NEWDIE STEADSLAW

Alas that Roby’s housemobile would be pierced by a gondola falling from on high, but seeing as how the explosion occurred at the topmost attic regions, wherein naught was stored but spare artichokes and the winter watering cans, she was little the worse for the wear and, what’s more, the ad hoc renovation could be put to the virtue of the installation of skylights later—after the mess was cleansed and the most chaotic debris removed. But one issue demanded a more immediate solution: Mario, the gondolier, had survived the event, and collected a wound in the process.

“I have,” said Mario, “a bump on my head. And one on my toe.”

“Do not experience fear,” said Roby, “if you can refrain from doing so. I will see if a healer is near, so you will soon be well from head to toe!”

“Not ‘from’,” said Mario, “I can’t afford the full job—just the head and the toe.”

Roby said considerately, “We shall heal the whole as well, if it has a bruise or a swell.” She buckled Mario into the passenger seat, then took her own and revved the wheel and sped off in the direction of the nearest hospital, but the hospital recognized her in her coming, and slapped together a quick moat to keep her at bay, and while perhaps a full bay would have been better—the moat wasn’t much to look at, though it did get the job done, despite the dearth of crocodilians—what really did the trick was the hat, for by donning a common deerstalker, the hospital looked decidedly unhospitalish, and Roby was thoroughly bamboozled. She opted for the next best thing: asking directions at a pancake factory.

Now, there was a problem at the pancake factory—but, honestly, have you ever known a pancake factory that didn’t have constant problems? Really, that the place was still standing at all should’ve counted as half a miracle. As it was, it was only just barely standing, and standing around it now was a large group of strikers, riotously angry, all shouts and clattering jawing and opinionation, armed with signs with witless slogans and ill-conceived kerning, their passion hidden by the foolishness they were bred for. Roby beheld them, for they were as obvious as a beer garden’s privacy policy, and she considered the fanciness of her house and her supposed baronial status, and saw that it wouldn’t do to rub one’s success in others’ faces—not if one wanted more pancakes later. And so, she parked at the dam store around the corner and scoped the situ’.

The situ’ was this: owing to the strike that had occurred, was still occurring, and probably would still be occurring in the future, gathered around were a series of bowlers and baseballers, each well-versed in strikes of their own sort, and all arguing about whether or not this strike was to be a good thing or ill—alternately claiming it for themselves, or foisting it on the other.

“It’s ten points,” said the bowlers, “plus the total pins knocked down in the next two frames.” For them, the strike would continue ’til demands were met.

“It’s a third of an out,” said the baseballers, “which in turn is a third of an inning.” For them, a strike was best avoided—although some of the baseballers went on to debate the strategy of allowing a strike so as to tempt a ball from a pitcher expecting a desperate batter to swing at anything, and some more of the baseballers who were new to the job started asking why a strike is denoted with a kay and not an ess. The strategic strikers of the baseballish alignment considered casting their lot in with the bowlish men, but then they saw the score, counted their runs lacking, and opted to stay in their own lane.

“Augh! The bumps!” wailed Mario. “I still have them! Pancakes shall not suffice—full cupcakes are needed here.”

“Well, though this is no kind of cake,” said Roby, “perhaps your pain it shall take.” She handed Mario a decrepit magazine where the entire cover, front and back, had completely fallen off, and so had the first page, with the tabled contents all—but it was all ads anyway so it didn’t matter. Mario couldn’t identify the magazine, but, hoping it wasn’t one of those conventional types, opened it at random and saw a photo of a man bobsledding. A large quote beneath the photo read “And That’s When My Son Turned Into Too Many Fish Sticks.”

“Oh, thank the Masons,” said Mario, with a sigh of relief as the pseudoimagery took effect.

Roby heard the sound of a hubbub and, glancing noiseward, saw that the source was a hubbub indeed. A series of soccericians arrove at the scene of the strike with a whole new definition to contend with, but they all became sick with gout and misplaced a box of stamps. “Won’t someone acknowledge us?” they cried, and the bowlers and baseballers surrounded them and began queuing up some accusatory words. Alas that they had fallen for the hospital’s ruse as well, for surely that was a place more fit to their needs! Alas, indeed.

This was the critical moment. Roby saw the opportunity for action and drove her house over to the strike and said, “Long lost is your solution now found today! Relinquish confusion and play like your schooldays! Board my house so we may drive about and go to the park for a plan which is smart—you may pose for a portrait, and go on to collect it, and when all is done and you have had fun, grab your backpack and backtrack back to the factory and if unliked strikes are still in sight, you might smite the bright light and have a fight, all right?”

But it was too late—the trap was sprung, and all the bowlers, baseballers, and soccericians leapt upon Roby’s house, and sank their teeth into its timbers and its eaves, and plunged their claws into its shingles and its floorboards, and gored their horns into its windows and its wainscoting. Roby, not outdone, opted to roll and floored it, shaking off the sportsfolk—but they counted their mission incomplete, and so pursued.

“The park must be delayed,” Roby said, “so you may call me dismayed—and we are too pursued to visit the hospital for you!”

“I’ll man the flamethrowers,” said Mario as he manned the flamethrowers.

“Is it feasting time already?” said Roby. “Then, aim the machine well and steady!”

Roby sped into a tunnel that went under a toadstool forest just as Traycup, Ben Garment, and Phillippo emerged from said forest, stretching their sirloins in the bright noontime sun, and stomping with all their feet to enjoy the firmness of the Earth beneath them. Phillippo had a map, but it didn’t help, since it only showed the maternity ward.

“How’s planned to find the so-called Roby?” said Ben Garment. “It’s not my kind of way to have too much of a plan—I know you’re a doer, after all, and I’m more of a beer.”

“Mayhap no plan is a plan of its own kin,” said Traycup. “But, we’ve a new friend in Phillippo—and a wise one, in truth! Spill out your brains, won’t you, Phillippo?”

“A plan? Brains? Me?” said Phillippo. It folded up the map and put it away carefully. “Well, I’ll give it a shot. It’s my first time, though, so be kind!” It pondered the friend-finding options, but couldn’t tell their number, having no experience this far out of doors, and so was primed to pluck the air. “Well, I guess we can try... shouting at the top of our lungs—or from the bottom of our hearts?”

“As sterling as jets!” said Traycup. “But ere we rupture a vocal’s cord chasing hearing, what of seeing? Let’s put in place a desired thing, and watch the flocking, for Roby’s a haver, and might go hereward at a chance for more!”

“A citation plan,” said Ben Garment, “but what’s beloved?”

“Well,” said Traycup with gladness, “now I’ve got some pieces, so let’s dress the board—with undue haste!”

Ben Garment grimly said, “With, undo, haste.”

“My plan is this,” said Traycup. “Construction! A real caribeqsue monochromancy we’ll mold, with our hands and fins and hooves, all combined in one—we’ll make a pretzel unseen before, uneaten afore, and therein, sneak a snack and be derived us both. The thing won’t bear to see its duty undone! So, let’s shake it, in a capitalist way!”

They acted quickly, they sang slowly, and they did the dishes at a medium speed. Traycup went to the geranium district and purchased ten small boxes of smaller boxes, each containing part of the instruction manual for a solid platinum and entirely unstolen digital camera, and buried them in a line alongside a comic book store, wherein Ben Garment got a part time job standing on someone else’s head so that he could get a good look over the fence out back, which was adjacent to the vacant lot where they used to store organs. Meanwhile, Phillippo went on tour with the foreign legion and served in three entire battles, won them all, and took home the biggest trophy it could carry.

“I yield! I yield!” cried Aperture Wendel, emerging from under the popcorn bowl. “I do yield indeed!”

“That’s a score!” said Traycup. He, Ben Garment, and Phillippo all stood about Aperture, until he was corralled into a hamster ball. They gave him a pair of glasses. He could do no more, and wept.

“I saw the stealer of the congressman’s shoes,” said Aperture. “I saw the event! I saw the eventuality! But, I am innocent!”

“I’ve no doubt, but answer this!” said Traycup. “Where on this operatic ticket is the assigned seat number shown?”

With a trembling hand, Aperture pointed out where the ticket read “ROW FIVE, SEAT TWELVE.”

“It’s easy to lie when it’s not your life on the line,” said Ben Garment.

“It’s so,” said Traycup. “Well, tooth decay!”

“Please,” said Aperture, “have mercy! I’ve not done wrong!”

“Pleas?” said Ben Garment. “No mercy. Wrong: you’ve done naught.”

Now they shook Aperture upside down over a young magnet so that all his paperclips would be removed from his pocketage, and once done, he was free to go, for there was no more to be gained from the interrogation, and nothing more to be gained. If they hurried, they could get to the big statue of a squirrel shaver in the middle of the park before Roby—unless the painters had a day off this year. It was an untakable chance, and so they strapped on their teethbrush and off they ran.

Aperture, still enhamster-balled, rolled away, counting his lucky cards, as the camera panned down through a sectional view of asphalt and dirt and soil, a reinforced concrete ceiling, and the underground tunnel through which Roby’s housemobile, Roby still inside, raced with a sizable amount of speed.

Mario shouted, “They’re too-much upon us!” The flamethrowers had been damaged by a well-placed roundhouse kick delivered by an anonymous sportman—well, not anonymous, they had their names on the backs of their shirts, but Mario did not get a glance at that side.

Indeed, as Mario had said, the strike debaters, of various sorts, clung to the house and surrounded it chasing-style with house-catching speed, so well-trained in athleticism were they—even the bowlers, for sport it indeed was, so their phenotype was one which had both strength and agility to spare—and, what’s more, with the power of their balls, they had the means to cause damage to the housemobile, and so they acted on said means and damage was caused.

“They are breaking away too much of the house!” said Roby. “Though it pains me to say, these folks may be louts!”

She—Roby—gripped the steering wheel with tightness, shifted into ninth gear, and floored it further, so as to pass a minibus navigating the highway with inadequate swiftness, as the sporters’ balls collode with the housemobile’s rear end, taking out most of the brake lights and turn signals.

“How now will we pass inspection?” said Roby. “But if it breaks down, we surely will get our steps in.”

Mario ran to the third attic, where there were stored heavy things such as a ton of feathers, a marshmallow warehouse, and the loss of a loved one, and he flang these things from the window onto the roadway in a bid to flattenize some of the pursuant athletes. However, their nimbleness was an excessive match for the lumbering projectiles, which, in their heaviment, proceeded only slowly toward the street’s surface, their immense bulks objects only of ponderous inertia, indifferent to the whirling, sizzling speed indicated by the rest of the scene. A hurled bathtub stretched lazily as it careened gently to the pavement.

“Is that,” said the sporteers, “the best you’ve got?”

“No,” said Mario, “but I’ve also got a head injury, so I don’t want to push myself.”

“Eminently understandable!” cried the sporteers. “Yet in a show of dear respect, we will relent not in our attack!”

“Respect don’t pay the bills!” said Mario, as they began another onslaught, and threw their balls at the bumpers and fenders of the housemobile.

Roby, in the pilot’s seat, was jostled thoroughly, and grit various things, so as to denote tension. “The life of a lady of a house,” she said, “is an odd one indeed—and without an out I doubt the house will last an hour of the striking power, the assault of balls, the attack at the back—but I think it seems I see the idea I need!”

Now, they had been driving for a good little while, but perhaps that was exactly the catastrophe, and parking instead would confabulate the sportsfolk severely enough to shake them—and there, up ahead, was a sign for the exit from the tunnel leading to the local park! Surely, this was probably a good plan.

“Mario, be well-braced!” said Roby. “I seek to bring an end to this race!”

“Roby, this is no time for genocide!” said Mario.

Roby span the wheel and took a hard right, flying down the exit ramp, and here “ramp” was no nominal term, for this was a real Olympianesque ski jump. The housemobile flew off the end and went aloft, but would it have the speed to clear the jump to the park? The judges were on hand to disqualify them, champing at the breeches.

“You challenge us to a sport?” said the incredulous sport experts, who were rightfully astonished at Roby’s inept decision-making skills. They took to the ramp like a plywood duck to a leftover cheese sandwich, their jumping arc as artful as it was careenful, and the judges were glued to their seats and T. Vs.

But below, on land, there went Traycup, Ben Garment, and Phillippo, nearly arriven at the squirrel shaver statue, sadly missing the spectacle—and they probably won’t check the papers later to read all about it, and even if they did, odds were good they’d be distracted trying to solve the horoscope and getting confused by a mattress advertisement, for more than the obvious reasons.

“If I were a Roby,” said Traycup, “I’d find a statue such as this quite enlarged!”

“You’re not,” said Ben Garment, “so we can but hope she notes it the same.”

“It’s not that large,” said Phillippo.

“Ah,” said Traycup, “but Roby might think so.”

The judges rose from their seats as the housemobile then landed on the ground with slightly distasteful noise, maintaining quite purchase on some streetage, its wheels spinning and its whole dashing along, and the sporteers arrove next, each landing finely in eaves and gables, all clung to the house in high-grace poses, and they set to work at once, sinking tooth and claw into the flanks and hide of the housemobile. It was as well that Traycup et al were not newspaper-readers, for this landing was right near their sight after all, and they beheld the whole shebang flinging toward their direction. There was Roby’s housemobile, half an inch from them and the squirrel shaver statue both and moving at full speed, and all the bowlers and baseballers and soccericians were unconstructing the house from basement to engine, from chimney to glove box, and then finally at the very last hour they found the load-bearing tire and delugnutted it, and the house fell to pieces, every beam splintered, every pipe detubed, every nail unhammered and screw undrove, and ere it collode with the ensembled gang it became nothing more than unsorted lumber and hardware falling neatly into organized piles and sealing themselves in plastic bags and shipping themselves back to factories, mills, and warehice as if the mansion-on-wheels had never existed, and the sportsfolk, their mission accomplished, landed in trilithons, rebuilding Sporthenge, fulfilling the prophecy at last. The judges gave them a fourteen.

Traycup, Ben Garment, and Phillippo forgot all about Bontrudian mythology and ran to the scene of the chaos, and some parents shushed them for causing such a ruckus near the children, saying the park must be peaceable so the butterflies might be heard, but Team Lopkit heeded not the parental desires, for despite their searchage they bespied not a trace of Roby.

“We’re in lateness,” said Traycup, “and Roby is lost!” There was not even some wreckage to gawp at, the shipping team having worked fast, and Sporthenge being closed for repairs and covered with a curtain.

“A flawless plan with a planned flaw!” said Ben Garment, doing some brief knitting.

“It’s what she would have wanted,” said Phillippo, removing its tuxedo respectfully.

They offered a moment of silence to their fallen friend, but the offer was refused, for indeed the friend had unfallen—there were Roby and Mario both, with minimal scathing, and Mario’s previously cited wounds healed.

“I have want of a pretzel,” said Roby, “so kindly make that offer. Stand not on ceremony—please begin to proffer!”

Now, everyone was surprised to see Roby emerge and not have been slain in the collision, and Traycup was not the least among them. “Ah!” he said with jovialness. “Daring friend! We are misjoined n’longer! Let’s call it some celebration, and rebegin the entwined travel!”

“First, be an elucidator,” said Ben Garment, “and tell a tip of the mobility you but recently displayed.”

“I shall right now,” said Roby. “I will retell this for all and one: the legend of the house, and the doings it had done.” And so Roby recounted the events to everyone that had occurred in the strange manor, in a strange manner: her adversarial meeting with Lord Shirechester, her definitely-accidental usurpation of his title, Mario’s impromptu invasion, and the ultimate demise of the house, bringing the story to a close, saying, “The struggling workers perceived me a lurker, and mistook my closeness as to them a boastness. Raising up had not succeeded, so with lowering down I then proceeded, and shed my wealth with excessive spending on friendly health and wounds fully mending!”

Nearby, Mario sipped a rum and coke. “A purchase unaffordable,” he said half to himself. Roby nodded.

“And so,” said Traycup, “the house became gifted in the buying—and unwanted occupiers obligated to depart!”

“Depart we did,” said Roby, “and then did not partake in the taking-apart of the thing in the end. And speaking of ends—” Roby grabbed her back’s pack and unzipped it swiftly, so as to procure its contents. “—may I present, my friends, the thing we have longfully sought: the butter is at last got!”

Roby proudly put forth her hands, and in them was the long-quested-for butter—or rather, on them was the butter, for packed in the pack as it was, it had endured overmuch heat during the escaping adventures and had attained a degree of meltation—or rather, approximately ninety or so degrees, enough to see it fully liquefied. This fluidic butter then flowed swiftly from her and everyone’s grasp, through the gaps of a tennis racket, and joined the circus, never to be seen again.

“Egad! I have failed in my quest,” said Roby. “And to think I thought I tried my best!”

“Give it less thought!” said Traycup. “The butter’s a gesture desired, but not ironed! We’ve new pals to accommodate—butter may’n’ve bee’nough! Your quest’s done finely, and finally, but in sorrow I changed the brand en route!”

“You are very kind,” said Roby, “but now we must rewind. In order to take friends to where this journey ends, despite my error, we want for a farer to take us from this location to our later destination!”

“We’ll slate a new time to brew some ideas,” said Traycup. “In the first place, let’s to’ve a moment and distribute beverages and victuals! Oopertreepia’ll not go without us.”

“It may,” warned Ben Garment. “Oopertreepia’s ways are Oopertreepian indeed.”

“Fair Ben,” said Traycup, “let’s unplace us on a doomy stat’ment! A journey’s point’s the journey, ’fter all—so let’s call us a clan and get on a hike!”

“Clan or no,” said Ben Garment, “if we’re to continue a journey, we need a compass’s point, at least! Or, to sharpen the point—Traycup, do you have knowledge of Oopertreepia’s even location?”

“That’s unhad,” admitted Traycup, “but fearn’t—there’s ways to find ways!” He rolled up a mental sleeve so as to display that which was contained therewithin, and thence the lot of them began a plan to develop a plan—or at least, to enwarm the oven and see an idea baked.