I Don't Seem So Bright in a Well-Lit Room

Chapter Twenty-Five

Civilizations don't begin with computers and microwave ovens and dentists. They begin with staring at fire and raw food and stinking, rotting mouths.

They don't begin with telephones and printing presses or even quills, parchment and donkeys...so spreading news and gossip was once very difficult on every planet at one time. Secrets were easily kept, murders easily overlooked, scandals averted and birthday parties often missed. Oh, but how things change.

Within one hour of Vrume T'cha T'cha's capture, the news was not only on every set of lips on Lyme Node (or various alien lip equivalents), but that news had made its way to Squambog, Barbohd, all the inhabited Vexes, and even as far as Hephmote, where Vrume's army of rescued assistants and prisoners trained, and awaited the overtaking of The Node.

The news even made its way to Chagrin, although only to one adorable Pelican Teddy Bear that had found an old antique iWatch on a crashed ships' time capsule, which it then connected to the signal of a dead Blankton's mostly-destroyed ship that was floating in space near the planet. It used half of a swamp potato and a pet eel to keep it charged.

On Lyme Node, a human named Dak Floodman was already planning a rescue. He had been training to be the very next assistant, and was practising his fake death when he heard the news. He immediately contacted his wife Jev, who was still in the Lyme Node prison awaiting her go at tank-suit manicure education. They had both been thrown in jail without a trial for complaining to The Node Middle School Board for losing their daughter.

The (then) thirteen-year-old Breva Floodman had gone on a school trip to visit The Node Museum Of Node-Approved Node History and Awesome Node-Inspired Wax Museum. She never made it back to the school.

As a student of the Machine Detailing and Beauty School, Dak had access to the prisons and it only took an additional half hour to rally every prisoner (not guilty of a Tractos-level crime) to attempt an escape. Vrume was their hero, he was in trouble, and he needed them now.

With the entire population of the third most heavily attended school on Lyme Node, and the most heavily populated prison on the planet, things were about to get nutty. The Node Guard was the biggest army in the galaxy, but many of them were off patrolling the universe for Potto and Aye.

The Node Guard may have been the biggest army in the galaxy, but prisoners made up the biggest population in the Node-run universe. Prisons were everywhere. There were so many laws to be broken that as far as The Node was concerned, anyone not in the Guard was merely a prisoner that hadn't been processed yet...mostly due to a lack of time and the necessity of practical services. Garbage needed to be collected. Ships needed to be fixed. Bounty hunters needed to bounty hunt. Office workers needed to office work. Torturers needed to torture.

The fact that this particular prison was Lyme Node's largest spoke volumes to the sheer volume of the prison.

It started as a prison riot. Complete with chairs thrown, (faked) fights started, and everyone yelling and being ridiculously unruly. The Node Guard easily kept this at bay by simply not unlocking any cell doors. It was much easier to sit back and let them all kill each other and clean up the mess later than to engage.

However, those doors didn't stay locked. The entire Machine Detailing and Beauty School came down on the Guard Patrol, rioting on their side of the cell doors as well.

Many shots were fired, many lives lost. Dak and Jev Floodman were thankfully not among the corpses. Many guards were slaughtered, many prisoners as well, and quite possibly many students, though it was hard to tell with them because they had become so good at faking their deaths.