"Wowee! Zappo!" exclaimed the newcomer, "Excellent! I mean, really MONDO cool! Like check this, I was bookin', layin' way flat out, I mean ferrrrrow, zoooom! And these dudes were like, y'know, right on top? And I thought BOGUS, I'm histo primo, but then there's, like, this most excellent FLASH, y'know, ahh-ahh? And now I'm in this most totally cool place, I'm sure."
The shaken trio absorbed this all carefully. Mollie decided she must be friendly and very nearly sentient. Snerdly decided she had large breasts. Tasha decided she was the singly worst-dressed person she'd seen since Elton John hocked his wardrobe.
The woman beamed at them and brushed some cosmic fluff off of her flourescent, multi-spectrum tie-dye jumpsuit. "Oh, hey, I totally forgot to intro!" She bounded over to the nearest body as fast as her metallic-sriped hi-tops would take her, and began pumping Tasha's expensively manicured hand, much to Tasha's expensively manicured distress. "Okay, it's like, my real name is something totally heinous, so you can call me Sparki, like with an `i'. Cool, huh? Peace, dude and dudettes."
With Mollie serving as an occasional interpreter, Sparki explained that she was being pursued by the IVPs (which may or may not have stood for the Intergalactic Vinyl Patrol, as that was lost in the thranslation) for the technological crime of smuggling large quantities of ancient 33 1/3 RPM records. Only a fool would have believed this half-cocked story.
"That's so sad!!" Tasha cried.
Sparki continued to tell her totally improvised tale: Just as her ship, "The Rude Dog", was disintegrated by enemy fire, Tasha and Mollie's ship has apparently materialized for an instant in exactly the same point in time and space, thereby saving Sparki from Certain Death at almost impossible odds (of course, that's what breaking the possibility shield is all about). But where they were now was anyone's guess. (Even Snerdly's.)
The very confused group gathered in the cockpit to assess the situation. Mollie randomly jabbed a few buttons on the main console while Sparki crawled underneath; Snerdly consulted his pocket computer and Tasha stared out the main viewport, hoping in vain for a glimpse of a mall.
The ship hung limply in space like a wet noodle.
"I wonder why Chad said this was his ship," Mollie pondered. "Was it some kind of a joke?"
"If we ever meet him again, I'll give him something to joke about," growled Tasha, "Here we are, tricked into stealing a ship, thrown through the possibility shield, and now stuck in the middle of this fashion forsaken universe, trapped!" She nervously fluffed her hair. "I can't take this much longer. I haven't bought anything in eight hours. If this keeps up, I'm gonna kill somebody!" Her glance inadvertantly fell on Snerdly, who for once was too busy calculating physically impossible sub-atomic particles to notice.
"Do you realize," he began in a classic accusatory tone, "that there is absolutely no way to begin to attempt to commence to contemplate the remotest possibility of where we are? We could be billions upon hectillions of solar years in the past OR the future. We could be at the opposite end of the realm of existence. It could be millenia before our microscopic remains are discovered, long after any clues of our gruesome, painful deaths have vanished. It could be-"
"Shut up!!!!" yelled Mollie and Tasha.
"Eureka!" cried Sparki, wriggling out from under the console. "I have discovered why we are most bogusly hanging out here." She proudly held out an intricately small and ominous looking bit of machinery.
The others gathered around and peered at the thing with interest. "So what is it?" Mollie asked.
"It's..." (Sparki paused for full dramatic impact) "...the Wankle Rotary Engine." (Tasha and Mollie inexplicably blushed. Snerdly felt strangely aroused.)
"This is the most totally delicate and mondo technical part on the WHOLE ship," Sparki went on, tensely. "We are talking, like PRIMO awesome."
Tasha glared balefully at the tiny engine. "Well, what's WRONG with it?"
"If I may," Snerdly began, without pausing to hear if he may not, "upon cursory examination of the mechanism in question, I'd say the fibrous propulsion unit has -----OW!"
Mollie pretended she hadn't kicked him in the shin, and so did everyone else (save Snerdly). Sparki pointed out one bit of the Wankle.
"See? The rubber band came off. Most uncool."
Mollie was about to assure them she had a rubber band somewhere in her drum kit when Snerdly made a ghastly choking noise. The others turned with cheerful curiosity, hoping for a permanent larynx injury on his part, and beheld him gesturing violently at the right viewport.
"Whoa, totally excellent seizure, dude," Sparki nodded. Snerdly continued to emit high pitched creaking noises.
"Should we help him?" Mollie finally asked, when the sounds became really annoying.
"He COULD swallow his tongue," Tasha pointed out.
Mollie considered for a moment..."Still, don't you think we should help him anyway?"
"Oh, alright."
The three of them valiantly walked all the way across the cockpit. "Okay, Snerdly, what gives," Mollie demanded.
Snerdly could only continue to flap his hand madly at the
viewport, so - against their collective better judgement - they finally looked OUT the
port......