Tasha began picking at the awful non-matching fuschia nail polish adorning her fingers. "Snerdly could be anywhere! He could be out there being dive-bombed by Pelicans in Hanson tee-shirts!"
"Is that a note of concern I hear in your voice?" Mollie teased.
"As if! I just don’t think any of us should go look for him. The Hanson tee-shirts alone are enough to make me squirm!" Tasha said sincerely.
"Like, the liz-dudes say Snerdly will be most okay, whether we like it or not - cuz like the pelicans haven't hit a moving target yet. And like if he's the primo-first, c'est la vie, eh?" Sparki shrugged. "We totally must concentrate on making a most excellent bomb."
Luckily, they were all saved from the tedious task of arguing Snerdly's fate when he appeared at the entrance of the hot fudge hut, his greasy hair singed and his face blackened. His glasses hung on his face in an awkwardly twisted, but somehow aesthetically pleasing manner (for Snerdly). His polyester suit was torn and charcoaled, but his pocket protector was still in tact.
"It's a jungle out there!" he wheezed.
"Just where have you been?" Tasha demanded, hands on hips.
Snerdly sniffed. "Well, I thought that by isolating the trajectory patterns of the missile disbursement requistionary forces, I could somehow predict the next attack and plan a reasonable defense by maintaining certain attributes of the attackers, THEREBY isolating the identity of the enemy…"
Sparki looked like she almost understood him. She cocked her head sideways like a cockerel Spanish puppy, then stuck out her tongue. "They are, like pelicans, you bogus pea brain."
"Impossible…"
Reginald jabbered at Sparki. Just then, they heard the wailing, whistling, and screeching sound of a missile being dropped. Everyone froze inside the ice cream igloo, and waited. There was a crash and a smash and a bang and a whump and a ping…then all was silent. At that moment, a two foot smoked summer sausage came sailing down the chimney and rolled to a stop.
"The enemy is most definitely armed with now identifiable flying sausages, therefore they are…Polish butchers!" Snerdly announced triumphantly.
"Can that thing like explodamundo?" Sparki wondered as she kicked the "dud" missile, wondering if it could blow up Snerdly without effort or even a broken nail.
"That is soooo dangerous!" Mollie squeaked.
Tasha's stomach roared. "Hey - can that thing be eaten?" she asked.
Snerdly pushed the women out of the way and delicately picked up the meat. Holding it gingerly between two fingers, Snerdly ran to the door and heaved it outside with all of his strength. It fell exactly one foot away. With baited breath (whatever that means), the others waited to see what would happen. They waited and waited and waited and waited.
Finally, Ignatius spoke and Sparki sighed as she translated: "That is most heinously why the pelicans are not winning the bogus War," she said solemnly.
Several minutes passed before they realized that all was silent outside. The pelicans had ceased to attack. Cautiously, the lizards, the humans and Snerdly stepped outside, looked up at the sky…and gasped.
Hanging there, like a balloon, only heavier, bigger and full of creatures that were full of hot air, was a Space Ship. It was perhaps the size of fifteen hundred elephants lying down and was silver and gold with racing stripes in various shades of green. ("Tack-y," Tasha murmured at the author, "can't you think of a nicer color scheme? How about painting the ship pink?") In large print was the legend "IVP".
"Oh, shit - it's the IVP! They've found me!" Sparki gasped, momentarily forgetting to speak Val-talk.
"It's the Stranger!" Iggie and Reg yelped in English.
"It's a bird…" said Mollie.
"It's a plane…" Tasha added.
"It's…"
"My big brother!" finished Snerdly.
They all turned in shock and horror as Snerdly began waving at the ship, drawing attention to all of them. Doors opened and huge speakers were revealed on the side of the ship. A staticky voice spilled forth, mixed with amp feedback, causing sickening whines. "Attention Lizards and Pelicans. This is the Mad Hatter - President of the IVP and future Emperor of the Known Galaxy. Surrender your planet and leave within one hour or we will destroy you." With that, the ship flew away.
Yes, it was true. One of the things covered in the 92 and 1/3-page dossier on the Mad Hatter (remember that from Chapter One? No? Go back and re-read it. There will be a test later…) was that he founded the IVP and that he had every intention of using it to take over the universe some day. Of course, Mollie and Tasha never read the dossier (and their bird was happy to have the fresh lining) so they didn't know any of this. And the Mad Hatter was mad. He had thought that the pelicans would have wiped out the lizards in record time, leaving the moon free for the taking, but he had not counted on them not being able to hit the side of a barn with a shovel, much less the lizard's homes with edible combustibles. Now he would have to dispose of them himself - and he HATED messy cleanups.
He also never counted on his old nemesis, Sparki, appearing on the scene and helping the lizards. If he had known about her presence, he never would have left the moon alone for a minute, much less an hour…
Snerdly stopped waving his scrawny arms and looked crestfallen. "He's gone. The only civilized being in the galaxy, the only intelligent life in the solar system and he's gone. And I am trapped here with you pathetic morons!"
"Huh?" Tasha looked up from her careful examination of the pattern of her skirt. "Oh, hi Snerdly…"
Snerdly wailed.
"Get a grip!" Mollie exclaimed. Snerdly forgot he was upset and took her up on her offer. The slimy snake snidely pinched her salacious butt. Mollie casually, and without effort, bitch slapped him.
"Like, I hate to break up a major love fest, but we're on a time limit here, dudes!" Sparki exclaimed, taking control. "Okay, like Iggie will pick the lock on our most non-triumphant space ship and Reg will totally and fer surely round up the lizards and get them on board. Is that like completely copacetic?"
"Umm, how are we going to get all those lizards onto our ship?" Mollie inquired.
"Well, the lizards are compact creatures and they travel light. No problemaroonie. Finding a bogus combustible material capable of blasting this moon in a most excellent way is our only hideously heinous worry-rama."
"I have an idea about that…" Mollie began. She was interrupted by Snerdly, who, somehow managing to exist without his pocket computer, had strung some lifesavers on a piece of licorice rope and was using the contraption like an abacus.
"According to my calculations based on the mass and density of this solid matter and derived directly from the mass quantum physics involved in propelling certain combustions into the atmosphere, I can firmly state that…"
"Let's just use Pop Rocks," Mollie announced.
"Pop Rocks?!?" asked Tasha and Sparki in surprise.
"Rocks which are indigenous to this moon do NOT pop and even if they did, they could not pop enough to pulverize planetary substances - organic or otherwise. Furthermore…"
Mollie ignored him. "Yeah, Pop Rocks. Remember when we were kids and they told us not to eat Pop Rocks and drink soda at the same time because…"
Tasha jumped up and down, clapping her hands together as she and Mollie finished the sentence at the same time, "…your stomach would explode!"
"The chances of finding Pop Rocks on this moon are 2,998,276 to 9." Snerdly stated surreptitiously.
Actually, the odds were a great deal better than that, but we won't get into it now. Strangely enough, between Mollie, Tasha and Sparki they had enough logic to figure out that if Snerdly had licorice and life savers, that they must have come from SOME where on the moon and that there must be more where that came from. Well, it made sense at the time. Snerdly assured them that he could most surely find the location of Candy Land. He raced to the (now opened) space ship and started drafting a map on his AutoCAD computer. The other three left him to the task and wandered about aimlessly until they found it themselves.
"Jackpot!" Sparki cried. She began stuffing large quantities of Pop Rocks into her backpack. "Like, the way I see it, we can totally dig a mondo hole, toss the excellent Pop Rocks in, let someone give it a drink of super-carbonated beverage, zippo back to the ship and (zoom!) buzz away to safety." She turned solemnly to the twins. "Most dangerous job."
"We can't ask one of the lizards to do it - they've been through so much already." Mollie fretted, watching the troops of reptiles file past in rows of three onto the ship.
Sparki finished emptying the pool of Pop Rocks into her knapsack-which seemed to be at least ten times smaller on the outside than within. "And, like, who do we know who's stupid enough to risk life and limb for no fame or glory?"
"Here's a map to the locality in question," said Snerdly, walking past two large lollipops and stepping onto a small garden of gumballs.
All three women smiled simultaneously. "Hi, Snerdly…."