SmackDown: Back to Our Roots

Round 4: Carrot Pie - @jinnis

Carrot Pie

by jinnis

Right, mate, you wanted to hear the story of my strange encounter on Guppies Gold. Buy me another beer, and I'll tell you. Or, better, pass the bottle of booze.

Ah, that's good. Nothing like Beaver's Best to warm an outrider's heart and balls.

So, the story. I loaded the Flying Caravan to the brim with trade goods for my visit to the Sagitta sector. Hoped to exchange some genuine carrot pie for those fancy scales the fashionistas of the hub planets go crazy on.

The indigenous Guppie shed their scales each equinox, so they hold no particular value to them. But trade is hampered by communication. The ocean dwellers are not considered sentient, and when an egghead on New Stralia found the key to their desires, the secret vault of scales was suddenly accessible. Those fish people will literally trade you everything for glass beads. Though in this case, the beads take the form of a pie.

Anyway, I had several tons of the stuff aboard, carefully packed and padded in my cooling unit. The trip was a piece of cake. I steered the Flying Caravan towards the landing site at the prearranged coordinates. Well, landing is probably the wrong expression, watering would be more accurate. At least if you're happy to call the purple liquid in the great Guppie ocean water. Which it isn't, strictly speaking, not with the high content on acids and heavy metals. But I digress.

As soon as I'd passed the disturbance of the cloud cover, my scan picked up a floating anomaly on the surface. Its common knowledge nothing lives above sea level on Guppie. The storms are too harsh, and there simply is no reason to visit except for fish scales.

Curious, I diverged from my course and set the Caravan down beside a glass bubble the size of a one-seater. At first, I thought it was a ship, but I was wrong. My scanner picked up no engines or other technology. It contained a single life form I could see moving through the milky surface, jumping and waving.

My second guess was I'd found an alien rescue pod. I felt obliged to help my fellow spacefarer—you know, galactic peace, mutual respect, and that jazz. Imagine my surprise when I opened the hatch and found the vessel was occupied by a lone human.

Not that I took him for one. He was wrinkly, overweight, and sported an ugly bunch of orange tufts. By his looks, he could have come from a time long past. I mean, before they invented body fat control and anti-ageing steroids. When he opened his mouth, I was sure this was just a random human likeness. His accent was thick and hardly intelligible. Took me a while to put together enough of a vocabulary to comprehend his ranting and conclude he was human after all.

Seems a bunch of Kermitts had bundled him up and shot him into space. He was adamant they operated from a base called Area 51 and had no right to interfere with his business. The craziest thing was his insistence he came from the 21st century. Imagine that!

Well, you know the weird sense of Kermitt humour as well as I do. I wouldn't put it past them to slingshot an unsuspecting bloke several centuries into the future if he pissed them off. Must have gotten a good laugh out of it, too. I guess Area 51 was one of their research facilities on earth before the planet got accepted into the alliance.

But back to my guest. I brought him on board and asked him if he was hungry. That turned out a mistake. He didn't fancy my Nutri-bars and raided my fridge instead. It contained a sample of carrot pie, you know, a teaser for the upcoming trade. I tried to prevent him from eating it, I swear. Too late I realised he was delusional.

"I have over 65 million followers on twitter." He stared at me with piggy eyes. "I'll tell them you deprived a starving man of a slice of pie."

I tried my voice of reason. Told him the pie was unhealthy, and that he should stick with the Nutri-bars like any reasonable adult. Even offered him the choice between strawberry, chocolate and vanilla. He ignored my attempts, grabbed the pie and removed the transparent padding.

Alarmed, I stepped back and raised my hands. "Please put this down, carefully. We don't want to make a mess in here." I got ready to dive behind the kitchen counter, aware it would be hard to stop this madman.

„Don't patronise me. I'm an important person. A celebrity. I'm bigger than Jesus, baby."

And then, he stuffed a piece of the pie into his face and exploded. Yes, exploded. Don't believe me? I still can show you the stains he left in my kitchenette. Well, you should know we enrich the pies for Guppie's Gold with liquid nitroglycerin. The fish people love it, believe it boosts their fertility. But the high dosage is, in fact, unhealthy for humans.

Aye, I guess we'll never know who the crazy guy from the past was. Is there still booze in the bottle? Storytelling makes me thirsty.