6. Stakeout

Chapter 6: Stakeout

Hop-Pop's really been getting on my case lately. It feels like every little thing I do sets hm off. Like, is it my fault I have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom because my system's still adjusting to all his gross swamp cooking? And I do NOT spend two hours in there. It's like, forty minutes, fifty tops. And then he goes off on these long rants about how everything was so much tougher back in his day. At least he was hatched here! He didn't get ripped away from everything he knew and get thrown into a world that wasn't made for him! I bet if, somehow, he wound up in my world for whatever reason, he wouldn't find it so easy to adjust.

Huh, what's Sprig yelling about? I'm gonna go check. BRB journal.

Okay, so apparently, right under our noses – well, my nose – someone made off with about haf our corn crop? You'd think someone would've seen something.

Anyway, Sprig seems convinced that the thief is going to return tonight (if there is a thief; I'm fairly sure we're just dealing with a really big crow), so two of us have to stay up to try and catch them, and for some reason it has to be me and Hop-Pop. Frankly, I don't see why I couldn't just do this alone. I don't see HP staying awake all night at his age, which is I assume really really old… but I guess if this thief can steal that much corn that quickly, it might just take two to handle them. Blech. I am not looking forward to tonight. Hour after hour of "This is what's wrong with your generation" and "back in my day" and "does this look infected to you?" Okay, he only asked that last one once, but once was enough, thank you very much.

I am writing this the next morning with a pounding headache, 'cause last night, things got weird.

It started innocently enough. Just two folks sitting in uncomfortable silence staring at a cornfield, hoping for something to happen. Eventually, I felt myself starting to nod off. Hop-Pop, of course, had a smart remark about my lack of stamina. Luckily, I had come prepared for such an occasion. I always keep at least one bottle of Blam Berry Blitz in my backpack at all times. It comes packed with 8 essential kinds of sugar and caffeine and probably some other stuff that I shouldn't be putting in my body, but it's gotten me through more than one all-nighter. I'm telling you, if you've got a paper due tomorrow morning and you've barely started, Blam Berry Blitz is crucial.

Of course, Hop-Pop had a remark about that, too, and of course he totally new better, and that I should be relying on some kind of nasty gourd tea. Now, Marcy talked me into trying kombucha once, and it was genuinely the absolute worst thing I ever tasted, so I highly doubt that, but then he pushed my most sensitive button; he told me I probably couldn't handle it. And if there's one thing I can't resist, it's proving someone wrong. Actually… I guess maybe that's one way HP and I are alike, because we both grabbed each other's drinks and took one big chug.

Biiiiig mistake

Now, how do I describe the taste? Well… what if you managed to turn sadness into a liquid? And what f you took that sadness, boiled it in a teakettle made out of self-loathing, poured it into a mug of nightmares, sweetened it with the tears of the innocent, then you used that liquid to water a plant grown from a seed of misery until it bore a fruit of pain, then blended that fruit into a smoothie of lost dreams?

You'd get something I'd rather drink than gourd tea.

Judging by HP's reaction, Blam Berry Blitz wasn't exactly doing him any favors either. I guess I can't blame him. The stuff's so sweet that for three hours afterward, raw sugar tastes like dirt. Anyway, the face he made was hilarious. I guess mine was too, because we both broke out laughing and for a moment, it felt like the huge wall of ice between us had melted. For that brief moment, we understood where each other were coming from. Me, nostalgic for a world I lost, him for a simpler time. Of course, it didn't last long because after finally acknowledging we both had it bad, we immediately started arguing about who had it worse. Which I still say is me! After all, at least he's where he belongs! This world's completely alien to me!

Anyway, it was at this point, like I said, that things started to get weird. See, we'd both drank something wholly incompatible with our body chemistry, and we started – for lack of a better term – trippin' balls.

Of course, I have no frame of reference for what a drug trip is actually like, but I have to figure it felt something like this; colors are way too loud, sounds way too bright, people's head start turning into teakettles, your hair starts glowing, and you're convinced you have magic powers. Heh… imagine, me with glowing hair and magic powers. Ridiculous!

Well, it was at this point, the corn thief made his appearance. And when I said corn thief, I mean it literally, a tall lanky figure with a corncob for a head, and a smaller corncob head growing out of that first corncob head, which, granted, should have been a red flag, but hey, I don't know what's real and what's not in this crazy world even when I'm not tripping out, so how do I know there's no such thing as corn demons?

Anyway, it was time to call upon our magic powers to take down the beast, but they shrugged off even our ultimate super combo move like it was nothing (because, in hindsight, all we were doing was making goofy poses and shouting out attacks), so we grabbed some floating power-ups which looked suspiciously like farm tools and charged in to attack them directly. And that was when we noticed the corn thief sounded suspiciously like Sprig. It's a good thing we started coming down at that point, because a moment longer, we might've killed him. That's… kind of a scary thought now that I think about it. I could have lost my best friend, and HP could've lost his grandson, all because we drank the wrong thing. Kind of a strong anti-drug message there.

So, it turns out, in a surprise twist, we really did wind up catching the corn thief, because it was Sprig the whole time. This was all some sort of elaborate ruse to get HP and me to resolve our differences by giving us a common enemy to focus on. Which was pretty stupid, but I guess it kinda worked? I mean, he and I still have our differences, but in the end, I know when it counts, he'll always pull a Stinky McGuire.

Of course, that phrase is meaningless if you don't know Stinky…

A.N.: That's three full episodes down. I'm going to take a bit of a break because I finally have some inspiration for the next chapter of Body Issues, but I'll be back here soon after.

Schweenieboy: I don't think I'd wanna touch those things, honestly.

Snake screamer: You kinda cut off there before you did explain…

Jose: His cooking seems to have improved by the time of "The Dinner"; I guess Anne convinced him to finally give up that old recipe book.

TG: Yeah, exactly

Iron maker 2: My thoughts as well.

Next: The Domino Effect