In episode 18 we meet a new character. A very important character. A strange one too. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble spotting it. Hint: it’s not an earplug. In fact I don’t know what it is.
Good fortune smiled upon Celestino that day / night / or whatever it was on the lonely planetoid. The device read his mind and delivered the instructions to him in a language he could understand. “Hola, buenas dias,” it began, and then carried on until the end, when it said, “Fin. Auf wiedersehen.” The result of this education was his immediate relocation to another room, in which he discovered a large spiky ball that perfectly matched the item about which the previous machine had spoken. He pressed the ‘Go’ button, then stepped back to wait in concerned anticipation…
Would the machine actually work? Were its components still intact? Had it lain unused for so long that it couldn’t be bothered to reactivate? All these questions, and more – like ‘Where’s the toilet?’- ran through his fevered mind.
Still following the abusive signage, Erronious and Hellfire wondered how close Celestino was staying to them…
But, of course, they had no idea that he wasn’t interested in the least about where they were, and that, now ten seconds into his wait, Celestino watched as the colour at the spiky ball machine’s base altered…
“Um…hi,” he said as he moved closer to the green apparition…
…”I’m told that you are a device that was built by an ancient and highly technological civilisation.”
It was a statement made to sound like a question. The spiky ball recognised it as such. “Yes,” it replied in a fair facsimile of an earplug’s voice, but slightly more pleasant with a slight echo, “that’s right. Who are you, and what do you want?”
This reply surprised Celestino. He found himself warming to the machine. “Very abrupt.” He said back. “I like it. My name is Celestino Candalabra: what I want is the antidote to a terrible climatic change that had been brought to the world upon which I live by something from this planetoid. It was a bright light that attached itself to a spaceship, which landed upon my world, whereupon it detached itself; gained energy from an unknown source; and then activated – bringing forth an instantaneous ice-age for many kilometres in every direction. By now, I fear, the storm may have engulfed the surface of the entire planet.”
“Wow,” the machine responded, “that was a mouthful: with a vocabulary and verbal dexterity like that you should become a rapper – that is a ‘rap artist’. Do they have ‘rap artists’ on your world? Hey, maybe you should take a sit down and catch your breath.”
“No, it’s okay.” Celestino replied. “I live alone in a mountainside cave: I talk to myself a lot. I’m well used to it. Well – do you have what I need?”
“Not upon my person, you should understand.” The machine said to this. “But check this out.”
With that it transformed into a different configuration that almost stunned Celestino into a coma…
“Neat, huh?” The blue dome said. “Now watch as I turn a nice shade of peach…
…and tell you something about my origin.”
Celestino’s smile was wan: he’d already figured he was in for a long lecture, and he wasn’t sure his knees were up to standing around immobile for too long. “Great.” He replied.
“A long time ago,” the peach dome began, the “Schmerglies lived on a lovely world that was lit by two suns that perpetually tore matter from one another and so warmed the planetary system…
“Crumbs,” Celestino said as he watched the image of the twin-stars as they appeared in the air before him – much as he had displayed images of the weather attack to Erronious and Hellfire in his cave, “spectacular. But surely it couldn’t have been a never ending cycle of give and take between the two suns. There must have been some leakage of matter and energy.”
“Nah,” the peach dome replied, “it was spot-on perfect – until the Schmerglies figured they could tap into it, and solve all their power-generation problems in one fell swoop. Needless to say, as they drew energy away from the cyclical nature of the exchange…
…it got…and I use a technical term here with which you might not be familiar; it got buggered up. The Schmerglies’ tech guys couldn’t control it. It got…ah…”
“Buggered up?” Celestino suggested.
“Yeah,” the peach dome said appreciatively, “and, as a result, the entire system became sub-atomically unstable. Some tech stopped working. And being sub-atomically unstable, there was a better than evens chance that something would de-stabilize it so badly that it would simply explode…
…So they sodded off somewhere else in the galaxy, and left this planetoid behind to warn-off anyone considering the exploitation of the remaining energy resources.”
“Fine.” Celestino said to this. “But why did they leave all this tech here. Why a climate-wrecking device, for example? Wasn’t that just a tad irresponsible?”
The peach dome agreed wholeheartedly. “Too right it was, chum.” It said. “And I would have argued against it. But they figured, since they’d gone to the trouble and expense of inventing it, and that it was too dangerous to take with them, they thought they’d leave it all behind as a kind of memorial to, or celebration of, their greatness.”
“Big headed sods, then?” Celestino sniffed his disdain.
“Ooh, yeah.” The alien device agreed. “Pompous gits too. I’m almost embarrassed to be a product of their ridiculous society. One good thing about them, though: whenever they created something nasty, they always made a countermeasure. That antidote you wanted…?
Again the device transformed…
“This is the mobile me.” The red, one-eyed, backward-sloping triangle said by way of introduction. “Now we walk.”
“Walk?” A horrified Celestino wailed. “Haven’t I walked far enough? And I stood around for ages while you showed me that slide show!”
In reply to this, the red triangle said, “You want the antidote, don’t you?”
So, moments later…
…the residual glow of the second transformation subsided, and the earplug realised he had no alternative.
“Oui.” He said, though he had no idea why he’d used French.
© Paul Trevor Nolan 2022
P.S What is that thing? I found it in my ‘parts’ bin. Anyone recognize it?
Tooty Nolan: Languishing Somewhere Between Clever and Stupid 