Epic Tales from Beautiful Minds: An Ooorah Anthology

#TeamWattPunk - Part Six: The Extremely Serious Writers' Manual - @H-A-Spade

24

"So," Olive started, "how do we actually put Lord WattPad away for a long time. We can't arrest him, because he's a despot and his way is the highway." A pause. "We could kill him."

"Then we run the risk of being seen as more of the same," Mike said.

"We should SODOMIZE him!" TheGorillatan shouted, spit flying from his mouth, punching his fists at the air. "Hehehehahaha! Yeah! Let's get hardcore! Rick, you hold his wrists, someone hold his ankles, someone else tug down his corduroys, and I'll go to town on him! This'll be the perfect revenge for him killing my brother!"

"No, don't, please, that would be horrible, so horrible," Lord WattPad muttered without even a squirt of passion.

Mike got the deranged assistant into a chokehold and eased him to the floor when he was asleep. "Shhh, sleep off the excitement, old bean. You've had a rough month."

"We could write Lord WattPad out of existence with your laptop," Olive suggested.

"I don't know if I trust that thing now. And how can we be sure writing him out of our existence isn't bringing something worse into ours?"

Smacking his hands together, Rick said, "There's a machine in the basement. A supercomputer. Apparently it knows the answers to everything."

"Fools," said Lord WattPad, trying to break free of his handcuffs. "That old thing is deactivated and likely broken. Don't even try it! It's stupid! You'd only be wasting your time!"

"If he says it's stupid," Olive said, "it must be a good idea."

25

Down in the basement, Rick led the way to the storage room. Apparently there were two storage rooms, as he pushed open the door to one and saw a whole lot of blood and toenails. A twenty-pound bag of iodized salt and a fourteen-gallon jug of distilled white vinegar sat in the corner. It was quite chilly in there, too.

"I never want to see that place again," Mike said, shuddering.

They continued on their merry way and found the other storage room.

"This is it," Rick said, ignoring the frozen Wattpad founder, instead indicating the massive cabinet of synchronized computers. "The TK supercomputer."

Mike examined the thing. He crouched and felt around for a power button. Reaching around the back, his fingers grazed an on-off switch. He flicked it and was instantly blasted for a few seconds by a high-powered fan.

The fans slowed and the machine hummed. A cracked display turned on, revealing a blue screen with hard-to-read white text. The screen suddenly went blank, the fans stopped and the supercomputer turned itself off.

And then it started again. This time the screen displayed pixelated letters—TK—in big red letters. That screen fizzled away and was replaced with:

DIAGNOSTIC... COMPLETE.

ERROR.ERROR

MALWARE DETECTED.

CLEANING...

CLEANING...

QUARANTINE... COMPLETE.

SCANNING ARCHIVES... COMPLETE.

DOCUMENT DETECTED.