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John is not supposed to be in The Dealers chandelier. Slight addendum, John was not, is not, and will not ever be allowed to even touch anything under the possession of The Dealers marked at a value of over 5 American dollars much less turn it into a makeshift hammock. Unfortunately the rules of “John basketball” care very little for The Dealers trinket insurance.
A meer 16 feet separated the dizzy human from the unyielding yellow glass eyes.
“Uh… hi-“
“Get down,”
Various crystals, each probably worth more than John could make in a single paycheck, made their unwilling home in his ass cheeks. And arms. And back. And legs. And-
“H-how? Do you have a lad-“
“Hurry,” long (and expensive) feathers twirled with an unforgiving finality as The Dealer turned his back to the problem.
John fumbled with all the grace of a newborn giraffe with a people-pleasing-problem, caught in a million dollar net. The chandelier groaned in unison with its owner as John scrambled about. A small crack, and then a shriek, followed by the sound of 130lbs of sad human flesh hitting the floor, and The Dealer sighed again.
Perhaps if today were a different day, or if he were a different man, or if the idiot had been a different idiot, he would have turned back around and given a firm and concise lecture about the importance of leaving his shit the fuck alone, but as it was he simply did not have the time nor the fucks to give. Gloved hands moved swiftly and silently. A quiet note here, a pin number there, and suddenly a door grand enough to rival the pearly gates was opening up.
Heavy mechanical doors, seemingly taller than the ceiling pulled apart laboriously. John watched in awe as The Dealer became a Silhouette against the glowing insides, smoke slipping past them on either side, and the smell of well kept linen dominated the room. As the doors came to a halt the light dimmed slightly to reveal a massive interconnected maze of clothes and outfits being moved around metal beams with a mechanical meticulousness.
The Dealer glanced over his shoulder, “If-“
“JESUS CHRIST THATS-“
“…”
“Sorry,”
“Nevermind,” The Dealer un-glanced over his shoulder and John scrambled to his feet.
“No please I’m sorry what was it? Was it something important? It was something important wasn’t it?!” John trailed behind The Dealer, a near perfect depiction of a puppy begging for its masters forgiveness.
Never one for yappy dogs The Dealer simply entered in a code to his pin pad and fixed his attention on the giant closet machine as it whirred back to life.
Within moments a hanger was slid down a snake like metal beam and presented to the masked man. A clear dress bag sat protectively over a deep royal blue shirt with vibrant red and brown wooden beads draping off the shoulders and wrists. It looked as though a pair of black slacks were folded up inside the shirt as well, though if there was any detail on those it couldn’t be seen from the bag.
John chewed his lip as The Dealer took the strange change of dress and folded it over his arm. “Can… can I ask-“
Both heads snapped at the sound of banging on the walls. Loud, demanding, assertive banging coming from right outside the door to the room. John held his breath and The Dealer put a precautionary hand to his pistol. In the next moment the doors wished open, and the unaccompanied lower half of the ship's resident klykolian managed a whole 5 steps in before collapsing.
“Buenos Dias currs and cucks,” Timmy’s upper half called from a portal in the ceiling.
Perhaps on purpose, perhaps on accident, the upper half fell through the portal and splatter on the floor.
‘With any luck this would kill him,’ the two secretly thought in unison.
The upper half of Timmy log rolled across the floor with a series of wet flops and squelches, creating a lovely work of sticky teal art in The Dealers white shag carpet.
“Oh hey dress up time!” Timmy grinned, rejoining himself at the waist and standing to face the others. ”This could be-“
The doors of the closet slammed shut instantly.
“Doors mean nothing to me,” Timmy threatened, or maybe reminded? John glanced at the carpet. No, that was definitely a threat.
“We’re going to Yutobei today,” The Dealer announced a half decibel louder than his usual speaking tone. Though unpredictable, and easily fueled by the need to be a Contrarian little shit, one of the best ways to keep Timmy out of something was to remove it from sight and plow blindly ahead onto the next thing.
“Yutobei?! The super high tech 1st world planet with the really cool bugs?!” Timmy rushed over and scooped The Dealer up by the armpits. “That’s so awesome!! This way I can-“ The Dealer snapped his fingers and 36 laxer guns vaporized Timmy’s head.
John watched wide eyed in horror as his decapitated captor slowly tipped over and crashed into the floor.
Free from the insulting grasp of the annoyingly tall alien The Dealer made a swift exit to a fortified changing room.
John continued to stare unblinkingly as Timmy’s head began to reform. Being vaporized had apparently not been enough to stop him from talking as the throat kept making garbled sounds, eventually turning into the lower jaw and tongue making incomprehensible sounds.
“-but that’s just the little ones, which if you ask me are like a pie and a half. You like pie don’t you john?” Timmy’s newly reformed eyes managed to actually look at John for all of half a second before roaming around indiscriminately again.
John just continued to stare, his tongue felt too heavy and his brain too full of white noise to bother giving the ridiculous question and answer. Not that Timmy minded as he had already moved on to ripping chunks out of the carpet and shoving them up his nostrils.
A loud bang shocked John out of his trance as The Dealer re-emerged now dressed for the occasion. With the outfit fully put together John could see the way the three tiers of beads draped over the chest and back, connecting at the shoulders and draping down to the wrists, with a matching set acting as a belt. The shirt was light and billowy with a neckline cut low enough if The Dealer moved too much his gun holster straps could be seen. His ever present body suit kept everything to the imagination, though the black pants were tight enough they seemed to be working against the body suit. Luckily the shirt came down far enough to protect John from having to relive whatever feelings he had watching “The Labyrinth” for the first time at age 14.
With no less than a verbally spoken, “acho,” Timmy sneezed a wad of snotty carpet fibers onto John’s pant leg.
~~
Once when John was in 6th grade, his class had taken a trip to a farm. In a fit of remarkably horrible timing the trip happened to fall right after a flash flood. Not only had there been excessive amounts of mud and feces, but one of the farm animals had actually died at the start of the flood and not been found until the day of the trip.
All in all it was still better than the village John now stood in.
Yutobei was mostly water. Oceans covered most of the planet's surface and even the parts that weren’t water still had a lot of moisture. The air was dense and heavy, a light sheen of condensation shimmered on all the vegetation, and the ground was unsalvageable muck.
Well at least it seemed unsalvageable to John. There was no way a human could live here. He shouldn’t even be here. But the planet's sapien species seemed to move just fine through their environment. The people of Yutobei -who bore a resemblance to humanoid fish people from a 1960’s earth horror movie- had made their homes by carving out hollows in the colossal trees forming a ring around them. Mesh doors and windows could be seen at various different levels with various inhabitants effortlessly scaling the bark. More and more were popping out to investigate the commotion.
Timmy had portaled them down to the planet's surface ahead of The Dealer who’d been dead set on taking the mini cruiser. At least John hoped this was the right planet. It didn’t really seem like the “super high tech first world planet” Timmy had described it as. John hugged his sweater tighter and glanced around. It really was like the flooded farm he’d seen years ago. Timmy was ass deep in mud wrestling a livestock animal of some kind while various adult towns folk tried to get him off. The children of the town made themselves useful by very literally poking John with sticks and asking him menial questions. He tried to answer politely but The Dealer had warned him about giving out information for free, and decidedly kept quiet for some questions.
“Do you know how to play double double bubble muddle?”
“No,”
“Are you a full grown alien?”
“Yes,”
“What planet are you from?”
“Mm…”
“Are you a boy, a girl or a tor?”
“Ah what?”
“Do you know him?” One of the sticks pointed upwards at the descending mini cruiser. One of the men trying to wrangle Timmy caught sight of it and broke away from the group.
The cruiser lowered slowly and carefully through the scarce openings the trees provided. The mud and muck ripped slightly as it came to a stop, still hovering about 10 feet off the ground. The doors to the cruiser slid open with a miniature version of the fan fair The Dealers closet door had had. Only this time John knew from experience that they didn’t normally do that.
The man from before approached cautiously, as one by one a set of hovering platforms created a staircase. The Dealer descended nearly menacingly, the slight heel of his boots clicked cleanly on the steps, Monroe just a breath behind him.
“The Dealer, Lord of trade, and Master of procuration, please allow me to welcome you to Nequite village of Yutobei,” the man bowed his head slightly and blew on his open palm as either a gesture of good faith or a respectful greeting. The Dealer stood as proudly as he could with his feet slowly sinking into the muck, and returned the gesture.
“My name is Batyobi,” the man continued. “I called you here after hearing the men of the city sing praise of your god-like skills. My village needs help Master, please say you’ll help us.”
The Dealer held like a statue in the face of the praise. Not only did flattery not get anyone any more favorable with The Dealer, it in fact had the opposite effect by making them more suspicious in his eyes.
“Yes, in your request you wrote of how your village needs the teeth of a sea creature for quote, ‘many vital aspects of life’, and how you were quote, ‘willing to pay anything for it’,” his tone became cold as he stared down at his client. “Do you understand the gravity of that offer?”
“Yes sir I do,” Batyobi firmly held The Dealers blank gaze, though his head was not held high.
“I could ask for your life,”
“I would give up my heart beating, bleeding or dry if it meant helping my village. The master city of Yutobei has already left us to rot, at least now my suffering would be worth something!”
Unbeknownst to anyone aside from Monroe, The Dealers eyes rolled in his head. Sapien Xenomorph trafficking was such a chore to him, and these brave heroic types keep trying to trade their lives to him.
“Look at me, you practically shot a signed, blank check into the middle of the slums with an offer like that. The last thing I was in recompense for this trivial job is your Naïve masochistic life. Consider yourself lucky and do not ever offer ‘anything’ as payment to anyone ever again.” Only then did Batyobi falter in the wake of The Dealers' surprise scolding.
“Wha-, well then… what do… you want?”
“I want what you happened to grab while you were in the city,”
“That’s-“
“Your original request was for one or two teeth, but given my research of the creature you described it is well within my capabilities to being you more than ten,”
One of the children beside John yelled out “TEN WHOLE TEETH!! Baba you’d better take that deal!!”
Batyobi smiled softly at the youngster before turning back to The Dealer. “Yes of course. I did say anything after all. AH GEQUE!” He turned and called to another adult who was a part of the crowd trying to wrangle Timmy and the stolen livestock out of a tree. “Where did you put the travel packs?” The new adult sighed and broke off from the group to run inside one of the houses.
“Do you know why we’d need a travel pack?” Timmy asked rhetorically as he seemingly teleported behind John. Muddy hands placed firmly on his shoulders, excitedly shook the human back and forth. “Because Yutobei’s trees grow too tall and dense for our stuff to move through or around or up or down or under,”
John watched as The Dealer and Monroe each took a pack that was handed to them. With any luck the trip through the nightmare trees wouldn’t be as muddy as the village.
~~
It was worse.
The roots of the trees jutted out of the ground as wide as a paved road but as winding as a roller coaster, and while the village had been near a small clearing, the rest of the forest was so dense the smell of the muck was trapped in and the light trapped out.
The four of them could have been the cast of a sitcom with how wildly differently they liked along. The Dealer and Monroe walked with a well honed wilderness expertise that would’ve put Bear Grylls to shame. Timmy was switching back and forth between trying to swim through the mud and doing his best impression of a black out drunk Tarzan. Meanwhile John’s movements were more comparable to Ariel’s first few seconds with legs.
Every few seconds either Timmy would throw a wad of mud at him, or a giant bug would wiz past him, or Timmy would bump him as he ran past, or little animals would scurry near his feet, or his own feet would slip in his wet shoes! But The Dealer and Monroe were the ones with the lights on their backpacks and if he didn’t stick close enough to them he’d be left in the dark.
“Is- there- anyway… you could slow down?” He panted.
Monroe tapped his shoulder and then tapped a rolled up hunk of cloth in their backpacks. [Know what this is?]
“Ah… sleeping bag?”
“I trust you do not want to be in a situation where we have to use it.” The Dealer said plainly, not a break in the beat of his pace.
The root they were walking on curved back down into the ground with a series of slim metal rods poking out spaced just far enough apart that an average size person could scale them if they were careful.
A single second passed between The Dealer and Monroe before the skull headed man began descending the bars. The Dealer instead tapped the heels of his shoes to deploy the hidden knives and pulled a matching set of daggers from their unseen sheaths, repeatedly stabbing the tree with each limb as he made his own way down.
[Show off!]
The Dealer flipped him off.
Meanwhile John’s brain was swimming in abject horror. Yeah sure The Dealer would sooner die than trust someone else’s tools over his own but even still how could he be so confident in his own tools that he’d put his life in his hands like that?! The knives had been hidden in the souls of his shoes; they couldn’t be very thick or strong. What if they broke? And Monroe, while he was immortal and had less to worry about, he could still feel pain and take damage that was too great for his body to heal from, and here he was trusting metal rods that couldn’t be more that half an inch thick and had been rotting away in the woods for god knows how long! Not to mention the fact that they were at least 50 feet away from the ground, no no it was definitely closer to 70 or 75 feet, maybe even 90 if he looked at it right.
John backed away from the edge, hands gripping at the chest of his sweater. There’s no way that he was getting down this, not in one piece anyway. His heart hammered uncontrollably under his hands, pounding away, getting louder and louder, closer and closer. … and sounding suspiciously like flip flops.
Timmy crashed into John like a quarterback on a McChicken. Falling over the edge of the root, the two of them rocketed past the two older men a blur of screaming chaos. Timmy held John tight against his chest as they crashed into the mud, accidentally taking the brunt of the impact as the wet soil swallowed them whole.
Dark. Dark and cold. Dark and cold and NO FUCKING AIR. John flailed his limbs, kicking off Timmy’s chest and desperately reaching for the surface. His head broke out with a gasp right as the older men elegantly touched down on a rock next to them. Timmy popped up next to John mockingly mimicking his gasping for air.
“You dick I could have died!” John reflexively lobbed a hunk of muck at Timmy, he would have felt bad for aiming better than he wanted to and hitting him in the face, if Timmy hadn’t caught the mud in his mouth and fountain spit it back through his teeth at John. “I wanna go home,” he sighed defeatedly, mud/spit rained down his head.
The human turned and wadded over to the rock. “I wanna go home, take a shower, take another shower, give my cloths a shower, wash them, get new clothes, crawl into bed-“ John continued to mumble to himself as he climbed up the rock, Monroe stretched his mostly clean white pant leg between the pristine Dealer and the mud creature John had been reduced to. Once fully on the rock John flopped on his back and whined.
The Dealer turned heel and continued on with Monroe right behind. John contemplated his options. Timmy made dolphin noises and breached through the mud. John rose up on weighted limbs and followed after the first two.
Truthfully this adventure wasn’t even a particularly stressful one, at least not thus far, yet John was still struggling. Monroe watched their weakest companion vaguely through his thermal senses as they continued hopping from rock to rock to root in the forest. It struck his curiosity how unobservant the human could be.
In the midst of his ponderings he found himself throwing his hiking staff down to catch the human from tripping over a small rock.
“Shit, thanks,” John mumbled graciously. He took the discarded staff and used it to sweep the mud in front of him for rocks.
He’d been abducted by Timmy nearly 2 months ago and yet he still hadn’t really picked up on any survival skills. Monroe had slept with humans before, he knew a thing or two about them, and the way John’s brain seemed to have a trigger finger for playing possum was alarmingly strange. Humans were extremophiles, commonly known for their adaptability, but John seemed to almost be choosing to not learn.
From somewhere behind him he felt John trip and eat shit.
“Ah crap crap crap, my shoe came off!” He poked down in the mud to find it. His fingers brushed against something hard and when he pulled up, unearthed the mummified remains of an animal skull.
The Dealer and Monroe were overtaken for a moment as the perpetually anxious human ran screaming past them.
Soon the dark forest began to get darker.
“Oh god I hope it’s not about to rain,” John whined.
[Why not? You’d get a little natural shower?] Monroe teased.
“Because knowing my luck and this waterlogged planet it’d turn into a flash flood and then I’d actually drown. Swept away by the current, knocked unconscious by hitting a tree and just drown.”
[What a way to go.]
“We might need to start preparing for that very scenario, sounds like rain is headed our way.”
“What?”
[That's not rain,]
“WHAT?”
Silence consumed the three as they listened intently to the white noise steadily growing in volume. John glanced around them. Timmy was missing. Two pairs of eyes -and whatever the fuck Monroe had going on- peered into the inky black of the woods behind them.
[Its wings!] Monroe shouted.
Suddenly Timmy burst forth riding on the back of what could have been a rhinoceros beetle if beetles weren’t the size of minivans.
“THE BRIDE OF THE BUTT OF THE COWBOY RISES!!”
A swarm, or maybe more accurately a flying stampede rushed towards them like a typhoon. Hundreds of thousands of bugs of various sizes made an impenetrable wall speeding towards them, a storm of oncoming disaster. Within seconds the three were swept up in the swarm, nothing more than debris in the chaos. John’s senses became a blur of nothing but spindly haired legs and a deafening buzzing. Somehow Timmy’s grito could be heard distantly over the noise.
The last thought that passed through John’s mind before his brain assumed the worst and went blank was; I think I would have preferred the flood.
Seconds later the forest cleared.
John's consciousness clicked back into place as Monroe caught the back of his shirt and pulled him onto the back of a giant flower mantis. At the edge of a forest was a steep cliff scape, and for a brief moment John could see the endless horizon, a blue ocean misting and steaming up into a sky that had just started to turn orange, and then the bugs began to dive. Swiftly and with the lack of concern only a brain dead animal could have, they plunged. John held tight to Monroe till he lost feeling in his hands. Timmy’s beetle crashed head first into the waves, the Goliath shook its rider off and labored with wet wings back to its natural environment. The Dealer grabbed their bug by its horns and pulled back hard, somehow successfully getting the creature to pull up and land on the narrow sandy bank.
The Dealer and Monroe dismounted and John fell off, temporarily reduced to the status of boneless flesh bag.
Timmy laughed carelessly as The Dealer checked their inventory. They’d lost one of their backpacks in the chaos but had enough things to keep him from going off on their assailant.
Sea water dripped down on John, “you’re covered in mud,” Timmy commented.
“I hate you,”
“Do you want to be muddy?”
[You should probably rinse off in the ocean before we get on the boat,] Monroe noted.
“I can’t, what if the water has parasites in it, or man eating sand worms,” his voice was little more than tissue paper in the wind. ”I can’t survive a hurricane of bugs only to be done in by alien water.”
Monroe kicked him into the ocean, and Timmy dragged him further out to sea.
“IF THE PARASITES AND THE WORMS DON'T KILL ME YOU CERTAINLY WILL! Ah fuck my other shoe!!” John watched helplessly as his left shoe was caught in the current and taken out to sea.
“Timmy,” The Dealer called.
“Yeah?”
“How would you like to ride the board?” The Dealer pulled one of Raz’s devices out of his backpack.
“Today is not Wednesday, nor is Aquarius in its whore era,”
“Wanna get eaten by a giant sea monster?”
“HELL YEAH!!”
“I wanna go home,” John breathed.
Monroe had made himself useful by heading down the short beach and pushing the local fishing boat out from behind its hiding place. A modest engine powered vessel, that had clearly seen better days but was without question still in good working condition.
John’s limp, albeit now mud free, body was thrown over Timmy’s shoulder as the three hopped in the boat and started the engine. The item The Dealer had produced received a couple precise clicks and expanded into an older model of the hoverboard he himself used from time to time.
“Are we gonna bait the big one, the little one, or the supersized little one?” Timmy asked as they sped away from the shoreline.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” The Dealer said plainly, handing over the board.
“Can I bring My-John?” John’s barely conscious body lay on the floor, appreciating how smooth the waves were. He just needed a minute to catch his breath, and if that minute could last three years that would be great.
“You can bring the butt bride of the cowboy for all I care,” The Dealer quoted Timmy’s poorly translated colloquialism.
“No,” he said suspiciously, “Our day in the sun is nighttime now,”
“… Get on the hoverboard,”
“Sayless sergeant mess,” Timmy gave a salute with his middle finger and jumped over the side of the boat.
The hoverboard bounced slightly as it registered the nearby water. The klykolian used the wake to slide down the boat till he was parallel with his human.
“John John John John John!!”
“No!” With no warning Timmy opened a portal under his human and right above his arms. John’s bare feet hit the rough grip tape of the board at about the same moment he realized they were now much too far away from shore for him to swim back. “No no no NO NO!! TIMMY timmy I can’t- I can’t be on the board with you, something’s gonna eat me and I don’t come back from being eaten like you do you have to put me back on the boat. Timmy!”
His arms wrapped in a death grip around Timmy’s lith waist, his face pressed flat against the others chest as he nervously watched the suspiciously calm water they hovered above. The board was one thing, it operated on the same movement mechanics as a motorized skateboard which John had grown familiar with in his years before owning a car. The water was also fine on its own, his childhood was filled with enough swimming to know he wouldn’t drown. But he still had NO IDEA WHAT WAS IN THE WATER!
Timmy ignored his pleas to get back on the boat and instead leaned forward and sped ahead of The Dealer and Monroe. They rode up until they were a good several yards from the tip of the boat and then slowed down to hold pace with it. Timmy rocked them side to side idly and hummed to himself, he had one hand on John’s back and the other extended to the side to keep balance.
What if there was a giant leviathan in the water just inches below them? What if this had been the villagers' plan all along? They were sacrifices to some fucked up ocean god! What if there wasn’t a big sea monster but thousands of little piranha like creatures that ate them torturously slowly? What if the motors on their vehicles died and they got stuck out here and slowly starved to death? Who knows maybe the sea air had toxins in it and even if they managed to live through today he’d slowly succumb to a poison that gave him super mega brain cancer!!
The hand on John’s back began to pat him in beat with Timmy’s humming. His ear was pressed close enough to the cold alien that even with the noise of the motor and the ocean he could hear that it was the same speed as Timmy’s heartbeat. His heart was always eerily slow.
Timmy took a deep breath, his nostrils flared to take in the salty smell, and his chest expanded enough to forcibly loosen John’s grip.
“Ok, no more stomach hugging,” Suddenly Timmy was grabbing him by the shoulders and flipping him around.
“What?! No! Timmy! I-!” The hand that had been on his back now rested on his chest, still patting as Timmy carelessly resumed humming, effectively trapping John against him.
In this new position he had to put more effort into balancing. He tried to concentrate and remember the feeling of riding his skateboard. His bare feet pressed against the grip tape, they were close enough to the water that little drops would sometimes hit his feet, and the sea produced a thin mist that tickled his ankles.
It almost looked like clouds. In fact as John looked out on the horizon he realized he couldn’t tell the difference between the sea and the sky. A deep rich orange color surrounded them on all sides with faint splashes of yellow and red on some clouds that were higher or lower on the horizon. Something in these alien clouds must have refracted light because they almost seemed to glitter.
Wind whipped John’s hair behind him and chilled his face. Timmy took another breath and this time John did the same. He smelled the salt. Memories of a family vacation that he’d spent primarily inside rested in the back of his mind. He licked his lips. Salty.
Distantly he could hear the labored rumbling of the Yutobein boat, and the much more polite hum of the hoverboard under him. Timmy’s humming turned into wordless singing for a moment before going back to humming, never once louder or softer than the white noise of the ocean and the bubbling sound beneath them.
Wait.
Just barely visible through the mist were huge bubbles rising to the top. John held fast to the hand on his chest and threw their weight forward causing the hoverboard to rev and shoot ahead. Just barely missing its prey, the leviathan breached the water like an atomic bomb. John and Timmy were thrown from the hoverboard, knocked high in the air as the creature rose from the water. John fell helpless and screaming down the back of the beast, missing dangerous fins and spines through nothing but sheer dumb luck. A cold hand on his wrist, Timmy had managed to grab the board and pulled John around and back on it. They surfed down the back of the creature as it began to fall back into the water.
“I guess that’s the supersized little one,” The Dealer said calmly. Not what they’d been expecting, but it was nothing a little nuke couldn’t handle. As quick as a slap to the wrist The Dealer pulled out his FIM-92 stinger and fired it at the sinking behemoth. The boat jolted backwards in the recoil for a moment before Monroe revved the engine and began to circle around it. Three more bullets were waisted at various points around the creature, each time exploding with all the fanfare and none of the results.
The hoverboard landed back on the water, the surf far from the calm ride it had been moments ago. Waves threaten to knock them off the board again as John clung to Timmy’s back, and the beast shrieked at the explosions assaulting its sides. Timmy used a wave to make a sharp turn and head back around the monster full speed.
“Hell yeah! Now THAT'S a cowboy butt bride!”
“AAAAAAAAAAAWHATTHEFUCK!!!”
Timmy got the hover board to zip past the left side of the creature and with two fingers in his mouth managed to mimic the shriek it gave earlier.
The Dealer watched as the creature turned its attention from them to Timmy. “Convenient,” giving him just enough time to pull out the mini nuke -a weapon he hadn’t planned on using today but he’d sooner die than show up to a fight out gunned- and start the countdown.
And start the countdown.
He hit the button a third time. Still nothing. “Less convenient,” instead he pulled a bazooka larger than his body out of the side pocket of the travel backpack.
Another explosion hit the creature knocking it to its side, but just like the stinger it didn’t seem to do much damage. Between the boat, waves, and thrashing of the creature there was too much movement to effectively aim as well as he’d like to and the outside of the body was annoyingly well protected.
Suddenly his backpack was gone.
“Let’s see what we can play with?” Timmy rifled around in the main body of the bag tossing knives and pistols and bait over his shoulder and into the water. “Here we go!” A flare gun and a bear tranquilizer. The rest of the backpack was tossed in the ocean as Timmy swerved around again heading straight at the beast dual wielding his useless weapons.
“I’m gonna kill him,” The Dealer watched as his most chaotic employee sprinted for the jaws of death. Next to him the mini nuke chimed in alert that it had started the countdown.
The beast shrieked at Timmy, jaws open wide as he sped towards it.
“WELCOME TO THE BLACK PARADE MOTHER FUCKER!!” He threw the flare and the tranqu and managed to miss the creature entirely.
“FIRE IN THE HOLE!” The Dealer's voice rang out from behind them. The creature had held still enough waiting for its suicidal snack that The Dealer had a straight shot at its waiting maw.
The orange sky was overtaken in a blinding white. Ringing consumed everyone’s ears as the shockwave sent John and Timmy flying off the board. Fishy flesh scattered and rained down on The Dealer and Monroe. Now to hope the teeth hadn’t been damaged.
—-
“Yes Yutobei has been the home to some of the universe's most prolific technological advancements, but what many people don’t know is how beautiful our beaches are!” A tour guide with a smile bigger than their face spoke over the intercom of a beach car. “If you look to your right you’ll see a memorial plaque to Guitage Gul, the project leader behind the terraforming it took to ethically expand this beach for all you lovely visitors. And if you look to your right you’ll see… someone who had a little too much fun at our every-hour-is-happy-hour bar ah-ha-ha-ha.”
John's lifeless body washed up on the artificially colored sand.
Behind him the hum of The Dealers boat rolled in from the sunset, Timmy strapped to the front like an ugly mermaid figurehead.
“Wake up driftwood,” a solid food to John's side pulled a groan out of him. The Dealer Monroe and Timmy stood imposingly over him, arms ladened with shark like teeth each wider than their shoulders. “You gotta pull your weight,”
“I wanna go home,”
—-
There were many parts of his job that irritated The Dealer and very few that brought him joy. However, the feeling of strolling through the village with 5 times the original promised amount of product, hundreds of shocked and astonished eyes watching him walk up to the clients door, that feeling never got old.
Batyobi ran out to meet them, disbelief painted on his face.
“These are- so much bigger than expected. These must be from the ocean mother!” A watery smile overtook him. “‘How wonderful of our great and sacred protector to give you so many of her teeth!”
Just a few miles down the road Timmy was shooting the rest of her jaw through a portal to the spaceship like a basketball hoop.
“Master of trade you truly are amazing!”
“Yes, well… yes I am,”