Chapter Text
On yet another day in the lives of a certain long-suffering trio of puppets, the three of them had finally made it out of the house. Only now they were inside a grocery store, simply searching for items to stock up on. The store was lit by dim, sometimes flickering lights on the ceiling, and the shelves were numerous but rather barren, with a few items here or there waiting to be picked up by shoppers. Oddly, there didn’t seem to be any other shoppers or even staff. As far as they knew, the three puppets were the only ones in the store.
Red held up a long sheet of paper. “Alright, let’s see what we need to buy-”
He didn’t get to start reading the list before Yellow interrupted him, holding up a small ceramic statue of a tooth. “I wanna buy this thing!”
“I want to buy a bowling ball,” declared Duck, lovingly stroking the one he’d found while gazing at it a little too intensely.
“Guys,” said a slightly exasperated Red, “we need to focus on our shopping list.”
“Let me see that list of yours!” came a new voice. A gloved hand yanked the list right out of Red’s grasp, and the newcomer lowered his sunglasses to skim its contents. He was a burlap bag filled with something that made a metallic jingling when he moved, and his sunglasses looked to be made of solid gold.
At last he lowered the list with a “Tsk, you fellows clearly don’t know how to properly spend your money.”
“But that list has everything we need-” Red began to argue before the bag got up in his face.
“How do you earn your money?” the bag demanded.
Red gave a noncommittal shrug. “It just kind of… exists.” Come to think of it, where did their money come from?
The bag sighed as if he was talking to a group of dumb children. “You have so much to learn.” He swiftly tore the list in two and discarded it on the floor.
“Hey!” Duck protested. “What about the rat eggs we need to buy?”
“I must show you the only true ways to earn, save, and spend!” the bag dramatically vowed (his name was Bill, but he wasn’t allowed to disclose that). “Before it’s too late and you doom yourselves to the slums!”
“What’s a slum?” asked Yellow.
“You’ll find that out if you don’t follow my lesson,” Bill ominously answered. “Come on!”
He turned around, and that’s when Yellow noticed something odd about him. “Hey! He’s got a funny little stitch in his side!”
Bill turned on him with an enraged expression. “DON’T ASK ABOUT THAT!!!!!!!”
Before Yellow could process Bill’s angry demand, he and the other two realized that they were no longer in the grocery store. Instead they were in some sort of factory, with a conveyor belt in front of him. “This place feels familiar…” muttered Yellow, feeling a pang of loss and longing he couldn’t quite place.
“Your job should be easy,” Bill told the students, in a tone of voice that suggested he was thinking for idiotic simpletons such as yourselves. “Just send any defective coins into the incinerator.”
“But how will we know which ones are defective?” Red asked.
“You’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em!” Bill promised, which wasn’t all that helpful.
As the trio began to work, Bill rapped out a few verses of song:
“You have to work hard night and day
Just so you can earn your pay”
“This is too easy!” Duck interrupted.
“Oh yeah?” Bill sounded slightly annoyed at him. “I’ll crank it up faster then!” He pulled a lever that made the conveyor belt increase in speed, which gave the trio a harder time of keeping up with all the coins coming and going.
“HEY!” Bill suddenly shouted. “YOU LET A DEFECTIVE ONE THROUGH!” He held up a coin that looked pretty ordinary.
“That one’s not defective!” Duck stubbornly argued, and was met with a magnifying glass being shoved in his face.
“Look closer!” Bill hissed. Turns out there was an error on the coin: “1 Pound” was misspelled as “1 Puond.”
Duck huffed. “Nobody would notice that!”
Meanwhile, Bill’s rage and the sheer amount of coins that were now passing by made Yellow start to panic. Without any time to properly look at the coins, he sent a bunch of them toward the incinerator in the hope that at least a few of them were defects.
This only made Bill angrier. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! THOSE COINS ARE PERFECTLY GOOD!”
“I’m sorry!” cried Yellow.
“I’m doing far better than both of you,” Duck boasted.
This was the final straw for Bill. “Then let’s see if you can manage maximum speed!” He pulled the lever so hard it broke off, which he hardly even noticed.
Now the students were doing way worse, with coins scattering all over the floor. Yellow desperately started stuffing them into his pocket, and eventually resorted to climbing up onto the conveyor belt to stop the flow of coins. Unfortunately, one wrong move landed him on the part of the conveyor belt heading straight for the incinerator.
Red looked up to see this. “Oh my god,” he uttered, and even Duck looked terrified for Yellow.
“HELP!” Yellow shouted, and it looked like he was about to be plunged into the flames… but the conveyor belt stopped just in the nick of time. Bill had somehow reattached the lever’s handle and shut off the machinery.
The bag of jingling things turned to the trio with an expression that could best be read as “I’m pretending to be calm but I really want to strangle all of you.”
“You all did terribly!” he said in an all-too-cheerful voice. “No money for any of you!”
“That’s not fair,” Red pointed out. “It went too fast for us.”
“The boss will always demand perfection no matter what!” Bill warned the students. “Making money is no easy task!”
“And how are we supposed to spend it?” Duck questioned.
“It’s quite simple!” In another blink of an eye, Bill had somehow teleported the trio back to the store. “While making money is easy, spending it is a different matter entirely.” He began to rap once more:
“Listen to me and you’ll be living like kings
Resist all your urges to buy pointless things”
“Can I buy this?” asked Yellow, showing Bill the ceramic tooth from earlier.
“NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!” Bill knocked the tooth right out of Yellow’s hands, and it broke on the floor.
“Aren’t you still supposed to pay for-” Red began, but Bill silenced him by shoving a new shopping list into his face.
“Take a look at my better shopping list
And maybe finally you’ll get the gist”
The list read as follows:
Shopping list of IMPORTANT items:
- Eggs
- Chicken
- Rat eyes
- Bug spray
- Chuddle Dollops
- Gold
- Marbles
- Bits and parts
- Lumps
- Strooms
- Batteries
Red squinted at one of the words on the list in confusion. “...Strooms???”
Bill pulled the list away from his eyes. “You wouldn’t understand their importance!”
“This is nonsense!” shouted Duck. “All I want is to buy a bowling ball, is that so wrong?!”
Bill glared at him, every last bit of patience with this bird finally leaving him. “As a matter of fact, it is. This is your ultimate fate if you continue your reckless spending.”
The setting suddenly changed to a dark and dirty alley that seemed to stretch for miles. The students could barely see the end of it, and even the sky above was obscured by clouds, casting everything in an ominous shadow.
“Is this a slum?” Yellow guessed, looking around at the looming walls that felt like they were trapping the trio in.
“Indeed it is,” confirmed Bill. “This is where people with no money live.” The music started again, but with a darker tone:
“Sleep in the trash among the bugs and rats
Wallow around in their filth and scat”
The students suddenly felt rats and insects crawling all over them, marking their skin with teeth, claws, and stingers.
“Have fun with all the scratches and bites
You three probably won’t last the night”
“No! Bad rats!” Yellow shook himself to get them off, but they stubbornly refused to let go, as if Bill was silently willing them to attack.
“Pesky bees! I’ve had ENOUGH!” Duck broke free from the swarm that held him and made a grab at Bill, catching onto a loose thread.
Bill’s eyes widened in fear as he realized what was about to happen. “Please, I was just trying to teach-”
Duck didn’t let him finish. He pulled the thread, undoing the stitch in Bill’s side and spilling out his contents, which turned out to be a load of gold coins.
“But… you’re not supposed to…” Bill weakly stammered out, but it was too late for him. He fell over as the money and life drained from him, and finally died as the last coin was emptied out.
“Hey, look at all this money!” exclaimed Duck, not at all concerned about the dead teacher. “We can use it to buy so many bowling balls!”
“Let’s just try to remember what was on our list,” said Red, already making his way toward the alley’s opening.
As the other two followed behind him, Bill’s corpse lay still. A rat came and gnawed at it a little, and in that moment there was a rustle of movement from the deflated bag. Bill had just enough life left to utter these final words:
“They can’t just steal my money… not after I lost it all before… please… give it back again… I did what you told me to…”
Then he was gone, at least for now.