Antarctic Volcano Base Assault Part 5

The thing about springin a goth kid from a cage in the trapped throne room in an underground mall in the Antarctic while a giant penguin made out of penguins fights an ice giantess who recently looked like Amelia Earhart and, before that, a FedEx man is, when you're in that situation, as I myself have been here not too long ago, so I consider myself sorta an expert on the subject, the thing about that situation is, you're prepared to listen to any sorta crazy idea to get yerself out of that situation. It's a lot like if you was on fire for some reason, and the only way that fire could be not fire anymore would be for someone to tinkle on you. You would have someone tinkle on you, would you not? I would. Unless it was this girl from high school that I asked out one day and she told me she would not, in fact, help me out in that situation. I don't know why she imagined that sort of situation. I mean, it's not like you're lookin at people you meet thinkin, "I wonder what I would do if'n this person were on fire and there were no source of water about and I had just drunk a gallon of ice tea." Well, you might, but I sure as heck don't. Point bein, sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you're out of your depth, and you need someone else who is slightly more familiar with that situation to give you a hand, or, if that person from whom you are accepting advice happens to be a penguin, a flipper, and furthermore, if that penguin happens to be crazier than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs and it just so happens that the cat was murdered by living rocking chairs, then you would accept even a shaky flipper to help you out of the situation, which is what we did.

"What kind of idea?" I asked the penguin who had just told us that he had an idea for exit from this situation.

"Before I tell you that," Gunter stated, "I need to clear the air on a couple things."

"Sure," I sat down on a step and prepared myself for a story. Sure we may get killed at any minute here, but there's always time to have a story.

He began, "First, I'm sorry about all the penguins attacking you. We don't know who you are, you could be a good guy. You seem good now, but when we all attacked you, we thought you were evil. But now it appears you're not evil, you're good."

"That's nice to hear," I smiled, "but, just for argument's sake here, couldn't I be some good and some bad?"

"Not to me you couldn't?"

"And why not?"

"Penguins don't think that way," he explained calmly, "we see the world as divided into distinct classes of things without any combination of those things in a middle sort of compromise."

"I don't understand," I explained.

"For a penguin, you're either good or bad. You can't be some good and bad. It's the same with all things. You're big or you're small. You're crazy or you're sane. There is no middle ground for us penguins."

"So you see the world in..." I prompted.

"Stark contrasts," he replied.

"No, no," I tried again, "that thing you said about seeing there being one or another, that's got a name, right?"

"Right..." he didn't seem to fully follow.

"And that name is seeing the world..."

"Binarily?" he tried.

"Pat," interrupted Alistair with a significant look at the battle behind me, "you'd better let it go."

Seein as how the penguins had pretty badly battered the giantess and so she was pulling out orphans, kicking them around, taking their tears, distilling them over a fire and the shooting that straight into her veins with the biggest needle I'd ever seen, I had to agree.

"So, anyway," I continued, "what's happened now that you've decided I'm good?"

"We have to do good to you," he said bluntly. "In this case, it means that we may have to do the greatest good for you."

"Which is...?"

"Self-sacrifice."

I stammered, "I...Self...Uh...Whaddya mean by that?"

"It's ok," he said gently, "you have shown me the light. When we penguins are born, our mothers are away fetching food for us. We don't know this, of course, we just have this feeling deep down that we need our mothers. During that time, Amelia Earhart comes to each and every penguin. She strokes their head and tells them something nice. Then she gives them a little herring paste. The result, my psychologist says, is that we imprint on her. We see her as a mother figure forever, and so we feel protected by her and protective of her."

"Then why help us?" I was genuinely curious by this time.

"Because I see now that's just a trick. She is no real mother to us. She doesn't protect us when we are being kicked through windows like footballs and filled with bear stuffing. She only wanted us there to shield her. I see it now. She is bad. She doesn't love us penguins. She only uses us as a shield, as pawns in her sick games and as tenders of orphans. She makes us work for minimum wage and barely allows us to get the medicine we need to fix the insanity that is a result of her breeding program! Have you ever heard of a penguin working in a mall? Well?!" His voice continually went higher, like a castrato getting kicked in his recent stitches. "I looked it up!! On the internet!!! And you know what I found on the internet?!?!? PORN! You know what else? That penguins don't work in malls! So now," he visibly calmed himself, smoothing down his front, "she must be destroyed and I must be the one to do it."

I was stunned by this show. "I...I don't know what to say."

Alistair helped. He whispered to me, "Ask him how he will destroy her."

So I did. "How will you destroy her?" I asked.

"We will lure her into the pillow room, where the lava is kept at bay the the diaphragm. Once there, we will set off a pile of explosives, rupturing the diaphragm. She has the room rigged that, if the diaphragm is ever broken, the fire doors will close and explosives in the volcano will fire, sending the magma out of the room in what looks like a normal volcanic explosion."

"That sounds like a good plan," I told him, impressed. "But there are two problems. First, how do we lure her to the pillow room and second, where do we get the explosives?"

"I thought of that, for the explosives, we can get them where everyone else in the world buys their cheap weaponry."

"Where's that?" I asked.

"Banana Republic."

I think I looked confused. So he said, "You didn't know that's not just a clever name? They're really a front for all the arms smuggling worldwide."

"Is that so?"

"Actually," he said, "no. Only in this mall do we keep weapons in the Banana Republic. It's really just in case there's ever a large scale invasion. I will go there and get the weapons. You just have to lure Amelia into the pillow room."

"How do we do that?" I asked. His eyes got real big, so I turned around to see the giant penguin made of penguins fall apart like a pool full of water that's lifted up through some sort of psychic power or something, but then the person with the powers gets distracted by something on the tv, and so the pool water just comes apart and falls all over the place. Except in this pool, there was no water; just penguins. They fell and spread all over the floor. Then Amelia, her eyes shining redder than a child's behind after he cut down his dad's favorite tree with his dad's favorite drill, turned towards us.

"All you have to do..." said Gunther slowly, "is RUN!"