Morty continues watching his homework, filling in quiz answers on his paper without hang-ups. And every question sucked even more life out of him. Half-way through the show, he just zips through the remaining answers and heads towards the den.
Rick had continued to play Tekken with the woman, both quietly, aside from saying neutral statements about the game. She had been giving faint smiles here and there as if she was happy someone's there, but no real eye-contact, and certainly never gave any compliments, completely unlike how she was with Morty. Rick had spent the whole time slumped in the same position, hating himself for not hating this more.
Morty comes in and says, "Ok, I'm done with homework—"
"'Bout time," Rick simply lets go of the controller and walks towards him.
"—It was easy. I think the teachers have given up."
"(On you, finally.) There's something we should go check," Rick opens a portal and Morty steps inside. Rick doesn't turn to the woman to say, "Alright, put the box back."
"Why?"
"Well are you coming with us or not?"
"Hell yeah I am," and she gives one good kick to return the computer chair back to its place, then races to return the X-Box to the other room.
"Good," Rick says. "I did not feel like cleaning up your dead body after the security system caught you snooping around my stuff. This way, I can just leave your body where it falls."
"Fair trade," she says. Then he points to his backpack on her, so the woman takes the pack off and gently hands it to him as she says, "I've already triggered every memory I can from doing chores here, now I remember never to cook bacon topless again," then she jumps in the portal.
Rick halts a second, wondering if she merely triggered the memory or actually cooked topless this morning.
Stepping out of the portal, the three find themselves in a mall. Before them is a large kid-themed venue that Rick walks towards.
"House of Dribble?" Morty reads. Through the venue's windows he sees it's a room filled with kids surrounded by hundreds of kitten-sized furballs. Living furballs. Not unlike a ball pit, the kids play with these multicolored things as they scurry and bounce all over the children. The kids sound like they're on the drop of a perpetual rollercoaster, and the closer Rick gets, the more it annoys him.
Morty's body slams against the glass, "Ohhhh! WOW! Aww jeez look at them—They're so cute—Aww—Haha—There's so many of them! Haha!"
Next to Morty, Rick sees someone used gum to stick a napkin with writing on it to the glass. He reads: "Hey, Star Trek called, they want their pander bac—God d—Teenagers!" ripping the note down.
Entering, many of the kids seem drugged by the furballs' cuteness—drooling, bumping into walls, banging the furballs against their face nonstop.
Pulling from a panel in the wall, Rick puts on a clown mask and a T-shirt that's screen-printed to look like a shirtless hairy torso. "ALRIGHT EVERYONE OUT! OUT! ~UURP~ GET OUT! HONK HONK HONK!" imitating squeezing a clown's horn he didn't have.
All the kids shriek and run out, some holding furballs, which get held back by an invisible force-field. Then Rick presses a button to close the venue door and shoves the costume back in the wall.
Now all the furballs start to bounce on them, mostly on Morty and Rick.
"Awww! They purr!! Aww!"
"Yeah, it's a survival mechanism," Rick says. "That frequency is how they hypnotize you into loving them. Otherwise they're just a moving ball of dog pubes. Who want's that?" trying to avoid touching them.
The woman holds one seeming a little more fascinated than charmed, "I don't know, they are kinda cute. What are these things?"
"They're called dribbles, and—God damn it," shooting one that kept hitting his face.
"RICK!" Morty yells, "How can you do that!?" grabbing the one hitting his own face to protect it.
Rick says, "Well with no eyes, face, hands, or remotely recognizable human emotions, it's pretty easy to disconnect all empathy for them."
"But they purr—They're—They're—" it was getting harder for Morty to not get intoxicated by their cuteness, "They're like kittens!"
"Toxoplasmosis, Morty. A brain parasite in 30 to 50 percent of human beings that forces you to like cats. Seriously, it does exist readers, Google it... But not now! Rude!"
The woman was petting one, having a memory return, "Hmm, yeah, I remember it evolved in rats to make them not fear cats, and someone used that to engineer a new strain, then put it in perfume that made men not fear me..."
"You mean for your spy shit," Rick states.
She shrugs, "I guess, I don't know. But I showered this morning, so..." looking for a poop hole on these things.
Rick just rolls his eyes and continues what he had started, looking among the dribbles, for a particular one, "Help me find a solid black one, it has a data chip I need, for something."
"What do you mean," Morty asks, petting two dribbles, "like—like—awww," feeling one with his face, "—like in its pocket or something?"
"No, inside it. God! Only vermin in video-game-RPGs have pockets for the money 'n' shit they drop. The chip is inside these things because their hypnotizing makes them impossible to kill, unless you have no empathy, or the awareness and skill to shut it off. And, that way if someone ripped out the chip, I'd know I was working with a complete and utter psychopath. Someone evil. Cap-i-tol E."
It takes Morty a moment to process what he said, "Inside it!? That's—That's horrible Rick! Yeah and there's an infinite number of psychopaths out there, and they all have portal guns." The dribbles all drown Morty even more, as if attracted to his outburst. "Ohh, aww, haha."
Rick looks beyond Morty to see the woman squishing a dribble with her foot as she says, "Their guts are so blue..." digging with her shoe. Oh no, that rhymes.
He glares at her but then keeps looking, then Morty grabs a hold of one of the few pure white ones, "Aww! It's all white, like—like—aww—like Pearly—Pearl, aww."
Focusing almost entirely on finding the dribble, and barely paying attention to what Morty even said, Rick replies, "Like that cat you were obsessed with when—" 'Fuck,' and he shuts up, hoping Morty didn't hear. "Do either of you see a black one or what!?"
Maybe two words of what Rick said sink into Morty's head, but it was enough, "How—How'd you know about Pearl? I was like, eight—Aww Pearly..." petting his white one.
"(Your mom mentioned it or something)," Rick mumbles. "I thought you learned from your alien bastard not to name shit anymore. You know we have to leave it here."
"What, why!?" Morty whines. "Why can't I take her home?"
"How else am I supposed to profit off them, upload video to YouTube? Next to the billions of kitten and baby owl vids? That'd depreciate their value." He kicks a dribble and swats some from his face frantically, sooo done with this place.
Morty was almost entirely drugged up by this point, hugging two dribbles against his face, almost speaking into one of them, "Ohhhhh, but they'll neeeever stop getting cuuute... mmmm"
"Yeah. In person. That's the idea." Rick keeps searching but by now he'd had enough, "DAMN IT!" slapping one away. "It's not here! That means someone stole it, that's ~UURP~ impossible, they can't leave!" He grabs a spotted black one, counts the seven dots, and cracks it open like a bread bun. Taking a chip out of it, "I'll have to use the spare. Ok, let's go."
The woman follows Rick but Morty was still drowning in cuteness, happier than he'd ever been.
"Hello! I just killed one!" Rick taunts, waving the corpse in Morty's face, "Let's go!" But Morty's brain was gone. "God! If you're this hypnotized by these things, it means your parents really don't give you enough love."
Rick presses a button to open the venue doors and starts dragging Morty by the collar, pulling him along the floor out of the store, but Morty didn't even notice until his dribble was held back by the force field. He squirms and almost cries, but Rick keeps dragging, even when people start gawking. Once the dribbles were out of sight, Morty scrambles to his feet and slaps Rick's hand away.
"Alright," Rick announces, "I have to send out commands using the data on this thing," looking for a spot below a skylight. "There. From where that roided-out douchebag is, redundancy redundancy," pointing to a heavy-muscled twenty-something. "Wait here," and he pulls out his freezing gun.
"Rick!" Morty says. "You're not even going to try talking to him first?!"
As large as he physically can, Rick rolls his eyes and sighs, then he goes over gunless. Morty and the woman watch him try to get this guy to move, in what looked like telling him to fuck off in a dozen truthful ways. So of course the guy doesn't move, and Rick storms back to Morty as Morty crosses his arms. Rick gripes, "Can I do it my way now?"
Morty says, "You didn't even ask nice once, did you?"
A moment earlier, the woman had seen a shy cute teen blushing over this guy and itching her crotch a little too long, so she had gotten an idea.
Rick notices the woman walking to the guy, then Morty sees her too.
With some heavy admiration, she tells the guy, "Hey, um... Don't tell her I said this, but my friend over there says she's too afraid to ask you out. She gets wet for strong men."
The guy grins and walks over to the girl. Rick and Morty see the two start to flirt and large heart icons might as well be flyin' out of them.
Morty follows Rick storming over to the spot, watching him unfold a tripod from his coat and setting up a device. Morty says, "See, what did I tell you? She got him to move by being nice."
The woman says, "Not really. She has herpes," smirking, bored, while opening the guy's wallet.
Rick grins, "Nice."
Rick starts activating the device and the woman checks it out, fascinated, watching a ray of light shoot out into the sky. She asks, "So what are you doing?"
Rick eyes her, "Well... If you must know... only so I can track who you tell and find your boss..." but a part of him hoped she was actually impressed, spy or not, "...This helps change the Earth's speed to slow down time. Like a Dollar-Store form of immortality. The Citadel of Ricks have a similar thing going on. I—I—I think someone once called it Theory of Relativity to a Space Clock or Space Twin or some shit. None of it's actually time travel, if that's what you're thinking."
Morty asks, "You mean Einstein's theory of—of relativity?—Oh, hey, are you related to Einstein? You guys—"
"No............" And as if embarrassed, Rick mutters, "He had a mustache."
Morty says, "Uh... I don't think that's how that works."
With his happy tone of triumph, "Then why are there no Asians with a mustache."
Almost smirking, the woman counters Rick, "Yeah, all that is a bunch of bullshit."
"Ex~UURP~cuse me?"
The woman crosses her arms, an eyebrow raised, with a neutral tone, "The numerous confusions in concepts," and begins a list, "mainly: age vs. time; time dilation vs. clock dilation; time measured vs. time spent existing; how a body ages vs. how a clock ticks... Stands to reason that delivering nutrients—like oxygen—to cells at a slower rate would age a body, not preserve it. And clocks measure time but aren't time itself. Instead of a Light Clock, you can have two kindergarteners throw a ball back and forth to measure time but just because they have to throw it farther when they run doesn't mean they've changed time," ending with a challenging smirk.
Rick stood a little flabbergasted for a moment, but ego and proof kick in, "Except this isn't that, and my method works, otherwise why hasn't Morty grown at all."
Morty says, "I've—I've grown. I started to grow pubes, you've seen them Rick."
"Yeah but you're still an idiot, so, clearly, it works," yet now a smidgen in himself didn't quite believe it. Then he says to the woman, "Lettin' your boobs do the talking, tisk tisk," and pretends to resume with his device in a way that makes it clear he wanted his word to be final.
The woman just plops her forehead down into her hand and chuckles silently, quite amused. Morty, however, was having a hard time with not only understanding what either of them said, but, "So—Well—Then, what if I don't want to stay this age?"
"Tough titties," Rick says, "of which you won't be feeling any. When you invent a way to manipulate time, then you'll get a say in things. Meanwhile, grandpa likes things the way they are." Then his tone becomes concerned, "The problem is, someone else might not." He starts packing up his stuff, "Someone moved the chip from the warehouse, maybe tampered with that one and the second. So if someone did in fact steal the dribble's chip, it could mean they realized the least difficult way to kill a Rick is to let them grow old."
"You mean grow up," the woman jokes, with her attention elsewhere.
Lucky for Morty, Rick didn't see him enjoy that joke otherwise he would have gotten chewed out. Rick had just glared at the woman and opened a portal. "Let's go."
.
* * *
.
In a place that man has never touched, birds chirp and flutter outside a great wall of windows illuminating a mansion that man has touched most intimately. Inside the almost equally vast living quarters, one can see a space given great care to make many people feel at home, no matter what their mood. But now it only echoes with lone footsteps.
President Morty stops at his personal desk, of humble oak, and rests his weight into his two hands holding a box on his desk. He stares into it, holding it a moment longer, preparing himself for what's inside. When it starts purring, he fortifies himself further, trying to convert his anger for his weakness into resilience. When that anger peaks, he opens the box and grabs the solid black dribble inside. He holds it steady as it purrs harder and tries to bounce to him, then he pulls out a dagger and raises it above the cute thing. Though he looks deep inside himself, he keeps his eyes on the furball, feeding his anger until he can no longer stand it—
—SCHWING—
—the dagger nicks the dribble's side, and in an instant President Morty seizes it, shoves it in the box, and slams it shut. Cries come from inside as he just squeezes it harder, fuming, hatred for himself building even more. "Not yet. I'm not yet ready..."
He manages to calm himself some before a pure white dribble comes racing towards him from another room as if to save him. He catches it and his anger begins to melt. "Pearl, you're awake."
He stays calm and still as Pearl bounces frantically on him for a while, purring almost as loud as the whole House of Dribble, trying to dissolve his pains, then she calms down herself and he cuddles her in his arms.
He sits as serene as the view outside and says, "Don't worry, I'll never hurt you Pearl. I'll never replace you..." Under his serenity, genuine love and loneliness show through, and a hint of the child he once was long ago. For a short moment at least. Then his long-aged eyes return... as they plan and hate, as they usually do... as they drift into a well-deserved nap...
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Next Chapter: Rick's Father, Summer's Creature, and the Closet
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