[http://rom.ac/img/108/25-05.jpg]

[http://rom.ac/img/04snipsavatar.gif]

"LOOK I CAN SEE OUR HOUSE FROM UP HERE!" Captain yelled as if I wasn't hanging next to him on a questionable-looking parachute.

According to the brave leader of Captania, she made the parachute by stealing pants from the leader of the aliens. I chose not to argue with this nonsensical explanation. Asking Captain further questions about any given topic made my brain feel like it was swimming in molasses of confusion and despair.

"It looks so homeee-leeey!" She hugged me, somehow smelling faintly of baked bread and blueberries?

"We don't have a home as we pretty much roam from one abandoned complex to another," I commented.

"Abandoned? Nothing is abandoned, my dear. There's a war on between many factions and Captania has reclaimed plentiful territory for further development! Take a look, everything the light touches is Captainia!"

"What about all the dark holes and underground bunkers?" I said.

"Those places are beyond our borders. You must never visit the nightclubs there, because they shan't accept your id. You don't have enough eyes to enter them!"

"I wasn't planning on going there, but now you mention it, I'm pretty sure they're all ground-worm hives anyway."

"That's right! Photoshop said that the worms won't accept you because you're a naughty lawbreaker. So... you'll be staying in the mobile home with Pilot and I until you learn to behave in public!"

"What is it with you and tiny cardboard houses? Can't we just sleep in any room?"

A cardboard house is easy to draw omnicode on to protect it from the paws, claws and maws of Captania's enemies."

"I see. It's easier to decorate a cardboard home with your nonsensical chalk scribbles," I said, knowing that Captain and Pilot liked to draw with colorful chalk on things. Their drawings were simple and amusing in a way a four-year old's art is and sometimes featured all three of us surrounded by flower-like patterns.

"Yes. A smaller, more compact space is easier to apply a chain of hexagrammatic protection onto," Captain nodded.

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"Does it need to be cardboard though? Wind and snow keeps getting in."

"That's what blankets are for! Cardboard can be folded and put away. Stable structures that can't be folded can easily be messed with by... Eight."

"Eight?"

"Eight! She's constantly butting into my business with her infinite butting-butt ever since some idiot let her out in the Astral Ocean! Her power is greater in bigger buildings and super-stable, hex-mesh gigastructures."

"Big buildings?"

"Big buildings can house big, irregular conceptoids. Personally, I would rather have a chess match with a duck-sized conceptoid than a shark-sized one."

"Uh-huh."

"After all, shark-sized conceptoids tend to break everything due to the disproportional size of their attitude."

[http://rom.ac/img/67rr/Shark-minion--for-contest.gif]

"Right."

"It appears on their employment record for all to see! If something is a shark it will bite you!"

"How can anything have an employment record, especially sharks?"

"Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. You just need to squint seven times harder and you too can evaluate the true status of all the things!"

"Squinting at things doesn't turn your imagination into reality."

"Oh, but of course it does. You just need to believe, Snippy, and anything can be possible! Everything everywhere at the same time!"

"Wishing for something doesn't make it so."

"Can you be sure of that? The peoples of pre-Captainia also thought as you do, but then all of their wishes suddenly came true, all at once."

"I don't think their wishes came true. I don't think anyone wanted to die horribly in nuclear hellfire."

"Most of them were so very overwhelmed with the burden of such responsibility they all went on a permanent vacation!" Captain giggled as if nuclear apocalypse wasn't even a thing.

"Riiiiiiight. A magical genie killed everyone, because someone wished for world peace?"

"Warm, mister Snippy, you're learning well."

Contrary to Captain's judgement, I hadn't learned anything of value from this conversation.

I stretched and yawned and looked down at the frozen wasteland potentially crawling with creepy crawlies....

and then I remembered something... the damn aliens took my gun away!