Creation of the Sqimonk

"Here's that drink," I said as I put the moonshine in front of Alastair.

"Woah," he said, "what took you so long? Did you have to grow, harvest and distill the grain?"

"As a matter of fact," I told him, "yes, I grew, harvested and distilled the grain you are now drinking. And for your information, it is all organic."

"Great," he responded, "I hate that non-carbon-based liquor. It tastes like metal."

I never knew that super-intelligent animal hybrids could be such jerks when they were drunk. I told him, "All right, smartass, just continue your story." And he did.

With their distribution network in place, Clan Platypus began to experiment with different mind-altering drugs. Their goal was to have a drug that turned people into mindless zombies who would do anything for the drug without turning them into lazy, lethargic opium addicts. In the modern world, they tried several things and discarded them. In the '60s, they tried to distribute hallucinogens to the masses. They became pretty popular and Clan Platypus thought they'd have the solution, but then all of the people taking the drugs moved to communes or to India to seek spiritual enlightenment and, when both of those failed, returned to normal society with a greater fervor than had been seen before. They became obsessed with success and money and were really some of the greediest people the Clan had seen since the Heike.

After that, they journeyed to South America and found the coca plant. They saw that the natives chewed the leaves of this plant and were able to work all day without complaint. They did some work refining this and helped spread cocaine to people in the '80s. Sadly, though, they found cocaine did not make people subservient. In fact, it really just turned them into a bunch of violent douche bags. One group continued to try to refine this method and they came up with Crack cocaine, which was more addictive but made people into even more violent douche bags.
Finally, they thought it was time to start again from scratch. They assembled everything they had learned from previous experiments and attempted to make a drug that would have the hallucinogenic properties of LSD without the unfortunate "commune effect", the addictiveness of opium without the laziness and the energy of cocaine and crack without the douche baggery.
They worked for years on their new super drug and eventually discovered Crystal Meth. They first began to spread it in the rural areas so they could capture people and test the drug's effects. After some experimenting, they found that the drug turned people into mindless zombies who worked hard and didn't get into fights if another zombie stumbled into them. Finally, they had found the drug to implement their evil plan.

Clan Platypus began spreading meth as much as they could. They had a problem fostered by their early experiments, though. Because they had been careful to keep meth in the rural areas for its early trials, it had gained a reputation as an unsophisticated drug, suitable only for farmers and bumpkins. This was not a serious problem for their world domination plan because most people in the world were farmers and bumpkins and the sophisticated city people could be eliminated easily with a super-army of farmer meth zombies. The reputation as a rural drug was only a problem for their distribution network. In the cities, they could spread their drugs quickly and easily through people standing on street corners and at nice parties. In short, the density of the population was perfectly suited to their goal. However, in the country, people live really, really, REALLY far away from each other. They still have interactions and the idea of the drug can spread, but the distribution of the actual drug became the problem. Clan Platypus didn't want to be running all over all the time trying to sell meth to people in the middle of Iowa or Nebraska. After all, they had begun this plan so long ago so they could STOP working, not so they could work harder.

So they did some experimenting in distribution. They first tried to get the meth zombies to do it for them, but they had made a drug so addictive that the zombies were unable to deliver the packages without taking some of the drugs for themselves. They really lost a lot of zombies that way. They would find them on the side of the road, covered in white powder and, more often than not, dead of an exploded heart. Then they had to clean the zombie up, give him a fake heart, apologize to the customer and give him a little bonus in his new package. It was a managerial nightmare. They tried to make the packaging harder to open, but zombies hopped up on meth can be surprisingly strong. So, they began to work with animals. They came up with the idea of using squirrels pretty early on because squirrels are ubiquitous. There are squirrels in every state and no one would really comment on them. The first trial, though, most of the meth got hidden away in oak trees. They tried training the squirrels for awhile, but it's nearly impossible to train a squirrel, they're pretty dumb. Finally, they began manipulation of the squirrels' genetic code and they created us, the Squimonk.

"Squimonk?" I asked. "That's really a terrible name."

"I know," he replied, "Clan Platypus is terrible at naming things. Take, for example, their base. Most ninja clans have a base called 'Temple of Pain' or 'Decapitation Mountain' or something equally frightening. But Clan Platypus calls their base 'Clan Platypus' Base In Which Evil Plots Are Hatched And Every Tuesday Night Is Karaoke Night'. They're really bad with that sort of stuff."

"I can see that," I said, "if you were created by them, why are you fighting against them now?"

"That," he replied, "is where the story gets interesting..."