Chapter 1: The Apocalypse

"EVERYTHING MUST BE FILED PROPERLY!"

The voice was shrill, loud, mean and extremely unhappy. The voice belonged to Squiggles, one of the shrillest, loudest, meanest and least happy beings on the planet earth.

She was also a gopher.

When Squiggles was in a mood like this, which was almost always, it was best to be somewhere else.

But, there were a few unfortunate folk who tended to hang out with Squiggles. They didn't really choose to hang out with her; they were paid to hang out with her. They were her office staff.

When Squiggles let out her yell, they all scampered for the safety of their desks. More than anything else, they wanted to look busy.

However, while Squiggles was shrill, loud, mean and unhappy, she was not stupid. A file had been misplaced, and due to her superb sense of detail and organization it was only a matter of time before she figured out exactly who had misplaced it.

You might ask, 'what had been misplaced? After all, the way Squiggles was acting, it must have been important. Maybe it was intimately connected with the future of the planet Earth.' If you were talking about any normal person you would have been right. But we're talking about Squiggles. In reality, the missing file wasn't important at all. It was just a file used to track the number of worms consumed by one of Squiggles' many task forces.

And even though the file had gone missing, it wasn't like Squiggles didn't know exactly what it said. Squiggles could have told you how many worms were consumed. That wasn't the point. The point was that 'everything must be filed properly.' Everything had to be organized, perfectly. Squiggles had one real drive in life. She wanted the world outside of her head to be just as organized as the world inside of her head. Lots of people are like that, and most of them don't matter much. But Squiggles wasn't just another neat freak. No, Squiggles had a few other things going for her. She was incredibly brilliant, she was incredibly driven, and she was incredibly ruthless.

She was an extremely dangerous gopher.

While Squiggles' brain meticulously worked out who had been working on which files, the guilty party, who went by the name of Wangle, sat at her desk working feverishly. Perhaps she thought that by completing a week of work in five minutes, she might be spared some of Squiggles' wrath.

Deep down, Wangle knew better. Wangle had been working for Squiggles for years by then and she knew her about as well as anybody did. Wangle had survived for that long by being quiet, by anticipating even Squiggles' most random whims and most of all, by not screwing up. Even as she worked madly to lessen Squiggles' wrath, she cursed herself for her carelessness.

For her part, Squiggles was looking forward to finding, and punishing, the guilty clerk. Such moments provided her with the little joy she found in her daily life. However, while proper filing was incredibly important, certainly more important than the well-being of one clerk, Squiggles mind was on another topic. Squiggles was *really* thinking about an entirely different file. And it was a file that only Squiggles had access to. It was a top secret file which she protected like nothing else.

The top secret file folder was dark red with a green band running from one corner to the other. As all of the clerks could have told you, red-tinted folders were closely associated with a project known by only one word, APOCALYPSE. And, as any clerk could have told you, the dark red folders with green bands running diagonally across them were perhaps the most important type of folder they kept. Those folders were the primary planning folders for APOCALYPSE.

Squiggles thought about them quite a bit.

You see, APOCALYPSE was to be the culmination of her career. It was to be the point at which the world fell into Squiggles' lap and would finally benefit from her genius.

While most of Squiggles' brilliant mind was on the APOCALYPSE, she hadn't forgotten about the misplaced worm file. In due course, naturally, Squiggles determined that Wangle was the clerk who had misplaced the worm file. Squiggles walked to Wangle's desk, and stared down at her. Cornered, Wangle broke down. She pleaded, begged and cried for forgiveness. She insisted that her mistake would never be repeated. By that was not enough for Squiggles. Mistakes, even minor mistakes, simply could not be tolerated. Wangle was fired and sentenced to five minutes of the world's most excruciating torture.

As Wangle's screams filled the room, as a lesson for the other clerks, Squiggles' thoughts returned to APOCALYPSE. There were only four dark red folders with green bands. Three of them contained parts of the plan that had already been implemented.

Only the fourth remained unimplemented.

As she stood there, listening to Wangle being tortured, Squiggles reviewed that last folder in her mind.

While the contents of that folder were awe inspiring, Squiggles liked the title most of all. The folder was titled, "Gopher's Revenge." It summed up, in two short words, a lifetime of struggle and a dream that was nearing realization.

You see, Squiggles was the head, heart and soul of MRN, the world's largest underground organization. Its full name was The Squigglistic Organization for the Organization of Planet Earth Along Rational Lines. As you might guess from the name, it was an organization she had built. And it was an organization devoted to only one cause:

The destruction of mankind.

However, while Squiggles dreamed of setting the world completely straight, she was a practical gopher. In the short-term, she knew she could only hope to fix the greatest of faults. In Squiggles' mind, the single greatest fault in the order of the world was that gophers lived underground while humans lived above the ground. It was a situation that would have to remedied.

As Wangle dropped to the floor, almost completely shattered by the five minutes of tickling she had endured, Squiggles thought happy thoughts - thoughts of revenge and death and destruction.

APOCALYPSE was near.