Saving Pie Eyed Peety

I was seated at the picnic table at the spring, keeping a weather eye on the stench bubble, watching the mission unfold at Other Earth on my trusty tablet. The team didn’t need to pass through the portal that was swamped with the foul water, and would never have done it anyway. All it took for them to travel to Other Earth was text in the same coordinates I had used when I lost the first phone there and hit send–but they would arrive five minutes later than I.

Renfield had the phone, Gwen the money and Daisy took it all in on the camera and microphone assembly that was on her head, along with her glitter and paper mache horn. Each team member wore a necklace that contained a fob that connected them to the phone. They brought a fourth fob (also in Gwen’s possession) for the object I wanted them to retrieve. Yes, a magic fob like the tricorder Star Trek leaned heavily on to jump plausibility holes. Only fobbed persons and objects could time travel via the second flip phone. The phone previously used and lost by me was tuned to another fob altogether.

According to legend, President Obama once said “Never underestimate Joe’s [Biden] ability to f*$# things up.” If you replace “Joe’s” with “Our,” you then have what might be considered the Saragun Springs’ motto and/or Mission Statement–yet another item I attribute to Unchecked Free Will.

Immediately after Renfield pushed send the tablet screen filled with a distorted view of Daisy’s paper mache horn. It was smack in the center and obscured about two thirds of the picture. From what little I could see, it appeared that they had arrived in the same parking lot that I had landed near at the start of my trip.

I sighed and sent a text to the team:

GODDAM HORN BLOCKING MY VIEW

In return I received the following: MESSAGE PENDING.SCHEDULED TO ARRIVE AT OTHER EARTH IN O.E. YEAR 1996…

“Rat bastard–give a flip phone time machine any chance to pee in your lager and it will,” I muttered.

Fortunately the microphone worked and after forgiving myself for forgetting to install two way communication. I closed my eyes, listened and imagined.

“Hi,” Renfield said. To whom, I didn’t know right off. “Nice doggy, cute babies…Here you go plenty for all,” she added and I knew that it was the mother Coyote and her pups. I recall Renfield stuffing her pockets with something before going. Most likely Dog biscuits that the Boss keeps on hand, even though she doesn’t have a Dog.

Then I caught if not a lucky break, at least a mixed result. I heard Gwen laugh.”Daisy, you’re invisible but your horn and helmet show.” I opened my eyes and saw fuzzy movement on my tablet, then Gwen’s face as she adjusted the horn so it wouldn’t block the camera.

“Thank God disembodied cam helmets and glitter horns were so common in 1946,” Gwen, forever the wiseass, said.

“Right?” Renfield, also a consistent wiseass, added. And they did nothing about the situation. I watched Daisy follow them into the lounge. Daisy is eighteen inches tall at her highest point; mainly, I saw shoes and the gravel parking lot.

But it improved once they got inside the building. I heard Gwen say, “That’s them over there.”

The they in question were Dr. Dagmar and Durwood. Daisy pointed the camera in their direction. I saw them seated at the same table. Durwood was working on his art and Dagmar was examining the phone with a magnifying glass. The team got closer and closer, heralded by the beat of little, invisible hooves.

“Hi, mind if we join you?” Gwen said, but it really wasn’t a question.

I watched Renfield pick Daisy up and place her in a chair at the table.

“What the hell is that?” Dagmar asked, looking in Daisy’s direction. I’m guessing that the floating horn and helmet was a bit of a conversation piece.

“Not a that, but a Goat, darling. Her name is Daisy Cloverleaf,” Renfield said. “She’s mostly invisible,” she added with a whisper.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Daisy said, obviously understanding that there was no longer a need for stealth.

Durwood looked up and was gobsmacked by Gwen’s beauty. Although he would be a dweeb in any dimension, Durwood was still a guy and Gwen has the gobsmack effect on guys, well the straight ones anyway.

“Was there a woman here a few minutes ago–about three feet tall and a bit of a mouth?”

Dr. Dagmar pointed her flip phone at Renfield and pushed send. That’s a tell of an evil genuis if there ever was one. They just have to push buttons.

“Wrong frequency,” Renfield said. “But you can keep the phone. What we want is the drawing our friend was looking at.”

Gwen sat in the chair next to Durwood. She placed one hand on his and took the drawing I had dropped in the other–for I’d told her what it looked like–and purred “I’ll give you ten bucks for this.”

I think Durwood was expecting a different kind of proposition, yet he sort of nodded yes, and Gwen laid five two dollar bills on the table.

Dr. Dagmar noticed the fob on Gwen’s necklace and reached out and touched it and said, “What’s this?” the instant Renfield hit send to return the crew to Sargun Springs. That action, naturally, brought Dr. Dagmar along, but Daisy had the presence of mind to tap the send button on Dagmar’s phone which sent her back to Other Earth before the link closed. If Daisy hadn’t acted as soon as she had, we’d have been stuck with her–who’d later be responsible for the rise of the Atomic Monsters on Other Earth, aided by something she’d discovered in the flip phone at her laboratory. It takes a special Evil Genius to accomplish that, one that real Earth has never produced. And if it were to happen it would have had to happen very early.

Gwen handed me the picture. “What does it all mean?” she asked.

“Well, it’s like this.”