Tevun-Krus #80 - WattPunk 2.0

And Then We Went Ooorah - A Short Story by @jinnis

And then we went Ooorah

By jinnis

(Disclaimer: if you think you find yourself in this story, it may well be that the likeness was intended. If you don't like it, tell me and I'll remove all traces of the offence. If you hoped to find yourself in this story and don't, please consider my shortcomings as a matter of tact towards your privacy).

Right, kiddos, you wanted to know how we ended on an island in a purple ocean on a rock floating in space. Let me get another drink, and I'll spin you a yarn of times gone by. A yarn, not a thread. That's a tale, buddy. What do they teach you in that fancy school we built for you?

Anyway. Let's begin at the beginning. And no, I'm not going to talk about dinosaurs. Sure, dinosaurs were cool, but they went extinct long before my story sets off. Except, that some weirdos back on Earth tried to reverse-engineer them by cracking their DNA code. The dinosaurs, I mean. As if anyone would want a nine-ton T-Rex as a pet. Try to imagine the heap of kibbles that monster would devour every morning. Would probably swallow your pets as a dessert, too.

But I digress. The gen-tech multis were evil, but there were worse. Don't believe me? That's because you've never met a politician, lucky you. Your average T-Rex would look like a cuddly tribble compared with certain high-profile politicians. And don't get me started on the big company bosses.

Well, back to the story. It begins on Earth, in the infamous year 2020. Humanity was navigating a particularly nasty crisis, a virus killing off people left and right—and no cure in sight. Politicians shed lies and hollow promises faster than an unstable ion its electrons. People were insecure, and conspiracy theories popped up like the shrooms in my secret plantation. That's when we found out.

Yeah, we found out Earth had been taken over, all sneaky and secret-like. How, do you ask? Well, Elve was the first to hear the rumours. Or so she claims. She was on a fishing trip when a bunch of friendly dolphins dropped by and handed her an empty rum bottle with a message. Of course, we were reluctant to believe. I mean, she might well have been the one to empty the bottle, right? And her claim sounded too much like "so long and thanks for all the fish" to be true.

Then, Paine insisted he met an alien on a camping trip. Unfortunately, there was tequila involved, and so the dude wasn't believed either. But when the Mars decided on a whim to go dolphin punk in the upcoming issue of Tevun Krus, the mystery began to unravel.

After a short but hefty debate about the dos and don'ts of dolphin punk—wouldn't want to hurt a dolphin's feelings, after all, they are sensible fellows—Nab the Chronicler dived into the depths of the World Wide Web. And she came up with more dirty laundry than the most suspicious of us had expected. No laundromat on the planet would have been able to clean the slates of well-known people and parties if you get my meaning.

We concluded the dolphins were right, and we had to do something—anything. One of the guys, it might have been Jeff, suggested taking over the production of washing machines. Unfortunately, it turned out they were already alien-owned. And soon Wucksy reported we were under observation. Next day, Cynk was napped, and all evidence pointed towards the government. We never found any trace of them again, poor bugger. But their sacrifice shook us awake.

Silent like snails in hibernation, we retreated to our secret hiding places, distributed over the whole planet, and began planning. Many long nights were spent exchanging coded messages, writing meaningful stories that sounded like lighthearted satire for the un-initiated.

Then we settled on a masterful master plan, crafted between the lines of stories, published right under the noses of the bad guys on an innocuous website, well-hidden between bad boy billionaires and whacky werewolves.