Responding to a distress call, Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill discover a boot-shaped Extolon spaceship on the surface of an unknown planet. The crew is dead, their bones picked clean. In life, they would have been blue-yellow striped hominids with large jaws, but no longer. Exploring outside, they find a barren landscape underneath black clouds. They walk and walk but see only dirt. “This looks like good soil. Why are there no plants?” Haticat asks.
“Maybe not enough sunlight gets through the clouds,” Nathaniel suggests. Finally, they see one leafless tree at a distance. They walk closer to get a better look. It is covered in flies working hard on stripping the bark and chewing the wood. “My guess is that these flies ate all the other plants. That’s why this area is so barren,” Doctor Bill says. “Ow!” Nathaniel shouts. “A fly bit me!” “Maybe it thinks you’re a tree,” Haticat says. “Maybe,” Nathaniel says. Another fly lands on him and he swats it. “Augh!” Fred shouts. “A fly bit me too!” More and more flies begin to land on Nathaniel and Haticat. They wave their arms frantically but can barely keep up with them. “These are carnivorous flies! Run!” Nathaniel yells. The boys run back to the ship with a swarm of flies behind them. One very large fly gets past Doctor Bill’s waving paws and takes a chunk out of his ear. White stuffing fibers hang out. “Aaaaah!!!” Nathaniel gets an idea. He sets his laser pistol on wide-angle and stuns the whole cloud of flies above them. They collapse to the ground around them like rain. Only a few escape. This buys them some time until they top the ridge in sight of their ship. “What is that?” A section of the dark clouds above extends to the ground all around the ship and is growing. It is also moving towards them. The clouds are made of flies! All four explorers fire their lasers, but there are too many flies. One bites Nathaniel on his trigger finger and makes him bleed. “Hide in the Extolon ship!”
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Exploring beyond The Rainbow Nebula, Captain Nathaniel and his crew set down on T’n’fer’prey, a planet with surface conditions at the triple point for carbon dioxide, allowing solid, liquid, and gaseous forms to exist side-by-side. There they meet a civilization of Ornithomimosaur colonists ruled by Boss Zack, inventor of slang and nicknames. The Dinosaur removes his sunglasses and asks, “What’s your name?”
“Nathaniel,” Captain Nathaniel responds, looking back. “I’m going to nickname you Nate; that sounds cooler,” Zack says. “Nate? That is cooler!” Nathaniel declares. After escaping from Nathaniel’s parent-entity (named The Mama-And-Daddy) and the agents of the evil Fun Toy Syndicate several weeks ago, the boys travel the stars. For a while, they avoid heavily trafficked planets for fears that the authorities were still looking for them. They are now extremely bored with skimming only the outer edges of inhabited solar systems, looking for interesting planets to explore. They have found nothing but boring, airless balls of rock and ice – until now. “The guidebook doesn’t mention any planets,” Doctor Bill reports, twitching his long, yellow ears.
“But what else could it be?” Haticat asks, scratching his whiskers with one hand. “Whatever it is, it’s awfully small and close to the star. It’s possible the surveyors just missed it,” Captain Nathaniel reports, peering through the scope at the tiny world orbiting the red dwarf star Tizin. “Well, if that’s so, Haticat just discovered a new planet,” Doctor Bill says. “Yaaay!” Fred exclaims, jumping and waving his stubby arms. Captain Nathaniel was running from the police of planet Pookatel when he first lost his memory. His plan to elude them by flying his saucer-shaped spacecraft through an ion channel ended up frying his brain. It also made him thirsty.
Nathaniel finds his backpack and rummages through it for a bottle of water. Underneath his spare blanket he sees a small, black bag. “What’s this?” He opens it to find a blue-grey, spiky-looking sponge and reaches in to take it out. Suddenly, he feels as if all his pleasure, energy, and creativity are forcefully sucked out of him. He is overcome by excruciating boredom. Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill, dependent on him for their continued life energy, collapse onto the floor of the ship. Gasping, Nathaniel backs away from the strange object. “Colossal sponge apocalypse,” he mutters. What a strange thing to say! Where had he picked that up? He can’t remember. Crawling over to his pilot Haticat, he attempts to wake him, poking him over and over. As he feels his own energy slowly replenish, Haticat groggily rises. “What happened? What is that thing in my backpack?” |
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January 2025
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