Thus I have Heard

Right now, we're zeppelinin our way down to Tallahassee, Florida for the 2008 annual NAMSU (that's National Association of Makin' Stuff Up, for short) Makin Stuff Up Championship, wherein I am to defeat Emelia Earhart in a makin' stuff up challenge. Well, right after Charles told me that, I had to ask him why I needed to defeat Amelia Earhart, who is a national treasure as far as some people are concerned. He explained some mighty strange and terrible things about that Earhart and why I needed to defeat her, and I mean to relay those things to you. I know I've got a reputation for expandin the truth a mite now and then, and maybe you're not gonna believe all that I'm about to tell you, but I'm gonna make an effort to stick as close as possible to Charles Lindbergh's story. If it seems like I'm gettin into some weird territory, don't blame me. So, here goes.

Lindbergh had himself a young son, Charles Jr. You may or may not know some of this, stick with me a bit, and I'll probably wander into some stuff you don't know. It'll be a little like when you go campin and you start out in your driveway, which is stuff you know pretty well, then you drive onto some dirt roads for awhile, eatin some beef jerky and singin along to Freebird or Dust in the Wind or somethin, which is stuff that you still kinda know, but you know less and less as you go on, then you drive into a black hole for some reason, which happened to me once, but that's a different story, and in that black hole, you and light and time get all spun around and you get all stretched out in body and mind and you get super heavy even though you haven't eaten nothin since last night because your sister Frank called you up early in the mornin, before you'd had time to have a decent breakfast, all in a tizzy fit because it's her son's 3rd birthday party that day and she bought white cake and her stupid husband Earl, who you don't think is all that stupid because he always beats you when you're playin cards with him and his buddies from the ammunition plant, bought white frosting and any fool knows that you can't put white frosting on white cake, and your sister Frank has to call you at 5:30 in the mornin to fix it and tells you that you got to go to Wal Mart and buy some strawberry frostin knowin full well that you ain't allowed into the Wal Mart in town anymore because of that thing with the rabies, and then you tell Frank where she can get her frostin, if you catch my drift, and she yells at you and makes you feel bad about some stupid thing you did when you was kids and then you feel guilty so you got to go all the way over to the next town to get to the Wal Mart there but you want to be back in time for the game so you take a shortcut your friend Douggy (who later turned out to be half ninja) told you about, but he didn't warn you that if you turned left instead of right on CR 114, you'd drive yourself into a black hole and so you're spinnin around thinkin about all of this and you don't know what's what anymore but then you're somehow magically spit out of the black hole and somehow you got a tub of strawberry frosting while you was in there. That's like the stuff later that you don't know nothin about, so just pay attention and we'll get there.

So, anyway, like I was sayin, Charles had a son names Charles Jr. Sadly, Charles Jr. disappeared one night. It was all the thing in the news for a long time there. There were all sortsa reports on the Lindbergh baby and the search for the kidnappers and whatnot, but nothin was ever found out. A little later, a coupla people came out and said they was the Lindbergh baby, but that was probably just to inherit the Lindbergh fortune Charles left behind as a decoy after he faked his death. As I said, though, no kidnapper or anything was ever found. Nothin was ever found publicly, that is. Charles used his massive fortune, which was enough to buy, at my nearest estimate, one hundred thousand gold toilets, to buy only a single gold toilet and then make inquiries about the real people responsible for the loss of his son. Charles soon learned that his son was kidnapped by a group of drug selling ninjas, which later turned out to be Clan Platypus, in order to harness the navigational power of his mind. They knew that they could never twist an adult Charles' mind, so they did the next best thing and kidnapped his son, who they planned to raise as one of their own. Upon further investigation, Charles learned that his flying rival, Amelia Earhart, had used her connection to him to break into his house and actually take his son. She was not a ninja, though, just working with them for reasons that will become clear soon. When Charles learned of this, he had her plane "disappeared" as she traveled around the world. That flight was itself a cover for the delivery of a new drug formula that would have been more addictive and potent than any known substance. As he told me, meth is a pale replica of that drug they produced. Fortunately, they were sending the formula to their factories in Siam in the cargo hold of Earhart's plane and so they lost it in the ocean. If that hadn't happened, we could all have been zombies right now.

But then, why was Earhart working with the ninjas, you may ask. I know I sure did but, then again, I am a naturally curious person. I'm not the kind to be deterred by a sign that says "Danger, Black Hole Ahead". If you are not that kind of person either, you may be interested to know. This is a tale that goes back a long ways; a real long ways.

When the Earth was young, and I'm talkin days old here, just after it congealed out of the space dust of the big bang, it was just a small ball of rock hurtlin through the cosmos at billions of miles an hour. It had yet to be caught in the gravity of our sun because our sun had yet to form. So, there's this little ball of rock, no air, no trees, no nothin, shootin through space faster'n you can shake a stick at. You with me? That little rock, which was to become our Earth, was covered in ice and was ruled by the Ice Giants. No one knows where the Ice Giants came from, this bein only days after the Big Bang, but the fact is that they were there, wanderin on this little rock of ice. Now, these giants had themselves a king named Ymir. Ymir was a good ruler, he always made sure his giants had enough ice and rock, which is what Ice Giants love best, and found ways to entertain them during the long, cold nights of the early universe. Interestingly, he invented the games of Cribbage and Risk during those times, because the giants needed games that would fill up their time, and those two games can really do the trick.

The giants lived in relative peace, that is, just the occasional scuffle when someone cheated at a game, and happiness for a couple of million years as the stars and suns formed around them. In time, though, the rock they were on got trapped in the gravity of a giant red star and their ice began to melt. Now, it's durned near impossible to have ice without ice giants, but they managed to scrap along. Soon, though, their rock began to heat, and the ice started to disappear. At first, they had enough to go around if they rationed it. In a matter of months, though, even rationing couldn't help them. Soon, real fights broke out among the giants, and they weren't even playing games any more. The fights got more and more brutal until, one day, the unthinkable happened. The giant Vafthruthnir picked up a rock and threw it at Surt, but Surt ducked and the rock hit Ymir in the head, killing him. This is the origin of the phrase "stone dead", which I was surprised to learn. When they saw their leader dead, all the giants armed themselves for war; real war, not Risk war. They also began looking for chemicals and formulas to strengthen themselves. Ymir's wife, Imla, stayed out of the fighting proper, but encouraged the giants to kill each other with a horrendous array of weapons. She found, that when a giant was killed, their children would automatically run to her, she being the only giantess, and they would cry. When this first happened, one of their tears crossed her lips, and she felt the strength that came from it. She bided her time, manipulating the giants and becoming strong off the tears of orphans.

When the battle was finally over, only two adult giants remained, Vafthruthnir and Imla. Vafthruthnir took it into his head to have Imla as a bride, not knowing that she was stronger than he. When he grabbed her to carry her into a cave, as was giant courtesy, she tore off him arm, beat him with it and then ripped him in half. Then she ripped the halves in half. Then, she did that again. She kept doing that until Vafthruthnir was nothing but mush, which she then mixed into the porridge of Vafthruthnir's children. After they ate the porridge, she told them what she had done. They cried and wailed, and she drank their sweet, sweet tears.

As the giant children grew, so did Imla's cruelty. She would promise the children puppies, which all children love, even children who were around before puppies. Then she would deliver a box, wrapped up nice as you please. The children would get excited and tear into the box finding not puppies inside, but razor blades. Sometimes there would actually be a puppy in the razor blades, which was even worse.

I'm gonna interrupt myself here for a second. I know this sounds like some sorta wild tall tale that Pat's just makin up, which is somewhat likely given that, on an average day, I spin enough yarns to make sweaters for all the penguins in Antarctica. I just want to assure y'all that ain't the case, though. This is all from the mouth of Charles Lindbergh, I swear on my aunt Rita's remaining leg.

Imla survived through the history of the world. As the Earth grew older, she found more ways to gain power and strength, but she always preferred orphan's tears. When the dinosaurs were around, she called down a comet in order to orphan millions of children. She took used an army that she had enslaved to gather the tears and store them in a cave. She gorged off those tears, growing fat as the life on Earth recovered. She was responsible for the Fall of Rome, for Attila the Hun and for the fall of the Qin dynasty. Through it all, she harvested and drank the tears of the little children. In the 13th century, she had an entire crusade full of children kidnapped and their parents killed. She hung the children by their ankles and let the tears drip on her as she rolled and laughed for over 10 years.

During this time, Imla began to hear of Clan Platypus and their desire to make zombies out of drug addicts. She met with their leaders and they formed an alliance. She would help them turn more and more people into zombies as long as they let her harvest the orphan's tears. They couldn't say no to the queen of the Ice Giants. Even ninjas know that killin one of them things is tougher than gettin rid of a hornet's nest usin a stinky sock on a long pole. So, they made themselves an alliance, she transformed herself into an aviator and changed her name from Imla to Amelia. The rest, I guess, is history.

Course, now all I gotta do is make up stuff better than a woman who's older than the sun and has prolly seen more than a fly in a house of mirrors. But I'm pretty sure I can do it.