entire life can pass without incident, and told in its entire with a single phrase encapsulating the degree of time for which it endured, and nothing more need be said, we are not here as catalogers, but as tellers, and so there must be much to tell—and, if not, all the more so. Should it be wondered that words gain ground as their length increases? Nothing eventless is, for even in its existence, in its time, there is the space for memory, and so let it pour, always and ever.
Roby’s suspicion, which was unbeknownst to even Lorenzo, was her presence in that liminal mall, but it was soonly demonstrated even to her her wrongness, and that thought went away nearly forever, but was scraped from oblivion as it now found its reference of a portion of use, for Lorenzo, Ben Garment, and Jockey, in their attemptive wandering, had indeed found themselves at the foot of that same assumed mall—but, so as not to squander grandeur, this was a place of unlegend, a forgettable locale not yet remembered.
“I think I recognize this place!” said Jockey.
“A stroke of luck!” said Ben Garment. “Take the fore, you finalized student, and show us something we struggle to believe!”
With Jockey in the lead, they quickly got lost, and found themselves stuck in a drain beneath the mall’s fountain—though, fortune save us all, it was as long defunct as a railroad, and indeed, rain within the whole of the safe was a rarity saved mainly for Wednesdays, one of the worst of all days—certainly not a Saturday. They were missing something paramount, the absence of which was feelable more and more firmly with every passing era.
“I think my compass’s batteries are out of juice,” said Jockey. She shook a test tube and winked, and then, with her wisdom fully afore, added, “No! I’m thinking of fiber. And grapefruit.”
“Grape? Grapefruit? Great fruit!” came a voice from an elsewhere only definable as behind the trash can—and not just any trash can, for this was one of Rose Kettle’s Profundity Installations for the Betterment of Culpability—but that didn’t matter, for as the speaker emerged, it callishly tossed the ’can on its side and let it roll with the hill into a ravine that was already late for work. Pardon the delay in defining the speaker, for the role hasn’t been determined yet—or detrimented—but it turned out it was Stam Clete, who was the most poverty-strewn individual ever to die cast some lenses at poultry. He had none of this about him at the mo’, and nor did he have any of the aforementioned fruit.
“We want not to buy,” said Lorenzo.
“I want not to sell,” said Stam. “I see some stuckers, is the truth! You’re ready for a pun, or a typo?”
Lorenzo, Ben Garment, and Jockey quickly put their heads together, but not so quickly as to produce dents.
“A pun is unbearable,” said Ben Garment, “unless, of course, it’s not got.”
“Take a challenge,” said Jockey. “I want to see the conception.”
“Neither of you have a plan that will find the exit,” said Lorenzo. “Let us dispense with this tramp. We will hasten for the outdoors yet. Look there! The grate is easily achievable to a bee like me, but that would leave you two sunk. Let’s find a route that keeps us together.”
“Enpiped, we’re doomed to downhill,” said Ben Garment.
It was as he said. The drain system led, fed by gravity, downwardly-sloping, and eventually to a distant sea—but whether it was one still contained within the safe or drained, they could not guess, and so its use failed to coincide with Roby’s discovery, so the plan was cabinetted. They signed a pact to locate her afore pressing anything adventurous, and so, armed only with Lorenzo’s stinger, Ben Garment’s dangler, and Jockey’s one-hundred-and-fifty-five-millimeter, nine-thousand-pound long-rage siege howitzer, they sallied forth into the dense and endless maze of pipes that lie beneath the streets. They made it as far as one inch when suddenly they were met by Pantry Trom.
“Oh! No,” said Lorenzo, “let’s not encourage a battling chase. Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, begin the assault at once!”
But, it was too late. Pantry Trom had shown Jockey its catalog of fine and near-fine produce, and she was already thumbing through the pages, rapt with disease and gazing at the order form with pen in paw.
“I’d better order two for Mom,” she said, committing the ink to paper.
“See,” said Ben Garment, “if they have tags, bags, or roadside chicken coops.”
“Have you seen the new models?” said Pantry Trom. “They can evaporate!”
“Evaporation?” said Lorenzo. “There’s an unexplored avenue. Ben Garment—make purchase of the merchandise. We can utilize its features to escape from this tubular confine.”
“Have you seen my wallet?” said Ben Garment. “That’s not a sight for a child! We’ll have to opt differentwise, if you please.”
Now, by now, they had meandered such that the site of their debates was near the front of a cottage, and with a full serving of suddenment the cottage door bung open, and out came burstfully the poisonous witch Grotilda, wielding a copper butcher’s knife and a lead meat hammer, and she said to them, “Alas! There, you children! You’ve got beef, or come to make it? Have it your way! For behold!” —and then she came running at them, swinging the knife and the hammer. Pantry Trom bought a bus ticket to the shipment factory, Stam Clete got his head stuck in two dishwashers, but Lorenzo, Jockey, and Ben Garment were not so quick of wit—but quicker of foot (approx.), and unrancid and spry, and typically fled from her, so Grotilda’s wild swipes found no purchase, and in her hectic swoops she threw away her balance and fell down in the dust.
“Ho, crone!” said Ben Garment. “That’s a fine right hook you’re looking for, but you haven’t got it, have you?”
Grotilda kicked her feet and pounded her fists and burst into tears—not literally. I mean, could you imagine? “Oh, you children!” she said. “With all your flesh intact! You’ll do well to embrace that youth, my chapples, but behold me—three hundred years old if I’m a day, and I am—and now far gone past my orphan-snatching prime! I can hardly ambush a wand’rer on my own stoop!”
Ben Garment, Jockey, and Lorenzo bowed their heads in sorrow, for it was indeed a terrible thing to grow old, the worst of all curses, to become beaten and worn, and become unable to hunt orphans for sport any longer. They gathered around Grotilda lying in the dust. From her flowing tears, the dust turned muddy and grew to a pool.
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“Shall we,” said Jockey, “let you get a few stabs in, so you might experience your golden years anew?”
Grotilda looked up, shining sparkles in her eyes. “Oh, child, that’d be very kind of you!” said she. “Very kind indeed!”
Jockey bared some supple parts for Grotilda’s stabbage, but Lorenzo was not so convinced of the necessity for charity. He eyed Grotilda with suspicion, intrigue, and a five-o’clock shadow. “Do not so hastily agree to her mood,” he said. “The trick is yet unplayed.”
“I think we’re on the same squire,” said Ben Garment. “The witch has an secret, ulterior motive—for in the fact, methinks she seeks to stab us!”
“No!” said Jockey. “After all we’ve been through together, you’d betray us so?” Hastily, she put away her supple parts, and made a note to keep them in check in the future—but the note was left on the fridge, quite out of view and memory both.
“Curses!” said the witch, tossing her tools away. “So, I’ve been found out at last. Well, nothing gets by you! I surrender, in that’s case. Help me up, at least.”
Jockey put forth a friendsome hand to let the old gal clamber from the muck, and Grotilda reached up towards her and clutched at it—but as fortune would have it, Jockey’s handing at Grotilda missed, so Grotilda gripped not Jockey’s appendage but Lorenzo’s, who, being a bee, had only as an available grabber his stinger, and when the witch closed her hand about it she became enstabbed and poisoned, and then howled and died, and fell down three flights of stairs and up two, and dried up and withered away until she was small enough to pin to a three-by-five index card and mount beneath glass for one’s butterfly collection—if one’d put a dried-up witch in one’s butterfly collection, which would be a little out of parcel.
“Alas, the circle of life,” said Jockey pretzellessly.
“Behold!” said Ben Garment, as from one of Grotilda’s hands had fallen a pin, poison fresh on its tip, and from another hand came a diaper, also full of poison. She also had a box of more poison in her backpack. “Trick upon trick in hand! Well-spotted, my buzzing comrade.”
“Well, that,” said Lorenzo, “was mostly accidental. But, no matter. We ought to be less trusting of this part’s folk—the safe is filled with deception, so it seems. At least, let’s use this cottage as our base to plan our escape from the safe, and Roby’s detection.”
The three of them all went into the cottage through different doors, and sat down at the one table in the one room, and checked the fridge for snacks, but there was nothing but baby-cut carrots, so they quickly shut the fridge in horror, chained it closed with a chain made of some really strong metal—I guess... brass?—and then threw the fridge in the oven, Jockey’s forgettable note quickly charring away from legibility.
“That’ll bake up good,” said Ben Garment. “Let that roast up and soak in its own juices for a while, use that as the base for some gravy. We’ll be eating good today.”
But then, the cottage suddenly awoke. Its rockets roared, its wings spread, and it rose up. The flex of its too-grand wings shattered the ancient walls of the mall, and the flame of its rockets lifted it high from the ruins, deep above the blank landscape until darkness was lost to light. The cottage stretched its mighty wings, great in their breadth, and with ten mighty flaps the cottage clomb even higher, and decoupled the first and second stages of the rockets, their weight being a hindrance now that their fuel was spent. All the doors closed, all the windows closed, and the cottage laughed. With them trapped in its maw, it glode across the plain, swaying like so, and humming a merry tune while they were jostled about inside.
“I didn’t expect,” said Jockey, “that it was one of these cottages!”
“Always expect the unexpected,” said Lorenzo.
“That’s literally impossible,” said Jockey.
“More to the point,” said Ben Garment, “look at the compass!”
They all checked the compass—a different one from before, as they buy a new one for each paragraph, even the ones without these—and it was spinning all hither and yon, so that they had not the slightest idea of the path they were taking, and since the doors and windows were shut, and the windows further shut with shutters, they saw nothing outside, and didn’t even know the span of the cottage’s wings, or whether the type was feather, leather, or a pane of glass.
“This house,” said Lorenzo, “seems to have a mind of its own!”
“False!” said the tangled, strangled voice of the ghost of the witch. “For you see, it was all part of my very standardized trap! And now my spirit has possessed the cottage, and the cottage has possessed you!” She laughed in a wheaty laugh, and now the cottage swooped and dove and barrel-rolled—well, it thought it was a barrel roll. It was enough, at least, to upturn Ben Garment’s jigsaw.
“This site,” said Ben Garment, “must include a root cellar or chimney that’ll get our insides outside!”
Lorenzo shook his head sadly. “No—we already checked when we were looking for a space for the extra mattress,” he said. “Curses! I should’ve seen this coming.”
Jockey put her hand on his shoulder so as to comfort him in her own way. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “This was inevitable, after all.”
“I know,” said Lorenzo, “which only makes it all the more egregious that I failed to foresee this event. But—wait! That’s it! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Jockey nodded eagerly. “Yeah!” she said. “Faster-than-light communication is possible by taking advantage of the ee pea are paradox—call Alice and Bob at once!”
“No, not that,” said Lorenzo.
“Well, then, I’m bumped,” said Jockey.
While the valedictorian and salutatorian put their brilliantish minds together and tried to steamroll their mutually unequivalent plans, Ben Garment rummaged through the cabinets, where he didn’t find anything but pots and pans, as one does—and a box of crackers. He lifted up the box, but it was heavier than a thousand mountains all rolled into a little ball the size of the tip of your pinky finger, so he dropped it, and it made a loud sound, which distracted Jockey and Lorenzo and made them totally forget their plan, which was nearly complete and would have solved all problems. The box popped open and that aforementioned ball rolled out, and promptly got stuck in between the floorboards.
“Augh!” cried the ghost of the witch. “What’s this? A feeling like I’ve got something stuck ’tween my teeth! Augh! I must have it out!” She opened her door and reached inside to unstick the stuck thing, and Ben Garment, Jockey, and Lorenzo took the opportunity and leapt out of from it—which seems like a sad mistake when aboard a flyable trafficker at an unknown height, but Lorenzo could fly, being a bee, and the other twain merely followed him on instinct. Outside there was nothing to stand on, of course—so they plummeted.
“Cowardful childs!” cried the witch, having at last unstuck the sticking thing. “You’ll leave gravitas do my dirty work for me, and leave my hands still bloodless?” She howled with... actually, I’m not quite sure what feeling she attempted to emote, for the tone of the shriek spanned sorrow and wrath both, and if there are other moods, that’s news to us all. But it was a pierceful sound that went unheard by our trio, for the cottage flew on, and gained distance by the jiffy as their plummet continued.
Lorenzo, engaging his wings, watched in spades, and, being a bee, was quite small. “No plan,” said he, “has adequate haste to aid them. But—who goes there, groundly?”
In the grass much distance below, yonder stick bug stood munching on a leaf, when it noticed its prior noticers and stared agog. It quickly put its snack away, carefully wrapping it in plastic wrap so it’d be fresh for later, and stuffed it in the back of yet another fridge, and then it sprang toward action, contracting a burly court-e-san to bring over a pile of tools and a stack of slabs. Pencilvester the mathematician arrove as well, to lend his geometric and trigonometric capabilities to the project, and calculate the landing quadrant of Ben Garment’s and Jockey’s plungation, and, once the locale was located, the burly court-e-san built a fine pool—this is the mediocre usage of “fine”, not the excessively grand-seeming one—and once the pool was constructed awhole, she filled it with cement, hardening it hastily with a hair dryer, and so Ben Garment and Jockey, in their hasteful drop, struck its center with all the speed speed could muster, and thus were spared a soft landing.
Lorenzo fluttered down to their spot just as Pencilvester and the burly court-e-san departed for their wedding. Yonder stick bug waved politely, and went about procuring a fresh snack.
“That’s an event disposed of!” said Ben Garment.
“We didn’t even need the eggplants!” said Jockey, who’d never even tried to make parmigiana.
“Rest not,” said Lorenzo. “Another challenge comes!”
It was just at that time that Dubious Miraclasm tired of the records to which he was listening, and unattached the current tune from the player. He opened his safe to insert it into safety and acquire novel sounds, and thus he beheld the interior disaster of mall destroyed, cottage rocketry scattered about, and debris and high mess-making—due to the poorly-kept status of the burly court-e-san’s job site—throughout the safe’s innard. As afuriated as a baccarat playist, he upturned the safe to force escapement onto the debris, and thus the mess was disposed of—and more with it, for Ben Garment, Lorenzo, and Jockey likewise were dumped from the safe before Dubious Miraclasm, content with his cleaning job, slammed shut its door and relocked it fully, and then left.
They were, of course, still alive, but now loster than ever, and blound by the sudden revelation of the sun. In time with the giant’s fading proximity, they recovered their breath and inspected their wounds, and found none, since this time they’d landed in a field replete with thorny briers, and crushed them for their own benefit—Nature, however, will last forever.
“Another too-close one,” said Lorenzo.
“But not close enough for undoing,” said Ben Garment. “All the same, inviting homesteads are things to be avoided henceforth.” He thought of Roby, and her bad luck with domiciles, and how he’d chided her for losing the housemobile. We are not so different after all! “Excepting geographically,” he said aloud, correctly.
Lorenzo and Jockey stretched in the sun and tested their visuals. “Which place are we in?” said Lorenzo. “Is this familiar?”
“Look all around! This,” said Jockey, “is an undiscovered country, now discovered, and without name.”
It was as she said. All around them was a great land of sprawling fields, cozy valleys, vast steppes, primeval forests, towering mountains, burning deserts, rolling hills, mucky swamps, flowing rivers, shimmering seas, and whatever other landscapery features I might have forgotten—and, the wreckage of rocketry and mall pieces. Ben Garment poked at a couple of floor tiles with one fin. Shrugging, he glanced about, taking in the sights of the aforementioned vistas.
“Some call it home, but not I,” said Ben Garment. “I’ll take mine with a dose more hustle and bustle!”
“I know the six tenets of wilderness survival,” said Jockey. “I’ve got some advice! Take the deepest breath you can and begin to belt!”
“That’s considerable,” said Ben Garment, “but not considered.”
“Well, there’s a first time for something,” said Jockey.
“We will not remain here,” said Lorenzo, “wherever ‘here’ is. We’ve got missions to our name.”
“And nemeses in myriads!” said Ben Garment.
“Every stranger is a foe still masked,” said Jockey.
“We’re highly dislocated from our entry to the safe,” said Lorenzo the focused. “The giant had the whole package with him on a stroll.”
“Then let’s find the path of our arrival,” said Ben Garment, “and use it instead for departure! I’ve a mind to contract that burly court-e-san to lay a road for us, that we might return whence we came with haste. Alas, behold!” He showed them his cell phone—no bars.
“Scatter that thought,” said Lorenzo. “What of Roby?”
“No sign about,” said Jockey, who didn’t even bother to check. “She must’ve been atomized by five lamps!”
“As one unhere, she fell not from the safe,” said Ben Garment. “If she’s escaped prematurely—well, there’s a closed book!”
“Correctly said,” said Lorenzo. “If she already escaped, we cannot guess where the safe was when she did, and where she’s gone thence. However—” At that utterance, he cast his segmented eyes toward the direction of the giant’s passage. “She may remain in the safe, somehow clinging to some highly-secured furniture. We may have to pursue that giant, and spring her from the case yet.”
“Then our only target is moving,” said Jockey. “A fine sniper’s situ’!”
“Here’s thoughts winding up a plan,” said Ben Garment.
“Just so,” said Lorenzo. “We’ll need to collect vital supplies—but make haste, that we may give chase ere long. Here—Student Number Four Hundred and Seventeen, take this jug, find fine trees, and wring as much sap from them as you can. And you, Ben Garment, take this great basket, and fill it with as many nuts and bolts as you can carry, that we will have food for our journey in pursuit of the giant’s wide stride.”
“We could eat the basket,” said Jockey the idea-haver.
Lorenzo picked up a medium-good walking stick, and set his direction toward the giant’s receding figurine. “We will if Ben can’t find us anything,” he said.