by Matt Medlock
The Tripponimish giant roared at them, “Vipers 14, Bears 6!” It was leaning so close now that each of the pore dimples on the giant's red-orange skin looked large enough to put a basketball through.
Trembling, Harry clutched Brantmusberger and muttered, “Can you understand it? What's it saying? Does it mean to eat us? Tell them not to! Tell them we've been on the ground for more than five seconds!”
The giant bellowed, “Stevedores 5, Whooping Cranes 4, double overtime!”
Frowning, Brantmusberger said, “Well, if there's one thing that I, Brantmusberger, know, it's how to read sports scores. But I dunno...it's a pretty thick dialect. I want to say that it's asking us for advice.”
“Advice?” blurted Harry. “It's asking for advice? This is how it asks for advice? By screaming sports scores at us?”
Brantmusberger tutted, “It makes perfect sense to them, Harry. Try to keep an open mind. It's actually a lovely language if you listen to its musical qualities. Has a lyrical lilt to it, really.”
The giant snarled, “Platypi 23, Foodies 1!”
“I'm not hearing it,” Harry harrumphed, crossing his arms across his chest stubbornly.
Brantmusberger's beady little eyes lit up and it cried back to the giant, “Uh...Orangutans 7, Bolsheviks 2?”
The giant throttled at the earth around them and insisted, “Doughboys 3, Pop-Tarts 0!”
“Oh!” Brantmusberger sighed, and then called out, “Cornish Game Hens 18, Hollaback Girls 4?”
The giant nodded vigorously, snuffling and grinning. “Haberdashers 8, Beetlejuices 6!”
“Shrieking Beasties 27, Tamagotchi 10!” Brantmusberger clapped its hand on Harry's shoulder and said to him, “He's just looking for a little help. These big bastards sorta live in something like a hive society, but with asexual reproduction. They're ruled by a queen—or a Bottling Plant Operators 9, Decapitated Giraffes 3, as its known in their language—and all the offspring are male drones and workers and the like. But the queen hasn't spawned a new giant in, I dunno, something like twenty-one seconds.” Which, of course, translated to roughly 6 Earth years, 10 Earth months. The conversion rate should be obvious by now.
“Okay...and how exactly are we supposed to help him? Sounds to me like this big gal is just barren or menopausal or something.”
“Harry, what part of 'asexual' don't you understand? Barren and menopausal don't enter into the conversation. Something's wrong and this guy here thinks we might be able to help.” Then he muttered, “At least he hopes. A fool without many options is ever more foolish.” Brantmusberger looked up and appeasingly said, “Tapirs 9, MC Hammer Back-Up Dancers 5!”
The giant smiled wide and snorted, its big, yellow teeth like barn doors.
Harry miserably said, “And I suppose that turning him down is not an option?”
“Well, there's the risk of being squished in wrath, of course. But more than that, did you forget that ship circling earlier that wanted to turn you into charcoal? You got no means to fight back by yourself. But if you get these huge doofuses on your side, well...do I need to remind you what they did to the fleet of cargo transports that tried to bring them goods?”
Harry blinked, “Uhh...yeah, I forget.”
Brantmusberger's big hand covered seven of the triangular faces of his icosahedromal head. “Grypke's Gravy, you're hopeless, aren't you?”
Harry didn't need that.
V: Pimps and Mullahs Agree: Bitches Be Outta Line
Harry and Brantmusberger followed the Tripponimish giant for several miles across the dry, stony sea of waste. The two smaller creatures threaded through the litter. The giant just stomped and kicked anything in its way. And the large creature had to frequently stop and wait with an annoyed grunt. It took almost a minute for Harry and Brantmusberger to walk the distance that the giant could take in a single stride.
Harry had no idea how large the giant was. His first estimate was that he was at least seven miles tall. Then he revised that judgment and figured it had to have been at least a hundred inches high. Neither guess was remotely close (both to each other and to the reality of the giant's height), and further proved that Harry wasn't the sharpest light bulb in the toolbox, verified when Harry used the nonsensical phrase: “not the sharpest light bulb in the toolbox.” Not once, mind, but on four separate, unrelated occasions.
During the lengthy trek, the mysterious threat returned. A slim, C-chaped spacecraft whooshed across the dusty sky. It made two passes, observing Harry, Harry's odd little companion, and, naturally, the looming, immense humanoid that towered over them both. Inside the spaceship, the villainous Chuugik glared in alarm at the giant as he navigated the ship around the lumbering beast. Its red-orange skin made the giant look sunburnt and ready to split. Its wild, tangled hair made it look feral and fearsome. The fact that it was attired in seventy-three-tuple XL clothing provided by Aeropostale and Ed Hardy just made it look like a very large douchebag. But Chuugik knew that even if this giant was a total douchebag, no one carelessly enrages anything that size.
“Greetings, magnificent mega-man,” Chuugik announced on a flyover. “I am the great hyper-assassin Chuugik. I have business with the small speck of feces down there named Harry. I respectfully ask your permission to vaporize that slimy toad and be on my way. In all other ways, I mean no harm.”
The giant didn't understand a word of what Chuugik was saying. He grumbled, “Sad Clowns 8, Herpes Simplex Virus Ones 2.”
Puzzled, Chuugik responded through the broadcast channel, “I'm just gonna drop down and wipe out that little pest down there. Okay? Here I go. Stay cool, big guy.”
The ship dived—no, dove, and grammar Nazis be damned—ahem, the ship dove into an attack course. Harry and Brantmusberger saw it coming and scrambled away. The ship's cannon blasts narrowly missed Harry, instead striking an unopened, grain silo-sized can of Super-Lite Beer (eighty percent water, two percent malted barley, yeast and hops, eighteen percent camel urine). The huge beer can exploded, sending a surge of flat (and swill-tasting) ale to toss Harry about, nearly drowning him until he was pushed more than two hundred yards and the tide subsided.
When Harry came about, he saw the giant looking down at him with a queer, confused look in its eyes. In the distance, he saw the blurry form of Brantmusberger racing his way to check on him. And he could see the shadow of Chuugik's ship start to turn.
“Help!” Harry cried out, shaking off the bitter piss-beer. “Brantmusberger! Please!”
“I'm coming, I'm coming!” Brantmusberger replied with a holler.
“Talk to the big fella! I'm begging you! Ask him to knock down that ship! Save me, please!”
While it kept jogging toward Harry, Brantmusberger shouted up at the Tripponimish giant, “Sand Pipers 19, Pas de bourrées 7!”
The giant grunted down, “Telemarketers 2, One-Eyed Jacks 1.”
“No good!” Brantmusberger yelled as it came up alongside a soaked, stinking Harry. “The feud isn't his. At the moment, you are neither his friend nor foe, so he is obliged not to involve himself in the conflict.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
Brantmusberger snapped a finger, which was remarkable that the little alien was able to make the snapping sound using just one finger. “Just stay real close to the giant. Walk around its feet and between its legs. That Chuugik jerk isn't gonna be stupid enough to risk hitting the big ogre.”
Harry thought it a pretty sound strategy. So he fell in quickly near the heel of the giant. And did his best to stay either at the huge creature's feet or underneath its stride. Chuugik looped around a few times, cursing at Harry's proximity to the massive creature. Finally, the ship bugged out so its pilot could once again think of a new plan.
“So, uh,” began Brantmusberger as it caught up with Harry again, “why is this Chuugik character after you? What did you do to piss off the Neptunian Yakuza?”
Harry despondently murmured, “The She'bok Gargalet.”
“She'bok
Gargalet? Is that, like, a sex thing?”
“The more I think about it, the more I think that fat, mauve freak pulled a fast one on me.” And Harry had thought about it often. If only there were more clues to confirm this suspicion, clues that were obvious and not at all difficult for an idiot like Harry to figure out. “A business partner of mine borrowed a crap-ton of cash from those gangsters, and in my name, no less. I don't think it was a wise financial venture on their part. And the last I heard, my old partner was halfway across the galaxy, likely to never be seen again by these two eyes.”
“Oh, I see,” Brantmusberger nodded. “You were fucked over. So...a sex thing, got it.”
After about another hour of walking, they began to realize that what looked like mountains and buildings in the distance were, in fact, more Tripponimish giants. Some standing, some sitting, some laying down, some angrily correcting others that the proper predicate in that circumstance is “lying down” not “laying down,” but most were just piled up on each other in gigantic mounds (which, of course, looked like mountains to Brantmusberger and fleetingly like boobs to Harry because he hadn't felt the touch of a woman in a loooong time, and the poor guy was hopeless, not dead). Arrayed loosely around a massive pit, with a midden heap to the east and a small copse of wide-leaved tree-like flora to the west, the throng of dust-covered giants appeared to be shiftless and lazy, but they stirred once the new arrival was noticed. Some of the giants even began shouting hurtful things like, “Scalawags 9, Bludgeoners 7!” and “Ungulates 10, Ennui 0!” These were, indeed, very hurtful things. If translated, the words would cause much blushing and fits of outraged fainting spells preceded by, “Why, I never!”'s, so as a courtesy, they will not be revealed here.
The giants noisily griped and groaned and growled with each other for a long spell. Harry's ears began to hurt very badly from the relentless racket, and keep in mind that he managed to sit through more than forty-five minutes of Noisy Stupidity II: The Revenging...in 5-D! without going deaf, so his ears were clearly weathered and leathery to begin with.
During the brouhaha, Brantmusberger did his best to explain to Harry what was happening. “It seems that this guy here, the one who had been shepherding us, was sent out to find food and the rest are upset that he came back empty-handed. I think that these Tripponimish flesh-towers are starving. That's why they're so desperate for their queen to start spitting out babies again.”
With an intensely knitted brow, Harry exclaimed, “That doesn't make any sense! How would making more mouths to feed solve hunger?”
Brantmusberger tried not to sound too condescending when it replied, “That's a very sensible observation, Harry, I am impressed. However, these creatures are filial cannibals.”
“So,” said Harry with dark intensity. “They eat people from Philadelphia. Monsters...”
After a sigh, Brantmusberger said, “No, not Philly. Filial. It means that they have a propensity for feeding on their young, notably the runts of the litter.”
Harry blurted, “By Uranus' Odiferous Leakage! That's revolting!”
Shrugging, Brantmusberger said, “That's the circle of life, what can I say. There are more animal species that consume their offspring in the universe than there are ones that do not. It has important ecological and even evolutionary reverberations. In fact, my people do it, and they say it's delicious.”
“Oh! No! Stop! I don't want to hear this!”
“Don't knock it 'til you try it, that's all I'm saying.”
“You're disgusting!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you eat babies!”
“I don't think you heard me. I said that my people do it. I, myself, have not done it. Because I have never had a child. And thanks for reminding me!” Brantmusberger burst into tears. And tears for his people had the stench of an old sneaker filled with curdled milk, so it was unpleasant for Harry in more ways that mere social awkwardness.
Brantmusberger's weeping fit was interrupted a short time later by the original Tripponimish giant roaring down at the little alien, “Threshers 21, Flaccid Johnsons 3!”
After wiping away his stinky tears, Brantmusberger calmed himself down and told the giant to do the same. Then it explained to Harry, “The queen is in the pit just ahead. The giant wants us to try and get her to start making with the babies again so they can finally eat. What do you say?”
“I say, 'Let's make this big babe start birthing big babies!'”
Down into the pit they crawled, avoiding the stones and bones that littered the roughshod path. Harry looked up on occasion, making sure that Chuugik wasn't coming back around now that Harry was no longer sheltered overhead by one of the giants. The last thing that Harry wanted was to get burnt, immolated, dismembered, obliterated, vaporized, atomized, lobotomized or any other-ized on this weird planetoid, this land of biiig. He was still hoping to live long enough to experience one of his two dream deaths: sacrificing himself to save the life of some great intergalactic hero, or an orgasm overdose brought on by all 11,000 contestants of The Real Miss Universe Pageant (friction and fluid dehydration be damned).
At the bottom of the pit, amongst clods of the stony earth and a litter of massive, soiled clothes and quilts, sat the queen of the Tripponimish giants. Adorned in a toga-like frock made from parachutes used by the pilots of the transport ships they had destroyed so long before, skin more like tarnished gold than the bright red-orange of the males, and features clearly more feminine, she barely stirred at the approach of the two small strangers. Harry wondered if they had gone unnoticed. After all, he didn't always notice when the rat-like burgleblutts crawled out of his old loft walls. No matter what he did, he never could get rid of them. Even when he purposefully left out food with notes that clearly claimed his ownership so they would get the gist, the burgleblutts would just rudely eat the food and scamper away. Harry had no choice but to blame it on bad manners and leave out more food with harsher notes in larger lettering.
The queen's head lolled and her eyes fell upon the intruders. “Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts 5, OshKosh B'Gosh Overalls 2,” she murmured.
Brantmusberger answered, “Hatfields 9, McCoys 9, stalemate.”
She said, “Sasquatches 5, Left-Handed Scissors 4.”
“Wienerschnitzels 20, Unladen Swallows 8?”
She mournfully sighed, “Torn Rotator Cuffs 6, Those Little Plastic Things at the Ends of Shoelaces 1...”
It said to Harry, “She's very unhappy. That's why she hasn't made any children in so long. She feels unloved, unappreciated. All of the males just ignore her, walk all over her, act dismissively. She needs someone or something to make her feel good again, to make her feel special, like a woman.”
Harry nodded staunchly. “I know exactly what she needs. Follow me, Brantmusberger!”
Two hours later, Harry had chopped down one of the largest trees in the copse off to the west (at least it looked like a tree; trunk and branches and leaves, yes, but the leaves were bright blue and the bark was a pinkish lavender hue). He cleared off the boughs to turn the trunk into a huge log. Then he began shaping one of the ends, rounding it off and sanding smooth.
Brantmusberger watched Harry work with fearsome determination and tireless dedication. There was no pausing, no waffling, no doubt or despair. Harry knew exactly what he was doing and knew that it would save them. Brantmusberger actually watched him work with a feeling bordering on awe.
So Brantmusberger asked Harry, “What are you making, anyway?”
Harry wiped sweat off his brow, his chest heaving from labor, and proudly announced, “I'm making her a dildo.”
Brantmusberger no longer felt those pangs of awe. “You...moron...”
Resuming his work, Harry said, “I need to make her happy, Brantmusberger. This is the way. Oh, yes, this is the way...”
“Dude, did you ever consider just listening to her and being nice?”
Harry paused. “What, you think that will work, too?”
“I
really don't think it would hurt.”
“So...do that before or after I give her the dildo?”
“Stop what you're doing and back away from the giant dildo before I roll it over on top of you.”
“So...before?”
“Stop it and get away!”
Harry grudgingly dragged his feet back toward the pit, whining, “Aw, man, but this sounds like a lot of work! Can't I just finish making the big, wooden penis?”
“No!” Brantmusberger snapped back, shepherding Harry along with the occasional shove. “Don't you know anything about women?”
“Yeah, I do,” he moaned. “That's why I'd rather toil for days on that enormous, back-breaking woodworking project.”
“Blatant and shameless chauvinism aside, how do you even know she has the organ to...I mean, do you not know what 'asexual reproduction' means?”
“I know what your so-called better idea means...gonna be booooring.”
On the way back, the little alien told Harry that he would serve as a hidden translator, à la Cyrano de Bergerac. Harry did not understand the reference, so Brantmusberger had to describe it in terms related to the Earth teen comedy Whatever It Takes. It was Harry's ninth favorite movie (between More Faster & Most Furiouser 23 and Varsity Blues), so he understood perfectly now.
At the base of the pit, Brantmusberger squatted low behind a rock that Harry planted himself against and told Harry to call out to the queen. On Brantmusberger's suggestion, Harry asked her how her day had been by saying, “Savory Béchamel Crêpes 11, Bilge Rats 8?”
The queen's dull eyes lit up, but quickly turned suspicious. She replied, “Sunrays 17, Gingers 1?”
Brantmusberger whispered to Harry, “She's dubious. She's not used to anyone actually being considerate and interested in her. Quick. Say this: Bed Sores 8, Bouncing Baby Buggy Bumpers 5.”
Harry did so. And then he had to listen to the queen read off sports scores (or, talk in their bizarre language) for the next six-and-a-quarter hours. Brantmusberger sporadically told Harry to give her an, “Uh-huh,” “I see,” “You don't say,” “I totally agree,” “You're always right,” and “That's so fascinating, tell me more!” Even though, to Harry, it just sounded like he was telling her that the Gizmonics just defeated the Slap Happy Pappy Slappers by a score of 14 to 6.