Ash me no questions

I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I hates me some shoppin. I hate everything about the shopping experience. I hate drivin all the way over to the Wal-Mart in the next town (which I gotta go to because of my aforementioned troubles). I hate walkin in and havin some guy who looks like an unwrapped mummy and smells like a truck carryin Vick's crashed into a truck carryin cream cheese tries to say hi to one last person before shufflin off this mortal coil. I hate seein roughly eight metric tons of back fat wanderin around stuffed into a half ounce of tank top. I hate how they're always tryin to reorganize everything so it's easier to find. I just wanna scream at Mr. Wal "Hey, doofus! Thing'd be a lot easier to find if ya quit movin 'em all over hither and yon."

A couple months ago, I went to get myself some toothpaste and they had it next to the candy aisle, which I thought was a pretty good lesson for the kids. But then, I went back in there a couple weeks ago and it was almost within reaching distance of the angry tentacle beasts. First, I had to wander all over the store to heck and back to find where it was, then I had to go into the garden center to grab myself a shovel with which to fend off the unwanted touch of them accursed pseudopods. Then, I had to get myself a plastic sandwich bag or a glove or something to pick up the toothpaste so the acid from the tentacle beasts' spit didn't eat right through my hand. I decided to use the sandwich bag. But, just as I was pullin the bag outta the box, this employee came around the corner and started tellin me that I was stealin and I had to buy that whole box of bags now even though I already had about a hundred boxes at home from when Douggy was tryin to make himself a floaty suit for the pool. But that's neither here nor there, just so long as you know I warn't wanderin in there ever intendin to buy me no sandwich bags. But I sure as heck walked out with some. That and they charged me for the tentacle beast that I had to whack in the head with the shovel because he was gettin a mite close to the Crest. And then they had the gall to charge me for the shovel, as if it was my fault that the blade dissolved after it met tentacle beast face. In the end, I went in for toothpaste and came out with a shovel handle, a box of sandwich bags I didn't need and a dead tentacle beast in a plastic bag. In all the excitement, I'd forgotten to buy the toothpaste and so I still ended up brushin my teeth with baking soda for the next week.

I'm just tellin ya all this so that when I say that Haruki's collectin everything on his shoppin list what the Grimoire of Necrography gave him sounds to me like the worst thing that could happen to a guy, you'll be able to keep it in perspective and not go yellin about how he coulda been devoured by a Sarlak or somethin stupid like that. I know that it might be a touch more painful to get digested for a thousand years in the belly of a sand worm, I ain't stupid. But it still wouldn't match the sheer frustration of findin some of the stuff that Hatayama kid had to find to help out his pinball wizard friend.

I mean, sure, the first stuff was easy and he just had to pop on down to the seven-eleven or the eight-twelve or the thirty six-twenty four-thirty six or whatever convenience store they had on his crazy planet. He could just go on down there and pick up all the coffee and gummy worms and actual worms and dried newt's eyes that he needed. Plus he coulda picked himself up a Powerball ticket while he was at it. I know, I know. He was super rich and inherited his dad's crazy big pile of money when his dad ran off, but it's still nice to win somethin once in awhile.

His first big problem was in findin the, ahem, privates of a turtle what had killed a man. He looked all over high and low for that thing. He musta been in and out of a thousand stores and weird medicine shops. He saw enough turtle privates to last a normal person a lifetime, but none were labeled as to whether they'd been attached to a man-killer or not.

He was gettin mighty despondent and started considerin himself a different career path. In that spirit, he bought a self-help book that urged him to "think outside the box" and "solve problems creatively". It was really inspirational. And not in that "Eatin Chicken Soup With Five Maurys on Tuesdays in Heaven" sorta inspirational, but inspirational in that it taught him somethin he didn't know before and inspired him to act. So, he acted. He killed a guy with a turtle, then "harvested" what he needed. Bing, bang, boom. Problem solved.

In this way, Hiroki got himself all but one of the ingredients. Not in the "killin a guy with a turtle" way, mind you, but in a "thinkin creatively" sorta way. His final task was to get a perfectly straight stick, six feet in length, off an ash tree. And it couldn't be no trunk, either, but had to be a genuine branch of the tree. Now, I ain't no horticulturalist but I'm pretty sure that's near well impossible to do. I ain't even totally convinced you could grow yourself a tree with a perfectly straight six foot branch if you really wanted to.

I gotta say, though, until I got mixed up in this whole squirrel versus ninja business, I wasn't what you'd call a great success in life. And I been told that I gave up a lot of stuff to easily but, really, tryin all the time to get yourself a bunch of stuff is a lot harder than pickin up a jar of "I don't care" moonshine and watchin the sun set from your front porch. People say the secret to success is persistence. Well, persistence and inheritin a giant pile of money. So I guess Hiroki had all the ingredients to be successful.

So, he wandered around from planet to planet until he found the biggest durned ash tree in the universe. This thing was, at rough estimate, the size of a million, billion suns. I ain't seen it for myself or nothin, so I'm just goin on word of mouth here, but I'm relatin it as I heard it, so you can choose to believe that about its size or not.

Hiroki came up on this tree and saw these three old women sittin underneath in havin themselves a sewin circle. He politely introduced himself and clarified with them that this was, indeed, an ash tree. To which they responded that they knew durned well who he was and they knew that if he couldn't tell an ash tree from a hole in the ground, then he was about to have a lot more trouble than he realized. He just went on the assumption that these grumpy women weren't gonna tell him a whole lot more and so he might as well just go ahead and start lookin for the straightest branch he could find.

The importance of Pinball

There was young Hiroki Hatayama, sitting in the spooky section of the library, reading by candlelight and fending off the bats that would swoop down and try to bite him on the neck and other exposed skin surfaces. He pored over tome after tome while the lightning continued to strike outside, lighting up the dark corners of the library and making Hiroki promise to himself never to look into some of those corners again.

But it was late, and his eyes were heavy. His head tilted forward just a little, and he dreamt of pinball. Ahh, sweet pinball. I know y'all out there is young and don't recall how important pinball was in the '70s. Let me see if I can spell it out for ya. Pinball was, and I ain't exaggeratin here, really important in the '70s. In fact, I would go so far as to say pinball was really, REALLY important in the '70s. Does that help? I thought it would. I know me and my buddies would go straight to the pizza parlor (where all pinball machines were kept in those days) after a long day of building houses or shaving bears or whatever job we had at the time, and spend hour after hour just watching that silver ball bang and bounce around while the points racked up. Everyone under the age of 60 became a master in the game and, for a time, we considered doing away with elections in the House of Representatives and just selecting people according to pinball high score. I gotta say, after watchin C-Span over the last 20 years, I think we may have been a lot better off if we'd gone with that plan.

Of course, where I was goin with this is that, of course Hiroki was dreamin of pinball. We was all dreamin of pinball at the time. We weren't all bein awakened from out pinball dreams by hearin our name bein whispered, even though we knew we was alone, which is the situation Hiroki found himself in.

"Hiroki..." came the soft, seductive voice, like warm waves crashing over a supermodel.

He awoke with a start, "Wha? Huh? Screw you tilt!! If you weren't aware, this was the most common thing to say when being awoken in the 70s, followed real close by, "Maybe big hair ain't that great," and "Peanut farming rocket scientist!"

Hiroki looked around, but he didn't see nothin or no one who coulda been talkin to him. He was about to dismiss it all as the large peperoni and anchovy he'd had for dinner and go back to sleep, but he heard it again. "Hiroki....Hiroki Hatayama!"

I ain't never been a ninja myself, but I've seen and heard enough about them guys to guess they prolly got themselves a high tolerance for bein creeped out. I mean, a regular guy like me, I see a spider that's got itself a little too much hair and I'm screamin like a schoolgirl and climbin on a chair. Ninjas regularly make pets out of giant, hairy spiders that look like Yetis with eight legs and a dozen eyes, so it takes a whole lot more to creep them out. Hiroki, though, that guy was right creeped out.

He drew his sword and checked that his throwin stars and calipers were where he had left them. Then he dropped back into the shadows like he was taught, becoming part of the background. He slid along the walls like he was made of shadow, scanning around to find the source of the voice. He didn't have to wait long.

"Come on!" The voice yelled out again. "I can still see you, Hiroki! No, don't try to climb that wall. Seriously, I can see you're reaching for a throwing star. Don't bother. Really, I can see you. No, don't pick your...Hey! I didn't need to see that. Wait, no, don't eat tha....EWWWWW! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!"

Hiroki smacked his lips and dropped his eyes. The source of the mysterious voice had penetrated all his ninja camouflage powers and watched him eat that last slice of peperoni from his pocket. So he went for a different tactic.

"Who are you?" He asked.

"I am the Grimoire of Necrography!"

"You're the...Grim...of..." Hiroki stuttered

"That's right!" The voice said. "I'm the Grimoire!"

"A talking book, huh?" asked Hiroki.

"Yep," the voice responded, "a talking book. Isn't that awesome?!"

"Not really," responded the young ninja. "You're, like, the sixth or seventh talking book I've met in this section of the library. Seriously, it's a wonder anyone can get any studying done in this section of the library, between the talking books and the bats and having only candlelight to read from. There is such a thing as a desk lamp, you know!"

"Woah, hey," said the Grimoire. "Ease up there, little tiger. Don't get your panties all in a bunch. I just wanted to help you out a bit. But if you don't want my help..."

"No, wait," said Hiroki. "I'm tired and frustrated. I didn't mean to take it out on you."

"That's ok," replied the book, "I forgive you."

"So, what did you want to help me with?"

"I know you're looking to help your friend Thomas," started the book. "And I have hidden withn my pages the spell that can do just that. The problem is, though, that it's written in a special invisible ink, so you can't read it."

"That doesn't help me much then, does it?" The young ninja was snarky, like all teenagers get around that age.

"Well," said the book, "it could if you'd just shut up and listen. Look, I can't tell you the spell. But, I've seen the spell used before and I can tell you what you need to read the invisible ink."

"Really?!" gushed Hiroki.

"Really," said the book, smugly.

For the next two hours, the Grimoire of Necrography recited to Hiroki a list of ingredients, quantities and where to get them, while the young ninja wrote everything down. As the sun came up, Hiroki, with new hope in his heart thanked the book and turned to leave the library. The book chuckled lowly to itself.

"What was that?" asked Hiroki, turning back.

"Huh? What?" asked the Grimoire, innocently.

"That sound," said Hiroki.

"What sound? I didn't hear anything?" The book was talking a little too fast.

"It sounded like you chuckled lowly to yourself."

"It...what? No, that's...that's.....well, here's the thing. I was thinking of this joke this other book told me."

"Oh yeah?" Hiroki was suspicious. "What was the joke?"

"It was...um...it...you see, it was a book joke, and you just wouldn't get it. But the punch line is 'rifle, rifle'...."

"Uh-huh," nodded Hiroki. "I guess I'll just be going now, shall I?"

"Yep, sure, go ahead and get those ingredients. Have fun." Shouted the book.

As Hiroki turned to leave, he heard the book chuckling to itself again and decided he should find another library.

Teenage Ninja

I guess from the time he organized all the chillins in revolt until he reached adulthood, the ninjas tried to keep Hiroki in isolation as much as they possibly could. But, you know how it is. Boy will be boys. And, sometimes, this particular boy killed all the guards outside his room with increasingly deadly poison and more advanced delivery techniques, and went down to the local pizza parlor to hang out and blow all his allowance at pinball. Naturally, this bein the 70s, he gave deference to this handicapped kid that came in to play. There was just somethin about deaf, dumb and blind kids in the 70s that made them sure play a mean pinball.

Sure, in the end, the Clan Police would always show up in riot gear, shoot tear gas into the building and slaughter the customers as they came out, only sparing the sons of the ruling council, but Hiroki thought his twice weekly pizza and time with other boys his age was worth the time he spent developing his tear gas resistance. Partly because Hiroki loved him some pinball and partly because he built some good connections.

First, he got himself hooked up with the sons of the entire Clan Platypus ruling council. To be fair, he didn't exactly make those connections just at the pizza shop. He actually met the group of thirteen when he first staged his little nursery room takeover. Thirteen of the kids in the nursery at the time were sons of council members and they remembered the impassioned speech Hiroki made against parental oppression. When he later began to show up to the pizza parlor of a Friday night, he became default leader of the group.

Second, he made friends with that deaf, dumb and blind kid. They began hanging out and challenging each other to beat high scores. After some time, they became fast friends. Their bond became much stronger when, during the Friday raids, Hiroki protected the kid from certain death. You know, there's usually two ways to make life-long friends. You can A) meet people who are going to die pretty soon or B) keep people from dying right after you meet them. Either way, you really gotta put yourself in a lot of dangerous situations in order to make real friends. In fact, Douggie and I met one another on a plane full of promising young rock stars one winter as they were traveling across the country to deliver presents to orphans and be reunited with long-lost fathers. Ain't no more dangerous place to be, really, because that plane had a 90% chance of crashing. It never did crash, but still, it was a dangerous situation, so my point remains valid.

Anyway, Hiroki spent a lot of his free time with the deaf, dumb and blind kid (who was named Thomas, by the way), or thinking about how to help him. Because of his isolation and intelligence, Hiroki had mastered the ninja arts by the age of fourteen, and was allowed to pursue any area of study he saw fit. He spent a year or so studying conventional specializations (advanced beheading from a distance, pirate weaknesses and particle physics) and then moved into more esoteric arts. By the time he reached sixteen, he was an avid practitioner of magic. And this wasn't no "oh look at me, I can stand on one foot for a week" kinda crap like what passes for magic nowadays. It wasn't even none of that "make the Statue of Liberty" disappear kinda magic. One, it wasn't just illusion and two, they didn't have no Statue of Liberty. The closest they had was a statue to the Great Narlock, Eater of Hearts. Oddly, both statues had the same inscription on them;

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Except the statue of Narlock finished with, "So I can eat their hearts."

Regardless, Hiroki wasn't makin that statue disappear. He was doin himself some honest-to-goodness, plain, ol fashioned magic. Stuff like turnin sticks into snakes and snakes into ladders. Sure, there's an easier way to turn sticks into ladders (it's called rope), but it ain't as flashy. Hiroki pursued magic for two straight years, giving all of his non-pinball-and-pizza related waking hours to the project. He was really looking for a way to help out his friend Thomas. I don't think Thomas ever really asked for ninja help with his deafness, dumness and blindness. I mean, he seemed to be doin all right with his pinball career. I guess Hiroki never asked or somethin, but he wasn't aware that Thomas had been featured in international news pieces and had optioned his life story to a promising young rock band. I don't know if anything ever came from that, but he'd made about a bajillion dollars off the deal.

Well, as it turns out, magic ain't a great way to cure purely medical problems. I guess it'd be the same thing as if you'd had a demon and you tried gettin rid of it by hosin it down with hand sanitizer. I ain't gonna go into all the sordid details right now but, trust me, that ain't the way to get rid of a demon. But that little Hiroki kept at it. He tried all sortsa different formulas to get rid of Thomas' problems, but nothin seemed to work. So, he ended up doin himself some research in the forbidden part of the library. You know, that section they have in every library that's sealed off with heavy chains, always seems to be wet and dark and, even though the rest of the library's spotless, is always covered in dust and cobwebs? Yeah. That's the section he did his research in.

Now, I don't wanna sound like I'm just tellin ya any ol story here, but there's some things that's always true. If you punch a bull in the nose, he will get mad. If you meet a guy named "Bad, bad" Leroy Brown, you can bet there ain't a man in the whole damn town badder than that guy. And, if you start doin research in the spooky section of the library, you will end up practicin black magic and nearly destroying all life on the planet, even if you do it with the best of intentions. It's just a rule of nature. And that's precisely what the teenage ninja did.

Lemons

Now, I ain't gonna stop fightin them or nothin, but I gotta admit there's one advantage a person could get from bein a ninja. Them guys know when opportunity is knockin at the door with a box of girl scout cookies and a check from Ed McMahon. That is to say, they know how to take the lemons of life and turn it into hard lemonade. This kind of behavior ain't always good for people who isn't ninjas, but I imagine it'd be pretty darn good if you was a ninja yourself. You ain't a ninja, are ya? I don't want no ninjas readin this here thing. It's got all my plans and deepest thoughts in it. I mean, it's got ninja killin words in it. It's full of words so powerful that, if you happened to be a ninja and someone just told you about this here blog, your head would blow like you had stuffed your nose full of m-80s just before you remembered you was allergic to gun powder. So, no ninjas readin this.

Like I says, them ninjas can make some great lemonade out of life lemons, and that Hiroki Hatayama kid represented one heck of a lemon. He was sittin his sad, cryin butt on the ground, just wishin one of his parents would come back and give him some food or help him wipe his nose or whatever it is abandoned kids think about, when a couple of members of Clan Platypus, who was out for a head clearin stroll, happened to spot him. I know, you think I'm bein too hard on the kid. After all, you say, that poor kid was just left by his parents. But I would have to point out that you forgot that I myself went through this same sorta thing. Sure, my parents didn't turn into hideous creatures, and my pa fell through the crust of the Earth instead of giving me an existential dilemma before leaving, but other than that, it was just the same. And let me tell you, when your parents have left you to fend for yourself with nothing to take care of you but ninjas or, in my case, harbor seals, you gotta wipe away the tears, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, and grow the heck up.

It may just be me, but I think that is he hadn't wanted so badly to be coddled, things woulda turned out mighty differently. But things weren't different. Things happened exactly as they happened, which is how things always happen, if you notice. And as it happened, in this case the kings that was happenin was that the ninjas was bein super nice to the cryin kid they found because they remembered him from the family picnic and they knew he was the son of the most famous killer in the universe.

So, the ninjas picked him up, wiped the boogers off his upper lip, offered him some milk and cookies and took him to their underground volcano base. Now, at the time, Clan Platypus was still pretendin to be a friendly, happy corporation that was just tryin to do good for the world. I gather they was tryin to look like a manufacturer of paper plates what could be washed and stored after use. If it were real, it woulda been a pretty solid idea. Sadly, they was actually makin the plates out of plastic that had been made to look like paper because A) it was cheaper and B) they was plannin on slowly replacin the plastic with woven meth. But, at the point in time as these happenins was happenin, they was still just usin plastic. I ain't sayin they was right in doin that or nothin, but, if you ask me, havin a plate made of plastic is a whole heck of a lot better than havin a plate made out of a drug that's gonna keep you up all night and eat your bones. Maybe that's just me. But, because the Clan was still tryin to act like responsible corporate citizens, and so they had themselves a pretty nice Child Care Center inside that volcano base.

It was into this Center that they put little Hiroki while they went to talk to the CEO, Ted, about what they should do. He responded by calling them a couple of idiots and told them they had to run down, collect that kid and make sure they oversaw every aspect of his education and life until he was grown up enough to do it for himself. They agreed that was probably a good idea (mostly because their other option was dying in a pit full of grizzly bears covered in razor blades) and ran themselves right back down to the kiddie room.

When they arrived, they were met with a hail of missiles that had been quickly, but efficiently, carved out of bottles and wooden blocks. The child care technicians had mostly been taken hostage and the security guards were trying to negotiate with the terrorists who had taken over the play room. In the end, Clan security lost eight good men, two of the baby sitters suffered irreversible psychological damage and it was discovered that the mastermind of this situation was none other than the young Hiroki Hatayama. In the fifteen minutes it had taken the ninjas to get yelled at by Ted, Hiroki had organized the children into a well equipped and disciplined army that was attempting to secede from the rest of the company and form their own country with Hatamaya as Great Grand Poobah In Chief.

When they saw this, the ninjas who had picked Hiroki off the beach knew they had something special, but very, very dangerous, like a Christmas package filled with nitroglycerin. They took charge of the situation, removed Hiroki into his own apartments, arranged tutors for him and raised him as if he were their own, very dangerous, son.

Be a goose, Win a goose

I know I may have mentioned this a time or two, and I ain't one to beat a dead horse, but dead people are talkers. They are the chattiest bunch of Chatty McChattersons that ever chatted their way out of the chat factory in Chattanooga. They just go on and on. You'd think that, in their years of life and subsequent years where they were dead but not allowed to shuffle off this material plane, they would have heard of summarzin. After this conversation with the ghost dragon army, though, it would appear that's not the case at all. In fact, I would say they was right up among the five or six most long-winded supernatural beings I ever had to speak to. I'll tell ya about the other members of that group some time when you got a month or two to kill.

For now, though, I'm gonna just go ahead and give you the rest of the story as I remember it. It seems to me like I've given these ghosts far too much ink lately. Of course, this bein the internet, by "ink" I mean "bits". I ain't exactly sure what a bit is, but I know they must be made out of gold or some equally precious material. The guy I have come clean out my internet tubes every week charges me per bit he finds down there and my bill last week was nearly $150. So, because I don't wanna keep cloggin up my tubes with someone else's nonsensical ramblin, I'm just gonna go ahead and replace it with my own nonsensical ramblin. That way, I'm payin for what I make. It's like if you was to have a fiber eatin party and afterwards, you had to call out the roto rooter guy. Sure, some of that down there is yours, but most of it is someone else's, and that's just nasty.

So, accordin to them ghost dudes and dudettes, Hiroki Hatayama saw his mom turn into a giant, planet eatin fish and then saw his dad just wander away after shoutin, "You should not be!" at his son. Now, my pa used to call me a lazy, layabout, good-for-nothin flapper. I'll admit, that hurt sometimes. Especially seein as how I was only tryin to get into this goose imitation competition they have over in Gooseville every year.

I spent two years perfectin my goose costume; gettin the wings just right so that, with the smallest flick of my wrist, I could soar to the highest heavens. I spent day after day jumpin off our barn roof, furiously pumpin my arms and, more often than not, fallin on to the cold, unforgivin ground, breaking a major limb. It was on one of my many, many hospital visits that my pa called me a lazy, no good flapper. But I was determined to show him wrong. I worked and worked to fly. Day after day, from before sun up to after sun down I would build and jump until I could fly like the birds. Finally, the day of the big contest came.

I passed through the first round, which was a round-robin double elimination tournament. I then breezed through the quarterfinals, where I was up against a Scotch terrier in a hand-sewn outfit. No one expected him to do that well, really. I mean, he couldn't even fly or make goose noises. Sure, he was adorable, but you don't win the Gooseville "Be a Goose, Win a Goose" contest on looks alone. Then I moved to the semi-finals, in which I was up against the 1976 Harlem Globetrotters. They had developed a new trick where they joined bodies in such a way that they looked and flew like a goose.

I don't know if you've ever seen you some Harlem Globetrotters, but those are some mighty large men. I bet, if you're old enough, at some point in your life you've met a guy named Tiny. And, if you're anything like me, you were shocked to learn that this Tiny was, in fact, gigantic. Now, imagine that there are about a dozen guys the size of Tiny, and they've all joined hands and legs to form a giant goose. That would be a mighty large goose, wouldn't you say? In fact, that goose would be so large as to warp time and space, transporting the 1976 Harlem Globetrotters to some different time every time they formed that goose. If you was a member of the squad, this would prolly be very bad news. However, if you were Pat O'Neil or the Washington Generals, then this would be excellent news because they Globetrotters would forfeit any contest of skill that they were entered into. If you was the generals in this case, then you would advance your win/loss record to 2/100,000,000,000. If you was Pat O'Neil, and I was, then you would be automatically passed into the final round to compete against Goose X, the greatest goose imitator Gooseville had ever seen.

And that's exactly the situation I found myself in. I was guaranteed at least second place, which was better than anyone really expected me to do, so I was happy just to have the opportunity. My opponent, though, was something else. He'd been competing in this contest for thirty years, and for thirty years he had been undefeated. He was the unbeatable king of goose imitation, but no one knew who he really was. He always showed up in full costume, maintained his goose character throughout the competition, and wandered off into obscurity as soon as he'd won the prize. This was to be a great challenge.

We stood on the launch platform. I was as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Then, because I was in goose mode, I got even more nervous because I'd just thought about a cat. I was so worried that I almost missed the launch signal. Fortunately, the start gun woke me from my panicked reverie and we were off. Goose X and I ducked and dove around the sky, passing over and around each other. We honked to the best of our ability, both obviously making the best effort to imitate a goose. But then, a mere three hours into the round, Goose X made a fatal mistake. I don't know what that guy had for breakfast that day, but he apparently couldn't hold it any longer. He dropped himself a little fudge log right on the judges' desk. This, in itself, was not enough to disqualify him.

What Goose X must not have counted on was one of the judges being a Biologist specializing in Goosology, or the study of geese. That poop landed right in front of Professor Goosey McLovesgeese (actual name). He took one look at it and declared the contest over and me the winner. Why was Goose X disqualified, you may ask? Well, it turns out that Goose X was so durned good at imitating geese because he was an actual goose, albeit an unusually large goose, standing just shy of six feet tall. He had been careful for three decades not to reveal his secret, but now it was out. Let me be clear here, no one had a problem with his being a giant goose. The people of Gooseville ain't a bunch of speciests or nothin. It's just that the contest was for imitatin a goose, and a thing can't imitate itself.

So, in the end, I got myself a free goose. I took it home to pa and he apologized for callin me lazy. He wouldn't take back the flapper comment, though, which I learned to live with. Goose X ended up hittin all the daytime talk shows and told Donahue that he'd been entering the contest all those years because he loved the taste of gooseflesh and couldn't very well capture and kill them himself. He later went into a treatment center. Last I heard he was working as an addiction specialist and helping people with interventions.

I guess the whole point is this; if your pa calls you a lazy, good-for-nothin, it hurts. But at least you can prove him wrong. But if the last thing you ever heard from your pa is "You should not be!" that's got to mess with you a whole bunch. I mean, you can't even do anything to make up for that. So, I'm tryin to understand Hiroki's side of this story, because he turned out to be a pretty messed up guy, as you'll see soon.

But, like I says before, you best be glad that it's your ol' buddy Pat tellin ya this story, because them ghosts took forever to tell the thing and went off on all sortsa tangents that didn't have nothin to do with the actual story. Not me, though. That just ain't my style.

It's comin, it's comin

Man's gotta have a vacation every once in awhile. I ain't had the time for relayin all the rest of what went on on that there meth planet lately, but I'll be gettin to it. It'll likely be next week, or mayhaps the week after. I apologize for any and all inconvenience this may cause.

Picnics are no picnics

"Tetsuo lived in wedded bliss for eight long and wonderful years. In that time, he and Suki produced a son, Haruki, named after Tetsuo's first son. In those eight years, Clan Platypus worked Tetsuo into their corporate structure.

"Like anyone else, Tetsuo had to start at the bottom. No amount of reputation, money or threats of death could change that. He began as a runner, then an interplanetary runner, then he spent some time as a logistics manager. By the time Haruki was born, Tetsuo was working as an actuary and occasionally being given assassin jobs. On the weekends, he still committed acts of genocide, but it had become more of a hobby than a quest. Suki said that he was just doing it to relive a romanticized youth that never really existed. But she tolerated it most days. All was looking up for the man who had once vowed to wipe out all life forms in the universe. Looking up, that is, until the family picnic."

"Picnic?" I asked, incredulous.

"Yes," they replied, "the yearly Clan Platypus Family Picnic and Meth Zombie Race. It's a very popular event for the office workers in the Clan. They still hold it most years, but the budget has expanded so it's more of a yacht party than a picnic, but they kept the name for tradition's sake. Ninjas, as you may know, are very traditional."

"I was aware," I allowed.

"Regardless of all that, the picnic Tetsuo attended with his family was the beginning of the end for him. Legend says he didn't even really want to go. He claimed that he had gutters to clean, there was a big game on tv and he really needed to get that lawn mowed. Suki, however, knew better. Wives always know better. She knew that as soon as she was out of the house he'd be off planet somewhere slaughtering a whole village of innocents. Instead, she proposed, he could spend some quality time with their son, to which he acquiesced. Even the strongest men will do what their wives ask in order to avoid problems.

"Tetsuo arrived to the picnic grumpy. All he could think about was the people he wasn't killing, the screams for mercy he wasn't hearing and the lawn that he wasn't cutting. But, after he got a couple of hotdogs in him and some money in his pocket from betting on the Zombie Wrestling match, Tetsuo was surprised to find he was having fun.

"In his buoyant mood, he encouraged Suki to join the fishing contest. The woman who landed the biggest fish was to be given a riding lawnmower and Tetsuo thought that would really help their family out. Suki was hesitant to join. This being a Clan outing, the women were expected to land the fearsome Knife Tooth Laser Fish, which can only be caught using your own child as bait. The trick is to allow the fish to approach the child and lunge. As the fish is in mid lunge, the child gets yanked out of the way and the fish makes another lunge. If everything goes right, you end up with a mean, inedible fish. If you do it wrong, you end up with a heart full of sorrow and a "Participant" ribbon.

"Suki had landed herself a number of Knife Tooth Laser Fish in her time, those being the main source of protein in her home village. And because she'd seen more of those fish than anyone else in the competition, she knew what they didn't, that Clan Platypus had replaced the regular stock in that lake with radioactive Knife Tooth Laser Fish. And as any fool knows, you have to use a totally different bait for radioactive fish than you do for regular fish.

"While all the other wives tossed their children into the water, Suki tied herself to the end of her line and wrapped the rest of the slack around a tree, making a kind of primitive pulley. Then, using the strength and persistence she'd learned in her eight years of marriage, dove head first into the water."

I interrupted, "She got herself et, didn't she?"

"No," the answered. "It was much worse than that."

"Worse than gettin et by a radioactive fish?" I couldn't believe that was possible.

"Much, much worse," they replied, adding a little drama to the whole thing. It must have worked, because now I was really ready to find out what happened to this lady. Had they said something like, "A little worse," or "About the same but less convenient," I woulda just give up right then and there, but since they said "much" twice, I felt I had to stay.

"It was not Suki's first time with radioactive fish. Every time one came near, she jerked her rod and pulled herself a little closer to shore. She knew that, once the water got shallow enough to stand in, she could wedge her fishing rod between its jaws, flip the fish over and heave it onto the shore for cleaning and consumption. She was within ten feet of the shore when the unthinkable happened.

"The fish she'd been tempting had completed its final circle and was coming in for the kill. The sweat of concentration beaded on Suki's brow. Like a torpedo, the fish launched itself at her. She waited, knowing that if she pulled too early, the fish would lose interest. The fish closed quickly, shrinking the hundred feet between it and Suki to fifty feet in the blink of an eye. Still, Suki waited. 40 feet. She braced herself. 30 feet. Her arms tensed. 20 feet. Her grip tightened. 10 feet. Suki yanked with all her might.

"Two things happened simultaneously. First, Suki was hit in the face with her snapped fishing line. Second, the fish took her foot. Suki screamed out for Tetsuo, who rushed into the water, stabbed the fish with its own tooth, grabbed Suki and headed for shore. In the few seconds it took for all this to happen, Suki's leg began to swell.

"As she was laid in the grass, bleeding and delirious, Suki began to beg Tetsuo. 'Kill me!' she whispered. 'You must kill me.'

"But Tetsuo couldn't. 'You'll be ok,' he promised as the doctors were tying cords around her now elephantine leg to stop the poison. 'You'll be ok.' He repeated through his tears.

"The doctors did their best, but they could do nothing against the swelling. The tourniquets they tied were ruptured as Suki took on more mass. All the time, she whispered to Tetsuo, 'If you love me, you'll kill me. Please, Tetsuo. It must be done.'

"Still, he couldn't let go of the one thing that brought light and warmth to his otherwise cold and dark life. Still weeping, Tetsuo turned away from his swelling wife. In a rush, he remembered how full of suffering and pain the universe was. He gained new strength in his lost mission and resigned from the Clan right then and there.

"To punctuate his resignation, he killed all but two participants at the picnic. The two left were Suki, who had grown to the size of a small hill and began to take on fish-like features, and his son Haruki.

"Tetsuo picked the child up. As per his vow, he knew he shouldn't let it live. On the other hand, it was Tetsuo's son, and he couldn't bear to see him die. As Tetsuo was contemplating the child's fate, the young boy gasped. 'Daddy, look!' he yelled, pointing at the still-growing form of his mother.

"'My god,' Tetsuo whispered. Suki's transformation was almost complete. She had rounded out and become a fish with a woman's face. Tetsuo recognized the form from his youth. His wife had become a planet eater. She was still small enough that she was eating the planet one bite at a time, but it appeared that, at her current rate of growth, she would gain full size in a matter of weeks. Then she would become the scourge of the universe, eating entire star systems with no thought. All of Tetsuo's work, his years hunting down each planet eater, his guilt for wiping them all out and his millions of years of meditation to make up for it, were all for naught. His life was a sham.

"Standing on that field, watching his former wife devour a mountain range and holding his child in his arms, Tetsuo saw the full cold cruelty of the universe. His mind broke. He set the child on the ground, looked it in the eyes and yelled, 'You should not be!' Then he lept off planet.

"That was the last anyone ever saw of Tetsuo Hatayama. Clan Platypus, feeling partially responsible for all this, raised young Haruki Hatayama in their own headquarters. But, in the end, they were like the woman rescuing the cobra from the cold."