We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Hamsters
Last time in the Catrina Chronicles, we’d followed Ermingard to 2016 and a battle with Jill Polarity and Dr. Oatmeal, and we’d seen Katrina in a post-apocalyptic wasteland discovering some surprising wreckage before getting tranquilized by persons unknown. Now it’s time to see what the eponymous heroine of the Catrina Chronicles is up to, aboard the Dangling Participle and still all ghostified…
*cue theme*
“Captain’s log, stardate….erm. I say, V.V., what jolly old stardate is it?”
“I do not know, comrade captain. The computer calendar is still set on David Copperfield time.”
“Ah, yes; what a glorious experience that was, the thrill of a phaser duel with Mr. Murdstone, and courageously fending off the attack of Zombie Steerforth. Right, well, then, moving on, whatever stardate this happens to be, we’re in the 12th century or thereabouts, checking in on our valiant ally Catrina, whom we haven’t seen since our adventure with her in her novel. Alas, our computer has scanned the planet several times, and we have as yet not been able to detect Catrina’s life sign. Our search for her continues!”
Catrina, listening to Ferdinand Roderick Marshalham Willingsford the Seventh make this recording on the bridge of the Dangling Participle, facepalmed once again. It was something she’d been doing a lot lately. “Of course you can’t find my life sign on the planet, because I’m not alive!” she said, not that they could hear her. In her current ghost form, Catrina could only be seen or heard by people who were not important to the story in any way whatsoever. This meant that she couldn’t communicate with her friends the space hamsters, much as she’d wanted to. Catrina wondered whether she could try knocking on something, maybe a few spectral taps here and there, but try as she might, she couldn’t make herself tangible enough to do it. She was beginning to worry about her situation. Suppose the Dangling Participle left Earth’s orbit and jumped into meta-warp drive? Would she be able to float along with the ship, or would she be left behind, floating about in the atmosphere? It was not pleasant to contemplate, and so Catrina decided not to contemplate it. Instead she focused on something vastly more interesting; the unusual energy reading that had just shown up on Valentina Viktorovna’s computer. “Captain,” the white-furred hamster whispered in awe, “I believe we have located the Golden Spleen.”
“Well, yeeha,” Becky-Jane cut in, “but would y’all mind tellin’ me why we should care about finding any sort of spleen, golden or otherwise? Is it Catrina’s spleen maybe, and if it is, what’s it doin’ outside ‘er?”
“The Golden Spleen,” Ferdinand said excitedly, “is the repository of the mythical element splenithium, rumored to restore injured or even slain beings who touch it, not to mention serving as a virtually unlimited power source! Valentina! Activate the transporter and lock on to the coordinates of the Golden Spleen!”
“I did that five seconds ago, comrade captain, while you were expositing,” she said calmly, flicking her left ear.
The Spleen materialized on the bridge in a blur of shimmery light, coincidentally right next to Catrina. Intrigued by what Ferdinand had said, she reached out a ghostly magneta-tinged hand and touched it. Instantly the power of the Spleen flowed through her, cool and refreshing like a chocolate milkshake such as you might get at White Castle of an evening except sometimes the shake machine has been shut down for the night and so you must be content with a Mello Yello which really isn’t that bad, all things considered. Catrina could practically feel herself coming together again, taking visible form. Unfortunately the first part of her that took visible form was her small intestine. Needless to say, Ferdinand, V.V., and Becky-Jane were a bit startled by the sudden appearance of a small intestine on their bridge. Becky-Jane grabbed for her lucky plasticianum-handled laser pistol, Pollyanna. “No!” Catrina yelled, suddenly realizing she might very well get killed again. “Don’t-” But Becky-Jane was already firing at the small intestine, and Catrina, deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, made a run for it, taking the Golden Spleen with her. This led to a terribly amusing chase scene as Becky-Jane pursued Catrina’s bouncing small intestine throughout the corridors of the Dangling Participle, with Bucklebury the volebot trailing along behind suggesting sensibly that maybe they should try to open communications with it instead of shooting at it.
Catrina rounded a corner, and stopped in newfound amazement, as red light spilled across her face. The red Sporksaber hung in a rack upon the wall, conveniently pre-activated. (How it got to be there is a long story which I’ll have to go into sometime.) Several things happened at once, as things are wont to do in these stories. A final surge of splenetic power shot through her, finishing her materialization neatly. Becky-Jane rounded the same corner and saw Catrina. Catrina, meanwhile, had reached for the Sporksaber, her hand closing round its hilt. Immediately she felt the power of the Sporky Force; only her other hand was still touching the Golden Spleen. Spleen met spork, there was yet another big kaboom (Catrina was getting used to it) and she and the red Sporksaber both vanished from the ship. At the same time, just outside the vessel, a wormhole exploded into being in a dazzling array of color.
Ferdinand saw the wormhole through a viewport, and dashed back to the bridge, seized with the desire to explore it. Becky-Jane, completely bewildered, nonetheless decided to make something useful of the situation; she picked up the Golden Spleen and marched off to hook it up to the ship’s engine. She didn’t see an oozy black blob drip off one bit of the Golden Spleen and puddle on the corridor floor, nor did she notice the blob taking shape until it assumed an evil and familiar form. “Well,” said Susan, smiling like a diabolical lolcat, and she was about to say something dramatic and ominous, except at that moment the Dangling Participle lurched forward into the wormhole, and Susan was thrown against the bulkhea. “Ow!” she yelped. “Bella Cullen, that hurt! Blasted space hamsters!”
Meanwhile, Catrina opened her eyes, and found herself staring at a jar of mayonnaise. She started to move, and instantly found that she didn’t have much room to move around in, as she appeared to be stuck in a thermally insulated compartment with a metal shelf sticking into her back. “Oh come ON!” Catrina exclaimed. “You put me in a refrigerator? Really? Of all the-seriously, author, do you even understand what the whole women-in-refrigerators trope means? This isn’t even a device to facilitate the development of a male hero, it’s just….random! To quote Rebecca Dew, this is the last straw!” She drew her red Sporksaber and slashed her way right out of the refrigerator, tumbling through the fragments of the door and landing facefirst in snow. Braced by the cold air, Catrina scrambled to her feet, Sporksaber in hand. A long slope ran up before her, culminating in a high ridge that connected two towering snow-clad mountains. On the brink of the ridge stood a single cow, gazing stonily down upon her. “Oookay,” Catrina said. “A cow. This could be interesting. I wonder-”
Just then the cow raised its head and gave a long, low, chilling “Moooooooooooooo”. A sheep appeared beside it, a sheep standing on its hind legs and waving a terrifying battle-axe. Then another sheep crested the ridge, and another, and another. Soon the ridge was crowded with sheep, a whole horde of them, the sound of their combined sheepish voices filling the air and echoing off the mountains like spring thunder. “EM-TA-LA!” they chanted. “EM-TA-LA! EM-TA-LA!”
Catrina smiled, a slow, half-smile that spread across her face and lit her green eyes like a rising flame. She raised the Sporksaber, its red light dancing across the driven snow. She didn’t even consider emulating Mulan by shooting off a rocket and starting a convenient avalanche; no, instead she ran forward, charging the entire sheep army all by herself and screaming her name like a banshee: “Catrinaaaaaaaaaaaa!” As she ran, her boots tearing through the snow, she heard dramatic battle music soaring in the distance, and she broke into wild laughter. Finally, things were getting fun!
Will our plucky heroine survive? Will this story’s increasingly convoluted timeline ever get sorted out? Of course it will, because I made a helpful diagram of it. To find out what happens, stay tuned for Episode 44 of the Catrina Chronicles, coming soon! To catch up on previous episodes, go here. To check out Catrina’s previous adventure with the space hamsters, read Catrina in Space, available now on Amazon.Thanks for reading!
The Ballad of a Farm
This weekend’s Trifextra Writing Challenge was to write a poem, in either 33 words, 3 lines or 3 stanzas. I went with the three-stanza option. It was either this or try to write an episode of the Catrina Chronicles in verse, and honestly, I don’t think Catrina would stick to three stanzas. Her favorite number’s 17, and 17 stanzas is a lot to ask. So…yeah. Enjoy!
Shelly never knew that her life’s existence clung to likes and clicks.
Shelly raised her sheep upon her farm, lived happily and free.
Never even knew that her daily successes depended on whether
Marsha had saved up enough XP.
But in the real world Marsha misplaced her Facebook login, lost like the meter of this poem
And then decided to give up her tech and move abroad to help underprivileged youth on an island in the Pacific,
And she never gave a thought to her Farmville posts on a wall that some of her 1,242 friends popped in on occasionally to wish her happy birthday or ask her to play Mafia Wars.
She never responded, but that was okay, since her real-world friends understood that she had gone off the grid and got back to nature.
Everyone understood.
Except for Shelly, her neglected Farmville avatar.
Alas, Shelly.
A New Writing Challenge!
Well now. The things one discovers on the Internet. I had participated in the Chrysalis Experiment last year, and that was exceptionally fun, particularly as it inspired the Catrina Chronicles. But that ended in December, and so I was thinking about doing another weekly prompt sort of thing. Lo and behold, I have found one. The Trifecta Writing Challenge, which I just discovered the other day, and which posts not one but two writing challenges a week! Hooray! I think this could do wonders for the Catrina Chronicles, add that extra little bit of randomness. Plus, who knows the other characters it could inspire?
At any rate, rather than plunge right into the challenge, I suppose I should fill out the check-in form. It’s been a while since I’ve done a survey, so, here we go.
1. What is your name (real or otherwise)?
Arthur, King of the Britons! No, actually, it’s not, but I couldn’t resist the Monty Python allusion. Actually, my name’s Michael, and my blog here is hypotheticallywriting.
A Bit about Comments
Ah, comments: the lifeblood of the Internet. I’ve gotten precisely 476 comments on this blog since I started it lo these many moons ago, although a good bit of them are probably my own replies to comments people have left, so those don’t technically count. Then there’s the spam comments. Lovely spam, wonderful spam, as Monty Python would say. And while I don’t really get enough of them to make for a regular feature such as what Girl on the Contrary does on occasion, I have gotten some doozies.
My favorite spam comments are the ones that try, even just a little bit, to make it seem like they’re really interested in your post. They’re not the spammers that just copy and paste the same thing again and again and again (yes, I’m aware my blog ranks low in Google, no, I’m not going to click your dubious link that will magically bring me millions of pageviews); these are the spammers that care. Or at least they pretend to. Because the hilarious part comes in once you read their comment, and then compare it to what exactly your post said. This is especially true when you consider what sort of things I write. For example, one enterprising spammer left this comment back in March. “This is just what I was looking for. I did not expect that I’d get so much out of reading your write up! You’ve just earned yourself a returning visitor!” What a nice thing to say, you think. And you’d be right. Except that the post the comment was left on was Episode 33 of the Catrina Chronicles. Specifically, it’s the one that starts with the history of the Spork Brigade, and ends with Susan and Catrina getting into an argument. I’m curious: what about that impressed you so much, wandering spammer person? Are you a passionate admirer of sporks? (Hey, who isn’t?) Were you profoundly moved by Catrina’s brief discussion of epistomology, which partly explained why she got turned into a penguin? If you were….you need help. Then again, this particular spanner never did come back, so far as I know; apparently they have very loose definitions of the words “returning” and “visitor”. ![]()
Then there was this comment, which puzzled me at first because I had no idea what it meant (sadly, I didn’t note which post it appeared on before I saved it). The comment read as follows: “When she gets assigned to Neil’s father’s case, it will lead her on a journey into her own past and to the heart of a shattering secret.” And that was it. I was intrigued. Who’s she? Who’s Neil? What was the shattering secret? I mean, c’mon, that’s it? That’s all you leave me with? The suspense was killing me! Then just now I thought of googling the curious phrase, and discovered that it was evidently copied and pasted from a crime novel called Black Flowers. The mystery deepens. Why would this random spammer think my posts have anything to do with crime novels? Why didn’t they properly attribute the quote? And whoisNeil? Alas, it seems I’ll never know. C’est la vie.
But that’s enough about spam comments. There are other comments, good and thoughtful ones, and on that note I have just recently received the Great Comments Award from Trisha. This is, I think, the second bloggy award I’ve received since I’ve started. I’m so proud.
As is the tradition with these things, I must now pass it on to others. So. According to my blog stats, the person who’s left the most comments on my blog is….me. But since it would be terribly silly to pass this award on to myself, the top people other than me who’ve left the most comments on my blog are….drumroll please…..Trisha, the Hook, and Jes. Bravo, you chaps! Hooray! Thanks for all your loyal comments, and keep up the good work.