Bubble Energy Taken by Force

Festival

Sweaty drummers, playing underneath the signs welcoming visitors to the Indigenous Peoples' Pride festival, unexpectedly stopped and gasped. Blinding flashes interrupted several men's trance dancing. Grass skirts settled down to their bare legs. "Look! Look!" a hundred mouths voiced. A man tumbled from the sky like a wounded bird and struck the tent, bringing it down. "Who's that idiot?" A man, wearing crystals and entangled on ropes of clattering human skulls fashioned by the Ilongot tribal men in the state of liget, stumbled out of the collapsed tent.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III and Hasselblad H3D-II cameras along with a full 1080 progressive HD camcorder all instantly pointed at him and busily recorded many gigabytes worth of front-page news materials, documented for eternity.

He shed the grisly trophy in disgust and quickly located the chair inside the Skiri Pawnees Morning Star bundle ceremony section. It rested on top of a crushed scaffold made ceremonially from wood out of several tree species. "Computer, set our speed to be Warp factor ten. Engage! Can you at least lift off? How about dragging this chair under a rock so I can hide."

A loud crash startled the audience. Heads turned around and eyes incredulously stared at the rolling Huitzilopochtli temple topped with a mangled car. Rough pounding turned the Beetle into a pile of unrecognizable scraps. Soot covered wires, and metal skin hung off the skeleton in tatters; still spinning back wheels, pointing towards the sky, shed charred rubber as it wobbled. Wobbling, top-heavy chariot rumbled out of control down a gentle incline, sideswiping a cactus. Toppled metric-ton plant scattered tire-puncturing needles across a busy highway. Cars screeched wildly. Horns blared as the gaudy thing barged across the blacktop. Its high wooden wheels smashed into the guardrails, causing the temple to capsize.

"I don't see the front end of the car. What happened to it?"

The computer answered, "It's in a trajectory to reach the moon in twenty days. Look up 40 degrees towards the eastern sky."

Still throbbing in full throttle, the engine, attached to ruined front, burned through the atmosphere. Ten seconds later, sparks disappeared as it reached outer space.

"You know, one hundred years from now, Luna settlers are going to have an interesting time figuring out how a V8 managed to land there.

"Maybe we can name it 'Hemi Crator'."

"Resetting the Bubble Energy drive. This may take up to fifteen minutes, best case scenario. If multiple overloads melted its primary power rectifier, the Superjet may become permanently offline."

One of the dancers sneered, "Boy, you sure are awful in the art of levitation. Even after all these decades, you decadent blue-eye, White Americans still can't hold a candle to Tibetan greatness."

"What's that cloud drifting towards us? Uh No! Tobacco smoke! Cough, gag! Get that addiction nerve toxin of death away from me. Ever since the natives gave Columbus tobacco, it spread cancer and suffocating breathing problems throughout the Old World, leading to several million agonizing early graves per year."

A police officer walked to the wrecked car. With his Glock 22 drawn, he yelled in a commanding voice, "You are under arrest for disturbing the peace, destroying private and public property, having at least ten counts of traffic violations, illegal possession of restricted firearms, assault with deadly weapons...

"Drop your weapons. Drop them, drop them", the police demanded. "Hold your fire."

Staccato firing interrupted whatever more he had to say. Two bullets impacted his chest. He survived only because his wife insisted on him wearing a bulletproof vest that day.

"Their recoil may tip your car and chariot over that 200 meter cliff."

They managed to shoot in free fall a hundred more rounds along with two rocket-propelled grenades before impacting the ground far below. A dull thud followed by an explosion shook the area. Quakes cracked loose a section of the rocky cliff. Mounds of boulders in all sizes smothered the burning car.

"Officer, thank goodness you're on the job." Seeing the officer's sad face, Stephen tried comforting him, "Don't feel bad that they didn't peacefully surrender. They're an elite military arm of a dark cult. Topheth's Sword clerics search houses seeking toddlers who are naturally cruel. Taken from their families to live in military camps without the warmth of parents, they scientifically strengthen kids' vicious tendencies, maturing them into murder machines having no emotions except hate. They're madmen with trigger fingers constantly twitching. Never in my life had I seen such barbarians."

"You Europeans are the real barbarians, lusting for conquest, leaving a trail of blood and dismembered body parts wherever you immigrate."

"Shut up," Stephen yelled. "Thanks to you people feeding America's paranoia tendencies with your stupid conspiracy theories, my poor country is now flooded with assault weapons. Owners have shot people who accidentally ring the wrong doorbell. The hate propaganda published by Angry Goddess Earth Corporation, your festivals' sponsor, are being used all over the world to dehumanize Americans, belittle them, making it easier for terrorists to kill us without regrets. Topheth's Sword reeducation camps have libraries full of their horrible magazines."

"You got what was coming."

"Quiet woman. Quit escalating an already tense situation." The officer turned to Stephen, "Mister, what's with the jewels and modified lawn chair done in pink? You act similar to several severely depressed men I counseled who were cruelly jilted by their female dates too many times."

"Good for them. Marriage is men's institution used solely for dominating women."

"Shut up," Stephen screamed, sore from still being single.

"Corin and Audrey can explain everything sir. They convinced me to chase these psychopaths, who came along and stolen the company's vital blueprints. My chair and jewelry are parts for a new invention used in the chase; they had to rush slapping together with what they had."

"Corin? I know him. That does explain everything."

"You pig", the same woman hoarsely yelled. "While you dilly-dally, a man had stolen my car." Loud scrapping of tires drowned out more coarse words she spitted out. Marble sized pebbles dented several voodoo paintings glorifying the 1804 ethnic cleansing against the French in Haiti. Sprayed sand covered a table holding vegetarian meals. Several parked cars were smashed out of the way before he escaped onto the highway.

"He has the crystal disk? Rats!" Stephen moaned to the computer, "Our problem continues."

"Officer Frank speaking. A stolen black 2006 Chevy Suburban LTZ truck is on Route 12 heading west. I couldn't read the license plate, but the vehicle is pretty badly banged up. It won't be hard to locate. Hello? Hello? Darn it! I hate this evil festival. Somebody stole my police radio and computer while I was away from the cruiser. Drat, drat, DRAT!" He threw his useless mike inside. "I walked away from my cruiser for only five minutes."

"Wait!" Stephen warned while the officer began sliding inside his car. "Let me carry my chair inside first, the back seat. You'll need my protection. The driver is armed and certainly driving towards their stronghold bristling with heavy artillery."

"I don't know." Frank paused while studying Stephen's face, then looking doubtfully at his pink 'Fashion Girl' chair and feminine jewelry.

"So, how does it feel to belong to the race who brought diseases to Native Americans?" the woman purred to Stephen.

"Get me out of here before one of them scalp me as what the Stadaconans, Timucuans, or the Powhatan Confederacy do to their enemies."

She snarled, fingering her knife's handle, its scabbard attached in an outside the waistband, tip down style. Stephen had been nervously glancing at how she fidgeted it since he dropped in.

Frank quick-draw his taser, his right arm zipped so quickly that the weapon with a funny looking tall barrel appeared on his hand as if by magic. "Stop or I'll taser you."

She abruptly stopped, then backpedaled. In seconds, she disappeared into the crowd.

Frank opened the back door. "Get in the police car now. You need to be segregated from them before this escalates."

"Thanks! That lawn chair was getting heavy. We have a locator buried inside the disk so tracking the terrorists should be easy. I'll guide." Stephen slid into the back seat and slammed the door shut.