Chapter 18 — Into the forest

"Safety measures?" asked Marvin. "To protect us?"

Fluffy was sitting still on the passenger seat, looking determined.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean eliminate their capacity to locate me."

Marvin was waiting for the rest of the explanation, but nothing else came. Fluffy closed her eyes.

After a quite long silence, she started coughing. Then she coughed again, twice, with a harder, metallic, sound.

"Are you okay?"

After one last bout of coughing, she spat something on the car's seat.

It looked like a blue jewel to Marvin, a polished marble gem with not too sharp edges, in the shape of a very small egg, actually. It was blue and radiant, softly glowing.

"We need to burry this somewhere far away from here. This is probably how they can know where I am."

"A tracker?" asked Marvin, astounded.

Fluffy explained that when she incarnates she always takes with her this kind of celestial stone that is very common in the Fluffy Galaxy. When she arrives on Earth, it is incorporated inside her organic body at birth, together with her divine soul.

Then, this type of blue radiant stone emits strong waves that propagate in space and can be received by a quite distant spaceship. This is how she can speak to her servants at a great distance. They can send a message through the emitter of their spaceship. And Fluffy can answer through her blue stone. Her mental waves are amplified by the stone and broadcasted far away in space.

This is how they can communicate, and the how the crew can know where and when to come and pick her up. This, of course, when their receiving system works correctly.

But even without verbal communication, the stone is also detectable at a distance with the right instruments.

 Now, it seemed that the members of the Golden Fleet where not able to track Fluffy anymore. But somehow, her enemies, who were not supposed to know about her existence, nor about this device, had found a way to detect it, and were now determined to eliminate the goddess and her future general.

"Are you sure about that?" asked Marvin.

"Nope. It could be that we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I find this highly doubtful. My instinct tells me they know about me. Now let's drive far away from here and get rid of this thing."

Marvin agreed.

When they reached the limit of the town, they stopped at a gardening shop and Marvin went inside to buy a shovel. Then, they drove for two or three more hours.

Now they were driving in the middle of nowhere. It was a pure calm northern wilderness. Green lush forests were stretching on each side of the road.

They left the main road and entered the woods following a narrow dirt track. They stopped the Toyota somewhere and turned off the engine.

Marvin took the shovel out of the trunk, and he and the swift divine cat walked through the ferns, under the high pine trees. Invisible birds were singing soft soothing songs, hidden in the high boughs. It was almost summer, and the mild air of the forest was contrasting with the tense atmosphere in which the rest of the world was plunged since the last weeks. Everything here seemed completely disconnected with the events, at peace, unmoved, as if nothing had ever happened.

When they found a nice spot, Fluffy nodded.

"I really hope no one sees me doing this." said Marvin starting the digging of a small hole in the ground. "One might think I'm burying a corpse or something…"

"By the way…" he continued, throwing a shovelful of dirt to the side "Are you sure you want to do this? If we bury the jewel in here, there will be definitely no way left for you to communicate with your guys."

"I'm already unable to communicate with them."

"Yeah, but, think… If they manage somehow to repair their broken system. And they start looking for you. Now we are completely sure they will never reach you. Is this deep enough?"

"I think so. The depth doesn't matter too much. This thing is able to emit through almost anything, anyway. If my team repairs the amplifier and is unable to hear me because we got rid of the tracker, too bad. It is still a better situation than having our enemies able to detect it and shoot giant lasers at us."

"So, you think they will try to shoot at this location now?"

"Not necessarily. Destroying buildings of a major city still fits somehow with the rest of their narrative. But destroying forests to preserve the planet, hum… not so much. But they might send someone on foot that would come over here just to check what's going on. If so, they might take away the jewel and we lose it for good. If not, we'll still be able to get it back later."

"What if we lose it for good? And if there is no Gropius to help us, there's no other way left to communicate with your team. Or is it?"

"Maybe there is another way."

"Really?"

"I'm not sure for now. I have to check. We'll see…"

Marvin nodded, tossed the little blue jewel in the hole he dug, then he filled it in again. When he finished, he tied up a white dirty piece of cloth to a low branch.

"What are you doing?" asked Fluffy impatiently.

"That's a piece of fabric I use to polish my car. With this, we'll be able to find the exact location where we buried your jewel. Just in case we want to retrieve it someday."

"You'd better write down the GPS coordinates, okay?"

"Yeah, you're right... Gimme a sec."

"Come on now. Let's get gone."

They walked between the high trees, back to the car. But when they arrived, there was another car parked just behind Marvin's Toyota, a big pick-up.

It was already too late to hide away from the person who was inspecting the Toyota, because Marvin had already stepped out from the woods.

The man lifted his fat mustached face from the tiny notebook where he was probably writing down the number from the license plate. He took a slanted unfriendly look at Marvin and his cat.

His uniform was leaving little doubt about his function. The man was a forest ranger from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

"Is this your vehicle, sir?" he asked in a surprisingly high-pitched voice.

"No." answered Marvin. "I mean… yes. It's probably mine.

"You're not sure?"

"Uh… I wasn't sure, but… Yeah, I recognize it now. It's my car. Is there a problem?"

While speaking, Marvin arrived close enough to the ranger to be able to read the name "Lachance" on the badge that was pinned on the officer's large chest.

 "It depends." replied officer Lachance. "Can I ask you what you were doing over there, sir?"

"Well, nothing. Just walking my cat in the forest. Nothing unusual."

"With a shovel in your hand?"

"Of course. I use it as a staff. It helps."

"Your staff has some dirt on it. On the side made to dig in the ground."

"Oh, yeah, you're right." Marvin quickly wiped the dirt from the shovel with his hand. "Thank you, officer."

Lachance chuckled.

"Sir, can I see your driving license, please?"

"Why? Am I trespassing against any law if I walk around with a cat and a shovel?"

"Sir, the federal forest law is very strict when it comes to the protection of the environment and biodiversity. If you are found guilty of the destruction of wildlife habitat, destruction of endangered species, including fauna and flora, illegal hunting, illegal timber harvesting, degradation of natural soils, you may expose yourself to a severe fine or imprisonment penalty. Let me remind you that arson is a criminal offence and carries a penalty of fourteen years imprisonment..."

"All right, all right. Here is my driving license. I was doing no harm."

Ranger Lachance took Marvin's license. His eyes looked down at it, then came up again, suspiciously, on Marvin's face. Finally, the ranger wrote Marvin's name down on his notebook.

"Thank you, officer, for protecting our forests with such dedication. Can I go now?"

Agent Lachance didn't hand back the driving license, but instead stepped a bit closer to Marvin in a threatening way.

"You know what? I don't quite like your face. I don't like this sneering smile on it…"

This big fleshy mustached man in a uniform was quite intimidating, although the threat he was intending was a bit mitigated by his high-pitched voice.

 "I think you will wait here a bit while I'm calling my colleagues. We'll investigate around and maybe we'll find out what exactly you were doing over there with that shovel of yours…"

At that moment, Fluffy jumped up on Marvin's shoulders and looked steadily at the forest ranger.

"What…?" started Lachance, suddenly frightened. "Why is this cat staring at me like this?"

"What are you doing, Fluffy?" whispered Marvin to the bristled cat standing winded around his shoulders.

"I have no patience for that." answered Fluffy, stiffly.

Ranger Lachance looked suddenly baffled.

"Is it the cat who's just spoken? Or are you some kind of damned ventriloquist? All right, now don't try to make a fool out of me…"

"He… he can hear you?" asked Marvin, surprised.

"He can, because I want it." replied the cat.

"Now, look at me carefully." she ordered the forest ranger.

Her eyes were now like blazing flames, two drops of incandescent fused gold radiating powerful waves of strange energy.

The ranger's eyes were caught. He couldn't avoid the cat's fixed gaze anymore. His own eyes were trapped into fixity, sunken into the pure golden unfathomable depths of the divine stare, lost into an endless labyrinth made out of mirrors of glowing gold.

"Listen, human…" he heard a deep feminine voice telling him, and the voice was seemingly coming from nowhere and from all the directions at the same time. "You've interfered with a galactic being's path. Now don't tread any further. We, the Fluffy goddess, want you to go back from where you came and never annoy us anymore."

The ranger was standing in front of them, staring, not moving anymore, shocked into inertness.

"What have you done?" asked Marvin, in disbelief.

"Spared us some loss of time. Now let's go before he regains consciousness."

Fluffy jumped down to the ground. Marvin quickly took back his driving license that the forest ranger was still holding in his hand and just let go without a reaction.

They jumped in the car, made a quick U-turn, and drove away letting behind them, in a cloud of dust, the paralyzed ranger, standing and drooling a bit, unable to blink despite the dust.

"What happens when he wakes up?" asked Marvin. "He's got my name."

"Don't worry." replied Fluffy who was lying lazily on the passenger's seat. "He won't remember anything about that. I've erased his short-term memory."

"Do you think this guy works for our enemies? Is it why he was after us"

"I don't know…" 

Her eyes closed as if leaden with sudden tiredness.

"Are you okay?" asked Marvin.

"It's so hard to use magic with these material bodies. I feel so tired. I think I'm going to nap while you drive us home, okay?"

"Yeah, sure. Suit yourself."

Fluffy laid down her head with her eyes closed.

"You should see me in my galactic form. You'd see how powerful I can be. Yeah, back in the Fluffy Galaxy, I'm unstoppable… Back in the Fluffy Galaxy…The Fluffy Galaxy…"

She fell asleep, while Marvin was driving back on the road.