We've Got Cookies

Gargantuan garden that it was, it had caught the attention of Lenny, the owner and proprietor of Lenny's Landscaping, the company to which I had started my three week internship. Added to the case that the place was just flat out huge, was the fact that the Flgrge^gloff's lawn had never been professionally scaped. A travesty in Lenny's opinion, as he drooled at the prospect of what he could charge for mowing pretty much an entire planet.

Admittedly, and yes, this is with the benefit of the many years of countless-families-lost-to-combat hindsight, Lenny's sales tactics may have gone a bit too far. It quickly became apparent to us that none of the Flgrge^gloffs wanted anything to do with having any outsiders touch their lawn. They had a great sense of pride of ownership. Lenny wasn't about to take no for an answer. We'd flown over 12 parsecs to get here and he wasn't going to let it go without a fight. Words which he would later lament having said.

When Lenny, normally an extremely skilled purveyor of planning, in a last ditch effort to convince familial matriarch Yrg Flgrge^gloff that his expertise was needed, picked up an errant leaf from the yard and stuffed it in his recently silkscreen logo'd proprietary leaf bag, the final straw had been slurped. That camel's back was not only broken, but obliterated.

Yrg immediately went ashen faced, which was hard to tell because the Flgrge^gloffs are comprised of 13.25% ash in the first place.

Little did we know that every leaf on the entire expanse of lawn, had been carefully placed. Only after years of dedicated hard work and rigorous leaf mapping necessitating the invention, by youngest Flgrge^gloff, Lng^glbrlgr, of an advanced Frond Delineator AI capable of 1.6 centillion leaf placement calculations per Planck Second, had every leaf been satisfactorily situated.

Lenny's super casual plucking of the petiole had been an affront to the very essence of the Flgrge^gloff way of life. An insult that the aggregate of known space has since paid dearly for. Not only in cash money, and don't fool yourself a 17 years long Intergalactic War ain't cheap, but also in lives, loves, but mostly lives, lost.

You'd think that an enormous alliance of Intergalactic Inhabitants (the aforementioned ICCEWCNFASNFTCEAAANBSAWTRNTITPITN) would be able to deal with one pesky family of five pretty easily. You'd be wrong. The Flgrge^gloffs are extremely well organized. And, hidden under their perfectly placed foliage gives them a really good hiding spot. Also, they are indestructible and immortal with the collective powers of pretty much every God you could name. That helps a bit.

All of which brings us to now. 17 years of death, destruction, and delayed dental appointments. It doesn't feel right to get a routine teeth cleaning in the middle of the war, even if it would save you from future cavities. These are the sacrifices one must make in times of strife.

This envoy mission of peace had been in the works for years. The details pored over, then pored over, then pored over again, then a too hot mug of coffee mistakenly poured over, necessitating the details to be reworked from square one as only a single copy had been made and now been irreversibly smudged, then the newly laminated to guard against errant liquid mishap details pored over once more for good luck.

After all this poring, the mission had finally been agreed upon in its completeness. The minutiae of which was scrutinized to the very smallest quark. No page left unturned. No T uncrossed. No bagel left uneaten. This thing was air tight.

During a previously negotiated ceasefire, I, along with the rest of the reconciliation commission, were going to fly to Gleef and deliver to the Flgrge^gloff family a heaping platter of semi chewy chocolate chip cookies. Their favourite.

This contribution of confection would hopefully lead to a thawing of the icy relations between the two parties and allow a meaningful conversation to begin about the beginning of the end of the end of the war.

The fact that this entire operation had been painstakingly curated to the finest detail made it all the more surprising when, after already cresting the tropospheric plateau into the condensed airspace above the Flgrge^gloff bungalow, I discovered a mistake had been made. A teensy tinsy itsy bitsy error. Very easily overlooked. Could have happened to anyone.

One infinitesimal thing had been forgotten. Since most of the ICCEWCNFASNFTCEAAANBSAWTRNTITPITN's Interstellar Travel Vehicles had been completely annihilated during the war, this ship had to be hastily constructed from scratch for the express purpose of the mission. A beneficial attribute of the wanton destruction was that it allowed for this specific spacecraft to be designed with the singular purpose of Peace in mind, and it did just that. The whole thing was certainly a billboard for harmony.

However, in the rushed, yet determined, manufacturing period of this buoyant, jubilant, dove offering of a floating pact promisor, with all the fastidious thought put in to the peace framework and the equally hypercritical mindfulness paid to the wonderfully robust design work, a small gaffe was committed. No one had remembered to put any brakes in.

So when we tried to slow down and park in the very nicely appointed visitor's spot near the gleaming and glistening garden grounds, nary a deceleration could be felt.

That garden? The garden that launched a quintillion missiles. The pristine perfection personified parkland this whole damn war had been about? That garden was now a fiery mass of burnt and exploded flora. Not to mention obliteration of some nearby fauna that happened to be grazing in the general vicinity.

Add to that, the fact that the cookies had now all been spilled on to the floor.

Whoops.