MITCH 2.0:
The doors slid open and Hellfire Jones, green from his wild elevator trip, stumbled out, throwing up all over the place. This completely agitated my chill vibe.
April and Faizan followed, which restored my feelings of awesomeness. I sat up from my lawn chair trying to muster the energy to get up to hug them.
I could tell they were still trying to figure out what was going on. We were all in a brightly lit empty room somewhere in the depths of the White House. Behind me was a house-sized flying saucer hovering about a foot in the air. It looked exactly like something from an Ed Wood movie. This confirmed what I always believed. He was the greatest and most prophetic movie director of all time.
A more immediate question was how I survived. The truth was that I hadn't. My friend's brains were spinning with possibilities. It could have been a clone that died and not me. Or maybe my evil twin was killed in my place. I could possibly be a replica from a distant multiverse. Or maybe a robot version of me. Possibly a hologram, though that was a little far fetched.
"Mitch, is that really you?" Faizan asked.
"Blecchhh!" Hellfire Jones said, not adding much to the conversation.
"How...How?" April, at a rare loss for words, asked.
This arguably didn't add much either but it did get to the heart of the question. How was I now resting comfortably on a lawn chair sipping some frozen drink made of papayas or pomegranate or some other fruit that began with 'p' that wasn't pineapple. I would have known pineapple.
"Why are you blue?" Faizan asked.
"Turquoise," I corrected.
"Grey," April gasped. A tiny gray alien skipped over to where I was reclining to offer me another P drink. Passionfruit maybe.
April, who was pretty short to begin with, got on her knees so she could be at eye level with the tiny gray alien. Or maybe she wanted to worship it. Probably both.
"I just knew you existed," she said. "Did they hurt you? Do you speak English? I know a little Vegoran. Vgob vlua vnoba."
The alien looked just like you'd expect. Humanoid Tiny body. Big head. Huge eyes which took up most of its face. I don't know why the eyes were so big. The aliens were color blind and had awful night vision.
The alien held up its hand in greeting. "Vsol vsol vegrl."
"What did the alien just say?" Faizan asked.
"It was a standard greeting and they don't like the term alien," April said. "They prefer 'visitor' or 'sojourner.' You wouldn't like it if someone called you an alien, would you?"
"Vsdo," the visitor agreed.
"They make the greatest fruit slushies," I said sitting up from my lawn chair. "Oh, and they killed me."
"What?"
"I was going to be all kinds of dead anyway after the angel and demon shot me, so it's all cool," I explained. "The aliens-I mean visitors- used their teleportation machine to beam me down here. The machine tore up all my molecules and created an almost exact duplicate of me down here, since teleportation machines don't really teleport. And there were some technical difficulties so I'm a brilliant shade of turquoise."
The visitor shrugged. These things happened.
"So you are still dead but you're now what? A replica of you?" Faizan asked
"Who cares? We're all going to die and...I think I'm gonna be sick again." Hellfire Jones, obviously.
"No, dude," I continued with the exposition. "Because the prophetic recipe says that I'm going to stop the angel/demon war and bring peace back to the planet. It doesn't matter if it's real me or teleported me colored a bright shade of Smurf. My good vibes, especially after enjoying these most excellent fruity drinks, will create a peaceful equilibrium that will end the bloodshed."
A couple visitors walked in from the tunnel behind me carrying various contraptions. One looked like a power generator box. I knew this because it had a picture of a lightning bolt on it. The other thing looked like one of those metal caps they put on people's heads in the electric chair. One of the visitors made sure that it was tightly secured on my head. These aliens killed me once before. I totally trusted them.
"Is that thing safe?" Faizan asked.
"Of course it is," April answered. "Why wouldn't you trust the motives of a race that was captured and not allowed to return to their home planet because of the human race's petty hatred and paranoia?"
"I guess when you put it like that."
One of the visitors started the generator. The metal cap on my skull began to vibrate, giving me brain tickle. This was preferable to brain freeze which was the only negative side effect to the frozen drinks.
The machine hummed and my laid back vibes permeated the entire planet. The apocalypse never would have started if people weren't so unwilling to listen and accept each other. It wasn't just that everyone felt they had to be right. It was that anyone who disagreed with them had to suffer. There was no point unless someone was crucified.
Righteousness bred hate. The angels and demons glommed onto that and they joined in. It made them stronger. But my brain waves gave everyone an alternative. Maybe humanity would stop and listen to each other. Maybe they wouldn't. They could at least coexist. That had to be enough.
For a second, the worldwide shrieks stopped. The jackhammer accusations ceased. The entire planet heard my immortal catchphrase. "Just chill, dudes."
We all sat in silence. Did it work? Could it really be that simple?
"Screw that!" someone somewhere on Earth shouted.
"You moron! If you'd just relax and stop hating everyone, everything would be just fine!" someone else shouted before clobbering the first person with a Give Peace A Chance sign.
So much for that plan.
"Vdls. Vsola!" one of the visitors said as it adjusted the dials on the device. Maybe upping the dose would help.
"What did I miss?" Hellfire Jones asked. Like a bull in a china shop that had electrical stuff, HJ's feet got entangled in the wires. In typical graceful fashion, he slammed to the ground, pulling the machine with him. As the electric box slammed to the ground, it made a sound like kerrakle-krackle before exploding into a miniature fireworks display. Even though all hope was now lost, it did look pretty cool.
"That's a stupid ass place to put whatever the hell that was," Hellfire Jones muttered.
"Vessoe! Vseod! Vsoesl!" the visitor swore. April knew what it was saying because she knew all the Vegoran swear words.
"Don't tell me the president screwed things up again," Faizan sighed.
"He did. My brain waves of bliss were our last hope," I sighed.
"No, there is another," April said. We all looked at her to see if she was just quoting movies or if she had an idea. April always had an idea. It just wasn't always a good idea.
Even the visitors looked up to hear what she had to say. She was one of the few people on earth that believed in them. It was only common courtesy that they believe in her.
"There's an extremely non-canonical Bible prophecy that says the Prophetess and the Three Stooges will join with the extraterrestrials to save the world," she said. "We've got the extraterrestrials. I'm obviously the wise Prophetess. Faizan, Mitch and Hellfire Jones are the stooges."
"I'd say that's a fair assessment,"I said.
"I'm tangled up in these wires and I can't get up," Hellfire Jones shouted. "And my butt hurts."
"Okay, maybe you're on to something," Faizan said. "What's your plan?"
"That was it," April said. "I didn't really think beyond that."
"Who's the more stoogish? The stooge or the stooge that follows the stooge?" Faizan sighed.
I was going to say the stooge, but before I could. one of the visitors jumped up and down shouting "Vsdo! Vsdo! Vsdo!" much like one of us would shout "Danger! Danger! Danger!"
"I wonder what he's trying to tell us," I asked.
The earth began to quake and hiss. When the earth starts to hiss, you know things aren't good.
"The visitor's trying to warn us," April said. "It would help if he'd use some swear words because I know those."
"I said we need to run into the spaceship," the visitor said in English.
"Wait! They can speak English?" Hellfire Jones asked.
"No, we can't," the visitor answered in the exasperated tone of voice that the rest of us have learned to use when talking to HJ. "We are speaking via telepathy which is a really big word, so I'll make it easier for you."
We all got an image of us standing there with sad faces. The ground opened up and then all the sad faces exploded. We then had a vision of us with happy faces running into the spaceship.
"I think they want us to run into the spaceship!" I said. The happy faces were a dead giveaway.
The crevasses in the ground opened wider and hell lava gushed towards the ceiling. This was a moment where you could truthfully say all hell broke loose.
In the frenzy, I looked around but didn't see anyone. Apparently everyone got the memo and had run into the alien craft. Everyone, that is, except for Hellfire Jones, He was wriggling around in the wires getting even more tangled. It was tempting just to leave him, but I needed to prove I was better than he was. I had to save him.
Things got way worse. A swarm of gnat sized angels buzzed at me and flew into my nose. I never realized this, but I'm allergic to angels.
Flaming pitchforks flew out of the cracks in the earth. Someone down there was taking potshots at us. That was a really bad karma thing to do.
"Hellfire Jones, dude, I'm going to drag you to the spaceship ok?" I asked. He nodded. I then sneezed all over him. This was the worst rescue ever.
There was no way I would be able to carry him to safety. So I did the next best thing. I lied.
"I'm not leaving you behind," I promised him. "I'm going to see if the aliens have any allergy medicine. Then, if you're not dead, I'll come back."
"No! Help me!" he cried.
In the movies, I saw Hellfire Jones battle a whole armada of demons even though he had contracted satanic syphilis. I just had tiny little angels flying into my lungs preventing me from breathing. I could do this!
I stumbled towards the spaceship, promising myself that if Earth didn't get destroyed I was going to join a gym, no matter what April said.
The ship was just yards away when the earth quaked in front of me and flames shot out of the newly formed crack. All seemed lost but this was almost exactly like that scene in Hellfire Jones II. If my tarnished idol could survive this, I could too.
With a running start, which was more like a limping start, I jumped into the air. "Go to Hell!" I shouted much like Hellfire Jone did in the scene where he was jumping over the redundantly named Fiery Infernal Fissure of Fire. Now that I think about it, the demons were trying to drag him back to hell, so they were planning on going back to hell anyway. As deep and profound as that line seemed at the time, it now made no sense.
It might sound obvious, but the flames below really hurt. I'm not going to say they hurt like hell because that would be excessively obvious. I felt like a dripping wax doll in an incinerator. If my lungs weren't full of miniature angels, they'd have breathed in enough soot to kill a train engine.
Then tentacles slithered out of the pit. That wasn't fair. Hellfire Jones never had to face tentacles. I realize they had a really low budget for the early movies and couldn't afford them, but this still wasn't fair. Hellfire Jones had it so easy.
I could either look ahead and see how I wasn't going to be able to leap to the other side or I could look down as the tentacle dragged me into damnation.
So instead I looked up to the sky and saw a blinding blue light. How could I see something that was blinding? Dude, I was in shock. Don't ask me things like that. Let's just say it was really bright and kind of pretty. I flew up into the sky. Were the angelic forces trying to save me? Or did they just want to kick my ass as savagely as the hellish bottom feeders?
Turns out it was neither. The light I saw was the bottom of the spaceship's tractor beam as it pulled me up into the spaceship. Hellfire Jones too, though we probably could have done without him.
The next second, I was in a room that looked almost like the bridge of the Enterprise. One of the visitors was sitting in the captain's chair. Others were standing over various flashing consoles which looked very sci fi, even though I doubt anyone knew what they did. April, Faizan and Hellfire Jones were here too.
The only thing that didn't look like the Enterprise was the fact that it was set to the scale of our hosts and they were really tiny. Us humans had to crawl down on the floor so we wouldn't bang our heads on the ceiling.
"Ow! Crap! My head! That hurt! Who the hell thought designing a dollhouse sized spaceship was a good idea?!"
Except Hellfire Jones.
"Vpolta!" the captain said. That either translated to 'Energize!' or 'The president's a moron.'
"Vsdo! Vsdo! Vsdo!" one of the others said in a frightened tone. There was a viewscreen like a giant TV that showed everything in front of us. We could clearly see an angel and a demon hurling straight for the ship.
"I am Dirk the Divine, Deliverer of Doom!" the angel shouted.
"I'm Blanche the badass bitch of... oh screw it. You're all going to die! Horribly!"
"You could have used 'brutally' to keep with the alliteration," Dirk suggested. "Blanche, the Beastly Bringer of Beelzebub Boiling Your Brains Brutally. See how much more frightening that sounds?"
"You think you're so smart, don't you, Dirk?"
"I didn't get myself stuck on the slime planet."
"Let's stop talking and blow up their little spaceship," Blanche said. Her entire body became a pillar of fire. Dirk just flapped his wings faster.
"How do you say 'We're gonna die' in alien language?" Hellfire Jones asked.
"Vdie!" April said.
"Vdie," the captain confirmed.
Yes, we were so dead.
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