42. Fort in the Road
Chapter 42: Fort in the Road
Well, after a brief detour when HP realized he forgot to give Chuck the keys, we've officially started our road trip!
A quick word about the Family Wagon (HP insists on calling it the "Fwagon", which will never catch on). It's about the size of your basic RV, sleeps four, and comes with all the comforts of home, provided that your home is very uncomfortable. It once belonged to one Hal Croakburg, who used it to travel all over the continent, braving all sorts of dangers, until ironically, he died when one of his souvenirs fell of his shelf and conked him on the head. Mental note, no heavy stuff on the shelves.
Today, we finally made it through the mountain pass and into the Amphibian frontier! It's so vast. Speaking as a girl who grew up in LA, I've honestly never had a view this unobstructed. It seems to go on forever. In fact, if you look for too long, it gives you a serious case of eyestrain, so I wouldn't recommend it.
But who cares? Eyestrain eventually goes away. The important thing is that we are on the road to Newtopia and the possibilities are limitless!
Okay, addendum to the last part: the possibilities are not limitless. They are in fact, extremely limited. H has not only laid down the law, he's had it professionally printed and bound.
From the moment we left the valley, we've been subject to Hop Pop's Official Road Rules (© whatever year this is in Amphibia). And while some of them are common sense, others seem to be really arbitrary. For example, rule 29 is "no shouting." Rule 30? "No whispering." Apparently it leads to tension. And it goes on like that for 400 rules, and a good chunk of them contradict other rules. In fact, pretty much any fun thing you can think of has a rule against it. So, basically, we're reduced to being stuck in the wagon, watching any potentially interesting thing pass by in the distance. I can't even play my road trip mix to pass the time, because Rule 73 is "no music". Music attracts Kill Weevils.
This is gonna be a long trip.
Eventually, we just couldn't take it any more. When the Fwagon (dang it, it's catching) came up on some weird ruins a few hours outside the valley, the temptation to explore just became too great. Me and Sprig concocted an excuse to get HP to stop, and then we made a run for it. Of course, he immediately caught on, but we had enough of a lead that I figured we had enough time for some selfies outside the ruins.
Except I guess my phone's camera somehow activated the lock on the doors, so next thing I knew, we were inside!
And what we found inside was beyond anything I ever expected. In all my time in Wartwood, I don't think I've seen anything more advances than something you'd see on the Flintstones, but in here… computers, conveyor belts, all kinds of other machines…. Had Amphibia been holding out on me? Was there WiFi the whole time?
Well, no. But this place was way more advanced than I expected.
When HP eventually caught up to us, he gave us an earful. We'd broken, like, pretty much half of his rules in one go. And maybe it was time to cut out losses, but Sprig found his most favoritest thing ever: a lever. And you know how he is… if there's a lever around, he can't resist pulling it.
And when he did, the whole place came to life, and it became obvious that it was some kind of automated factory. One that somehow still worked after all the time it had been shut down. Which, according to HP, was before they'd even been writing down history.
But we didn't have tie to ponder that, because a factory needs materials, and this factory thought HP was the materials. He dropped down a hatch and would up on a conveyer belt where frog only knew what would happen to him. Probably nothing good.
We had to stop the factory somehow. While I tried to free HP, Sprig tried that old go-to: pushing random buttons. That worked about as well as you'd expect.
Apparently to shut the thing down we needed something called a "disk". I think I've heard my dad mention that computers used to run on things called disks in the before times, but what they looked like and where I was supposed to find one was beyond me.
In the end, it was HP's book of rules that saved us.
Not anything written in it, no. But it was just the right size to jam up the computer's input slot and crash it, hopefully for good.
With HP free and the factory shut down, we got out just in time for the place to blow itself sky high. I guess that's one mystery we won't be solving any time soon.
Well, we expected that HP would crack down even harder after that disaster (especially after Polly used the opportunity to take Bessie drift-racing) but surprisingly, he decided that maybe he was actually being a little too strict with us. Of course, the rule book being destroyed probably had a lot to do with it. All those rules are probably hard to keep straight if you don't have them all handy.
To celebrate our not dying, he took us to "The World's Greatest Diner," And while I really can't judge without context, it did have the best biscuits and beetle gravy I've ever had, topped off with crickets n' cream ice cream. Already this road trip is looking up.
That factory is still bugging me, though. It feels like something that's gonna come up later…
A.N: Short chapter this time, not a lot to say.
MarMarFaAnne: Good catch. And yeah, Marcy seems like she has some kind of ND coding. Pretty much everyone picks up on it. And again, yeah, that is a joke about how all of Season 1 was offloaded in one month
Jose: Thanks!
OMAC001: I'm just disappointed we never saw Chonky Turnip again when so many other characters came back.
Gregorian: I know right? It's kinda wild.
Next: The Ballad of Hopadiah Plantar