Chased

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There was night, and then there was the night shift inside a BTBL warehouse. Every florescent light was dimmer than its buzz was loud. Music wasn’t permitted, because you needed to listen for any creaks of structural instability in either the walls or the inventory, which were the same thing when you worked for the Brass Tacks Building Company, which Rupe did, and had been doing for all of three hours now with the other two members of the night crew.

Actually it was twelve members in total, if they were allowed to count their cillimorphs. Naturally they didn’t do any work, nobody had ever seen that happen, but they were present, and improving the dour mood created by dingy mud-brown uniforms and meager midnight paychecks.

Rupe picked the night shift because he didn’t want anybody to know he’d gone and made himself a brass tack, the universal heels in every society on all six civilized planets. He needed the money though, and if the tacks were good for anything it was long-term employment. The stigma meant they never turned anyone down. If you were a strangler they would put you to work rolling the loose bubble wrap.

Two, maybe three summers of secretly loading construction crates and cells would earn him enough to get his own star bike. Then he could hit the road, maybe try the cillikeeper life, letting his morphs worry about bringing him snacks when he was lost in the galactic gulf. Without his favorite trio by his side he didn’t think he could even make it through Supervisor Nincy’s instructions, which opened his first shift like a reverse hangover.

Bigger cillimorphs got in the way when you worked shelves, so his buddies for the evening were his tiny Trilt, his slippery dew variant Duop, and his reeking Dryherking, which was allowed as long as it kept its propelling green stink clouds to itself. Most people didn’t like hanging out with Dryherkings, but Nincy and his fellow grunt Duder didn’t complain in the mutual hope he wouldn’t say anything about their morphs if they misbehaved.

Nincy had a Glamnip, a Mannbao, and a Doggelear that definitely left more of its shed skins lying around than his Dryherking did its fishy odor. Duder’s buddies that fateful night, where the lights buzzed extra loud and a new load of particularly rusty building blocks had come in, were a Gingernut, an Onacall, and a Foamaccino.

Just three hours in he had a sense of what most of his near future would look like: Nincy nattering in their ears, over-correcting every little action to justify the presence of a supervisor for just two lowest level tacks. On their end they were to patrol, organize, inventory, lift, with their legs not their backs, backs voided their health insurance, and make sure the coffee station was stocked for the guys who would come in for the real heavy lifting of the day shift, where thousands of boxes and cells were sent out to be layered and locked as new building frames.

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Duder clearly knew how boring it was as a veteran of six months; he tried to scare Rupe with the tales that the veterans of nine months used on him. Nincy was off on a call, leaving the two younger men to each take the sides of one crate at a time and move them from one gigantic aisle of brown shutters and seams to another, seeing as neither of them were cleared to drive the hover forklift yet. The boxes should’ve been light, hollow as they were, but by the time they set them down at least one of their morphs had climbed in to take a ride.

“Get out of there,” Duder scolded his Foamaccino, which giggled and hopped out with a wave of vanilla scent that would’ve been comforting if it didn’t pool nauseatingly with his Dryherking’s aged herring aura. “No wonder everybody thinks the company’s always trying to trap morphs in these things for added structural stability. It’s like they’re baited or something!”

“They’re just like the old cats,” Rupe dismissed, rubbing his back that didn’t seem to be taking the advice about lifting with the legs. “A morph sees an empty box and they have to crawl inside. The real problem is how these shudders on the front always get stuck in the closed position. My buddy got trapped in one of these once.”

“Was he freed by,” Duder looked left, then right, reassured by the empty passages, “Chase?” His eyebrows went wild with implications, and he smiled like he’d just bet the farm on a winning hand. Apparently telling a good story was the best entertainment one could hope for inside one of those giant brown boxes blemishing the landscape at brutal right angles. He looked as if the echoes of his upcoming tale would be as tasty as leftovers, but only if Rupe bit. His back had already done so, so why the heck not?

“Okay, who’s Chase?” His Duop crawled inside his shirt to ice his lower back with the chilled slime of its droplet body, and the cold running down his spine turned the air ominous, killing the vanilla, making the fish more like dead fish.

“You don’t know about Chase? The terror of the Brass Tacks?” They started walking back for the next box, which meant Duder’s voice crept up from behind. He was glad his Duop was watching his back.

“They say Chase was raised by cillimorphs,” his fellow grunt continued, “and in the dead of space too. You know there’s only two ways to survive out there: a spacesuit or staying close enough to a cillimorph that their silliness field extends to you, letting you breathe and swim through it even though it’s a vacuum.

Think about it. Years upon years, with no human contact, and you can’t get more than five feet from a morph or you’re dead in like twenty seconds tops.”

“So he’s not real,” Rupe challenged. He looked around for his other two morphs, just to make sure they were doing alright. Trilt was riding Dryherking, stinking up the air three shelves above them, leaving a ghostly green trail something might follow.

“Oh he’s real. Lives on the back of a Toaderation, you know, the largest cillimorph ever discovered. You could fit like a hundred houses on the back of one. That’s not his only morph of course. He’s got thousands, because that’s what he does. He harvests them.”

screenghostillus4 [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/screenghostillus4.png]

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing freer than a morph backstroking in space,” Duder said, “and nothing less than free than a morph that looks trapped in one of our building boxes.” He slapped the top of their next piece of cargo. Its clang seemed to startle him as well. The morphs too. “He hates us, every last one, from the Prime Pinhead on down to mere pushpins like us.

So he descends into the atmosphere on the back of his mighty Toaderation and chases us down. Then you get a good look at him and see his… clownface.”

“That’s why he’s called Chase?” Rupe snorted derisively. “Because he chases you? Lame. And everybody’s got a clownface, I’m literally wearing mine right now, and you’re wearing yours. Can’t hang out with your morphs without one on.”

“That’s just it,” Duder crooned, voice corkscrewing into Rupe’s ear like a weasel diving down a rabbit den. “Where did he get the make-up? He’s always in space, peeing in black holes or something. No clown outlets out there. It’s just his actual face. Rumor is he spent so much time in his Toaderation’s silliness field that he grew silly traits.

His hair really grows in every stripe of the rainbow. His nose is swollen round and red, and his skin is as pale as cold cream. Never says a word, since nobody ever taught him to speak. All he knows is the silly language, if there is one.”

“So what happens when the chase is over and you’re cornered?”

“He makes you have a rasslin’ match between his morphs and yours. Then you lose of course, because who could beat a coach like that? It convinces your morphs that he’s a way better keeper, and he lures them all away to live on his Toaderation homestead in the wilds of outer space, until they burn on reentry to do it all over again. Oh and… uhh… he kills guys sometimes. Like a bunch of dead tacks, in some of the stories.”

“What, worried you weren’t scaring me?” Rupe asked. But Duder didn’t have a chance to respond, as something very strange happened when they set down the latest crate. It wasn’t his Gingernut hopping out of it, that was exceedingly ordinary, even pleasant given the way its gingerbread flesh brought back the vanilla scent with gusto. No, it was the terrible tremor that shook the entire warehouse, every building box it was made of, every building box stored inside, and every bone in the skeleton crew’s bodies.

Metal wrenched and shrieked as chaos rained down in the form of cube and hexagon boulders dislodged from the upper reaches. Rupe would’ve been crushed for sure, if not rammed out of the way by his Dryherking. Never had he been so glad to get two nostrils full of it. Duder was similarly snatched from doom by his hovering Onacall, which used its hyperactive manifestation power to generate a stream of consumer goods that hose-blasted his potential executioner off course, leaving him to suffer a drizzle of nothing more harmful than ramen packets, gaming magazines, and obsolete electronics.

All of this from setting down a box wrong? No, Rupe’s dazed mind recognized. Something had struck them from outside. It was a top-down sound, and it spread, like a giant meteorite of pizza dough had hit them. Only so many things could hit like that, and one just so happened to be a minor antagonist in the story he’d just heard.

Duder looked like he was having the same thoughts, but he quickly dispelled them by babbling something about an earthquake and how he would bravely go check the emergency exit to see how the outside world had suffered.

Things had stopped falling, so Rupe watched him go, flanked by his protective morphs, his Gingernut wielding its candy cane like a truncheon. He made it to the double doors safely, touched them, recoiled, touched again, and finally yanked them open like he was pulling a whale’s teeth.

Only to find the world was gone, replaced by a slimy membrane of gold foil. Duder didn’t dare touch it, and in fact retreated, as the shade was distinct enough to tell both of them what was just outside. Obviously the barrier was some of the solar sail webbing found only between the colossal toes of an unstoppable Toaderation.

If everything Duder had said about Chase was true, they were trapped. Why else would a morph most comfortable in the pillowy void descend to this mortal plane and drape itself across a humdrum loading dock? If true, the exits were blocked by its feet. Even if they could reach the windows with climbing or flying morphs, those too would be obstructed, probably by the innumerable juvenile Tadpods that usually docked and slept in the back-pockets covering a Toaderation.

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“So it’s true, huh?” Rupe said to Duder as color drained from both their faces underneath their clownish coatings.

“I didn’t want it to be! I just wanted to rattle you!” He stowed that talk, as their supervisor rounded the corner with her morphs and ran up to them, out of breath, yet still able to speak perfectly as long as it was a memorized spiel.

“Is anybody hurt?” Nincy asked. They shook their heads. “Then we follow procedure for a Chase encounter where the exits have closed.”

“There’s a procedure!?” both grunts blurted.

“Instituted after the first billion apptallies of damages,” she confirmed, “roundabout six years ago. This is my third time.” She sighed. “Get your morphs ready for a beating.” Her Glamnip clacked its claws in defiance. “Sorry buddy, but we’re going to lose. It’s practically policy. Put up a fight though, or corporate will fire you for not trying.”

“Trying what!?” Rupe shouted, hugging his Duop so tightly its fluid head bulged.

“To protect the inventory. Chase is going to take all the morphs,” she said as if it was obvious. There were more sounds on the roof, like two rust-coated beach balls bouncing on it, then a couple more traditional footfalls.

“But the inventory is just building boxes!” the naive employee fruitlessly refuted. “Isn’t it? Morphs getting stuck in them just happens sometimes. Corporate doesn’t do that… do they? Just to avoid spending money on filling the boxes?”

“Maybe it’s better Chase drums you out of here now kid,” Nincy told him as she ripped some shedding skin from her Doggelear’s flank and used it to wipe the sweat off her brow. “You don’t get to climb the ladder without stepping on some morphs.” She stomped her high heel, implying there might have been cillimorphs stuck in the very building boxes that tiled the floor. Her Mannbao bounced on her shoulder, irritated. “Not you sweetie, stupider worse ones.”

Rupe wanted to argue, and he would settle for Duder if his supervisor rejected the disrespect, but they were out of time. Something somewhere broke, out of their sight lines, and all at once they’d been invaded.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Chase, given his extraordinary history, no doubt had countless morphs at his disposal, training day in and day out on the back of Toaderation, beyond orbit where they didn’t even have days. Even he probably kept to the standard rasslin’ team size of five though, Rupe reasoned, anything more was unmanagably silly. Toaderation made one, and it was too busy blocking the exits to rassle. The second flew into view well above them, outclassing his Dryherking in size and aggression. It was a Dydolff.

screenghostillus6 [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/screenghostillus6.png]

A very different sort of fishy flying cillimorph from a Dryherking, the Dydolff. The former stank itself into the air, while the latter learned to fly by treating cyberspace as water, the same as Toaderation could do while wading in the galaxy. Whenever a cyberspace cillimorph emerged from an electronic device it behaved much as it did in the digital realm.

But it didn’t attack. Rupe watched it dive, then swoop at the last second so that he stared down its intimidating gullet. Duop was nearly blown out of his arms by the force of its passage, and it was the security booth that took the brunt of its momentum as the bellowing sport fish of neon greens, blues, and yellow dove into the computer terminal within.

The other exits, Rupe realized. The communication channels. His Dydolff was going to eat any outgoing messages, so they couldn’t call for help. That meant he might stand a chance though. Chase had three morphs left, and Rupe had three.

“You could try hiding in the big one that just came in,” Duder offered once the papers disturbed by Dydolff’s flyby settled, referring to the ultra-deluxe sized building box that had been dropped off on the other side of the warehouse. “Maybe he won’t find you and convince your morphs that he’s way cooler.” His Foamaccino swirled across the floor on its spiral whipped-cream foot and patted him on the leg to assure him that wouldn’t happen, but the man’s expression only sank further.

“What about you guys?” Rupe asked as his Dryherking descended to his side and his Trilt leapt off to wrap itself around his neck.

“You’re the new guy. There’s still hope for you. You can go be the new guy at something else.”

“But I need the money.”

“More than you need your best friends?” Duder posed, and when Rupe looked in the beady eyes of his Trilt he knew his fellow pushpin was right. It was better to run away, to live and rassle another day. “I’ll hold him off.”

“Yeah, because I told you too,” Nincy reminded, checking her own clownface in a compact to make sure the security cameras wouldn’t record any smudges in her performance. It would be reviewed later, and she might want a promotion to help deal with the emotional blow of losing the respect of her cillimorphs.

Rupe was already fleeing by the time she was putting her hair up in a bun, which was the least interesting thing he spied when he looked over his shoulder mid-stride. Chase had finally appeared, banished all doubt, exploded upon the floor with his practiced entrance that could only be achieved by someone raised in the company of cillimorphs, and as far out of the Brass Tacks Building Company as possible.

Chase’s three morphs came with him, descending from the ceiling between the gigantic shelves of now-disorderly boxes and cells. Two were spherical, bouncing in impact, leaving behind embedded spikes of pure rust. The first was a Rustyblow, like a puffer fish of old, only coated in the commonest complaint of street metals. Extra rusty this one, implying age, experience, and plenty of spines to go around.

The other bouncing ball was just its shadow brought to life, interrupted by a single glaring eye of concentric red and cream: a Puppentanz. They were colonial morphs that colonized the dark silhouettes of others, then took them for a spin, then kept them as their bodies. Whenever Chase had recruited his Rustyblow, the Puppentanz probably tagged along.

Chase himself rode one down, stepped off just as it bounced. Rupe glimpsed the gloss of rainbow hair, not a wacky poof as expected, but a luxurious mane of seven stripes cascading through the fall and then down his shoulders. Rupe was too far to see his expression, but the man walked with pure determination.

Less frightening than his last cillimorph’s gait, as it turned out. Riding the Puppentanz was a Shrampler. A Shrampler! Rupe couldn’t believe it. How did he get a Shrampler to be frightening!? It made even less sense than the entire cillimorph kingdom concept. A Shrampler was little more, and sometimes less in terms of intellect, than a shrimp made to walk upright. Sure, it was roughly the size of a rooster, but its ‘beak’ was a soft rounded nub that resembled a nose that had given out, blown a thousand times too many.

They were usually terrible at walking on their two stubby fin-legs, but Chase’s Shrampler had practice. Back and forth across the entire Toaderation. No dawn to crow at in outer space, so no interruptions. Now it could run like a raptor, and it did, straight for stalwart Nincy and her trio of morphs.

Duder cowered enough to call it a retreat, which set him up as the second opponent. Rupe’s goal was to not be the third, so he made it to the ultra deluxe in back and convinced his cillimorphs to crawl inside: the easiest task of the day. Something about those boxes just made them feel right at home, until they got bored of course.

Hopefully their patience would hold out until Chase got bored and launched his Toaderation back into space. Rupe bashed the control button with the side of his fist and tossed himself in as well just as the big box’s shutter groaned shut, cutting him off from the rest of the warehouse. But he could still hear it. Clear enough to see in his mind’s eye.

His imagination saw Chase stroll to a stop in front of Nincy. Their morphs squared up and stared each other down. Normally someone would say something about a bell to get a rasslin’ match going, but Nincy was only going to say what corporate had printed out for her, and Chase might’ve never said anything.

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The lightning fast Shrampler struck first, in another unexpected fashion. As it charged forward both the inflated Rustyblow and the mimicking Puppentanz bounced right over it, into its path. Shrampler kicked them, sending them spin-flying like spiky soccer balls, right at Nincy’s smaller morphs.

“Glamnip, poison pour!” she ordered her crabby morph, which spun and spilled a rapidly formulated rust stripping agent from the neck of its bottle-shaped shell. The attack might’ve worked, if not for an unintelligible syllable gutturally croaked by Chase, something along the lines of

“Uglur!” Perhaps the nickname of his Rustyblow, or an order, or both. Regardless, the fishy morph let out all its breath and deflated under the arc of the chemical agent. Then it rapidly reinflated and struck Glamnip as it always intended, cracking the pale green glass of its shell. Mannbao didn’t fare much better, especially since it didn’t have any de-rusting projectiles and Puppentanz was equally lacking in rust. It offered a brutal punch of concentrated shadow that tossed the wimpy vegetable morph high up into the shelves, where it got stuck in an overturned box.

In one fell swoop she was down to her Doggelear, which put up the most fight, rapidly peeling off its shed scales in big sheets and using them as weapons, alternating between its mountainous and desert-dwelling forms. The lanky lizard caught Shrampler up in one like a net, but it tore through with fins that shouldn’t have been that sharp.

Doggelear was on the back foot, which was on its stumpy legs, so it barely kept out range of Shrampler’s pecks, which may or may not have been shockingly sharp as well. Every swiped skin was torn through, and then Chase delivered the final instruction or name.

“Pumga!” And just like that Doggelear was down, waving the white flag with a scaly skin wrapped around its arm. Supervisor Nincy was defeated. Maybe her morphs abandoned her; Rupe couldn’t really tell what happened after that. When he pressed his ear against the metal so much it hurt he gained enough clarity to recognize that Duder had been confronted, and another match would start in seconds. Chase’s morphs didn’t need to rest at all.

“I’m the last one here,” he heard Duder claim, “and the best! You think you can beat us!?” His morphs trumpeted in unison. Once again Chase said nothing. He was close enough now that Rupe could hear his bare feet squeaking across the cold floor, as if he wore clown shoes. When the squeaking halted he knew the match had began.

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Chase’s Shrampler and its accompanying spheres started their approach in much the same way, with two artillery rounds fired via kick. Duder had watched the whole thing though, and thought he had a way around it.

“Onacall, junk shield!” His most peculiar morph, like a hovering cycloptic gumball, shot out in front of the other two and unleashed the same manifestation power that had saved Duder’s life minutes prior, but this time it was thrown as a wide arc of cheap consumer goods. In effect it was like a net, greatly slowing the Rustyblow and Puppentanz when they connected. “Gingernut, Faomaccino! Cinnamon gush!”

Both his other morphs had pleasing dessert qualities integrated into their physiology, one of ten million reasons to have them around, and as it so happened they both had access to cinnamon. Rupe wondered if that was Duder’s favorite flavor, a question he might never get the chance to ask now.

His technical mentor wasn’t looking to fill up Chase’s morphs before dinner and ruin their appetite. They had to inhale to maintain their spherical assault, and now that they were slowed midair they had no choice but to swallow mouthfuls of concentrated cinnamon dust flying from Gingernut’s open head and Foamaccino’s whipped cream-bloom.

Duder’s valiant effort worked, but only on Rustyblow, which deflated with flapping lips and spiraled back toward Chase like an untied balloon. On the other side of the aisle his Puppentanz shot straight to the floor as a flattened shadow and snuck under the falling cereal toys and Christmas lights.

Shrampler too snuck in just under with its astonishing speed. It was two versus three, Duder should have had the advantage, but he was a lugger of boxes and paperwork, not somebody who had the free time to take his cillimorphs to training gyms three times a week. Without that, his morphs could never get Shrampler legs.

Foamaccino and Gingernut turned toward each other for cinnamon crossfire, and there was a brief duel of armored shrimp neck and candy cane, but from the sounds of crumbling gingerbread and spilling coffee, Rupe knew that it was close to over. Onacall coming in from behind wasn’t going to do much. And it didn’t.

So this was it. His hyperventilating prevented him from hearing any words shared between the men. Calming it took seconds he didn’t have, so he threw his hands over his mouth and waited. Would Chase look inside the biggest box in the facility? Of course. Why didn’t he just get it over with?

Rupe had to listen to the plap-plap-plap of the Shrampler’s feet exploring the border of the box, plus the rummaging of the Rustyblow disturbing all their clipboards and orders with gales of exhalation. A few other cillimorph sounds reached him, meaning there had been some trapped in the facility, in the items he was hauling back and forth. Could he even take one more apptally from the BTBC with a clear conscience? Whatever the answer, he was glad it was pitch black inside the box, leaving him unable to see any disappointment in his morphs’ eyes.

That miserable time in the dark was just Chase playing with his food. Eventually, just when Rupe started to hope he would be overlooked, the shutter squealed and shot up. The man was just there, hands on his hips, rainbow hair scattering the light from behind like a prism. Rupe leapt out to avoid an instinctive curl into the fetal position. How could he expect his morphs to show a backbone if he didn’t, especially since two of them definitely didn’t have endoskeletons.

“Let’s just get this over with,” he tried to growl. “I’m not scared of you.” He decided to split the difference in strategies. “And I’ve never shoved a morph in a box in my entire life.” If Chase took that into consideration it didn’t show. The closest thing he made to a statement was the state of the aisle directly behind him. Rupe looked in the crook of his tented arm and saw a pair of legs sticking out of a building box. Just fainted. Hopefully.

“Ding ding!” Rupe shouted before he lost his nerve. None of the organic clown’s morphs were caught by surprise, rushing in from three different angles because Rupe hadn’t bothered to square up properly. He had to twirl on his feet to manage a battle happening in all 360 degrees around him.

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“Dryherking, odor veil!” That spread the stink as a curtain, hopefully tormenting their inhaling enemies. Spin. “Trilt, lasso those lips!” His flexible little morph tossed itself from Dryherking’s back onto the Rustyblow’s face, wrapping its body around the puffy lips so it couldn’t let the stench back out. Tears bubbled up in its eyes. Spin. “Duop, do the banana peel!” His morph obeyed amorphously, sliding into the Shrampler’s path and shifting to a slippery shape.

It was a solid strategy, as cillimorphs were almost physically required to trip any time it would look funny. Shrampler was no exception, careening out of control, right into a repositioned Dryherking, which slapped it with a tail flick. Rupe spun again to watch it fly, but it didn’t go far before a similarly shapeless Puppentanz caught it with the silhouette of a baseball glove.

For one silver moment, alive with fishy sweat and rusty confetti, he thought he might win. He really did care about his morphs, and he did see the inside of a gym every now and again too. But this was Chase, and the man was a legend. It didn’t matter that he’d only heard it minutes ago. The weight of it was there, in the rasslin’, in the way Chase’s face never changed, not an indigo hair falling from his twirled rainbow mustache.

The man’s morphs regrouped. The shadowy mitt reared back and tossed Shrampler like a spear, catching Dryherking in the gut and tearing it out of the sky. Rustyblow spun in the air, forcing Trilt, its head basically on the end of the rope of its body, to suffer a greater G-force and give up on its grip. Then a big fish landed on it.

Poor little Duop was last to go, practically flattened into a puddle by the pressure. Chase’s trio cornered it, glowered intensely, and rather than suffer three attacks at once, it spat up a tiny white flag and retreated to behind Rupe’s ankle.

“It’s okay,” he told it. “You guys did your best.” Dryherking and Trilt came up alongside as well, and he stroked their heads. “Mr. Chase, please don’t do something ridiculously cool that gets my morphs to leave me. I like them, I swear. I’m not like the other brass tacks. This was just supposed to be a summer gig.”

The solemnly silent clown contemplated this for a moment, or enjoyed a daydream, there was no way to tell the difference. Just like inside the box, he had to wait it out. The man without days obviously operated on his own warped sense of time. His response came when he eventually lifted one hand. Rupe cowered, expecting a punch that would put him in the back of a building box and dent it at the same time.

Plock! Chase just snapped his fingers. His Shrampler took it as an order and raced away, into the piles of paperwork they’d intentionally messed up. Several uncomfortable seconds passed before the speedy shrimp’s return. Rupe spied something tucked between its tail fins when it skidded to a halt at Chase’s side.

The man plucked it out, some ten sheets of paper stapled together, and without reading it he turned it toward Rupe and held it up, allowing the young man to inch closer, closer, until he could make out a logo and heading. It was a Brass Tacks employment contract. On a hunch his eyes dropped down, to where he saw a familiar squiggle: his own signature.

“It’s nothing!” he argued. “It means nothing!” He still wasn’t sure Chase understood human speech, so he had to demonstrate by lunging forward and grabbing the contract out of his frayed fingerless gloves. With snarling teeth and clawing fingers Rupe tore it to absolute shreds, spitting the last one out disrespectfully. “See? I’m so out of here if you just let me go.”

Again, the agonizing wait. Was it philosophy under that rainbow? Or a ten second looping cartoon of a baboon on a treadmill? There was no way to know, and there never would be, because Chase took it with him when he turned and departed, leaving Rupe his morphs.

Finally he breathed, just as the building did the same, the weight of Toaderation lifting off. He thanked the stars before remembering Chase would be up there, watching, listening, perhaps able to hear between planets thanks to the silliness field. Maybe he had his own. That little detail would make it into Rupe’s version of the story…

told around a campfire of course. Never a break room. He swore it.

THE END