Squiggles and the Pit of Destruction

Eddy the Arslan Heir

2007-04-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

(short eddy)

Okay, let's get one thing straight. I'm not an idiot or anything. I had a perfectly good reason for not knowing what to do when PENGUIN asked me for help with Grobar. Oh, and if you're wondering, I am the Short Eddy they asked for help.

Why didn't I know what to do? It's simple. Nobody told me.

Sure, I got this stuff from my dad that I guess made them think that I could be somebody useful. The thing was, my dad had disappeared without showing me how to use it. I was only five at the time. When PENGUIN asked me for help, I didn't have a clue what to do. I didn't even know what my dad did, or why. I did know that people in trouble often turned to him for advice. And, so, for some reason, they decided to turn to me after he disappeared.

The long and the short of it? When PENGUIN asked me for help, I had no idea what to do. Sure, I'd helped capture Grobar in the first place - but that didn't mean I had all the answers.

Now, when I say my dad disappeared, I don't mean that he abandoned me and my mom. Something happened, and we still don't know what it was. He just disappeared. My mom was real upset, and I guess I was too - although I couldn't have told you that at the time. I mean one day I have this great dad, and the next day, he's gone. And we have no idea why.

He did leave a few things behind, and my mom played with them for months afterwards - hoping they were clues, but nothing ever turned up. No matter what she tried, she couldn't figure out what happened to my dad.

And so, I grew up without a dad. It wasn't horrible or anything. I mean, I had a mom and she was pretty awesome. But it was a bit bad. I mean, even if my dad hadn't been somebody important, it would still have been pretty bad. I missed him just because he was my dad - he was somebody to play catch with, he was somebody who could always be relied on to straighten me out when I misbehaved.

I mentioned that my dad left a few things behind. Well, they were really gifts for me, and they were very cool. First, he designed a really neat security system for the house. Now, I know what you're thinking, 'what's so neat about a security system?' But I'll tell you. I'd be willing to bet that I'm the only kid you know who has an advanced biometric computer system that keeps their mom (and everybody else) out of their room. To get inside, you have to have a matching thumb print, a matching voice print and even a matching retina. It is very cool.

The second thing my dad left behind was much more important. It is this thing he used to call the Gryffin. I still call it that, although I don't know where the name actually came from. The Gryffin is an almost perfectly black sphere that can expand and contract. When it's small, it fits in my pocket. When I tell it to, it expands to full size and I can hop inside of it. That's when it's really neat. With a word, it will fly me anywhere in the world - and fast. I flew to Mongolia once and it took 30 minutes. After my trip, I went home and figured out how fast I'd been flying. The answer? I was going 15,000 miles per hour. The really neat thing was that it didn't really feel like I was moving at all. When you're inside the Gryffin, the world just moves by you, but you don't feel like you're accelerating or anything. I have no idea how it works. In fact, I don't even know all the things it can do. I do know one thing though, if there is something that identifies me as my dad's heir, the Gryffin is it. And, just like a crown, it has its own cushion that it sits on. Well, not really a cushion. It actually has its own table. When I'm not using the Gryffin, I keep it there - on its table and under the light that was built just for it.

I think maybe the most important thing my dad left me was a picture. For some strange reason, it isn't a picture of me, him and my mom. Nope. It's a picture of me, him and the Gryffin. We're all smiling (all but the Gryffin of course) and looking very happy. I have pictures of him and me with my mom, but for some reason this picture seems really really important. This is the picture I carry around with me - constantly. It even has a special waterproof holder so I don't hurt it when I go to the waterpark. It's hard to explain, but when I look at the picture, I feel like a part of my dad is right beside me.

My mom didn't just raise me and worry about what happened to my dad. I mean, for years I thought that was all she did. But it turns out that she's pretty important too. You see, my mom was the Commander-in-Chief of PENGUIN. And no, before you get any images of a short, dumpy looking kid who waddles around, I'm not a penguin-human genetic experiment gone bad. I'm a normal human, just like my dad - and my mom. She's a human *and* she's the Commander in Chief of PENGUIN.

After we captured Grobar the Goat, my mom explained the whole thing to me. PENGUIN was actually led by penguins for almost 500 years. All that time, PENGUIN got bigger and bigger and more and more important and the heirs of Harold relied on it more and more. Then, one of the PENGUIN commanders decided that just doing good wasn't really PENGUIN's ultimate destiny. He decided that PENGUIN, as it was so powerful and all, could take over the world. So, this PENGUIN commander dressed up in a human suit, swam to France, paid some people off to invent a Corsican childhood past - and then he proceeded, with PENGUIN help, to take over most of Europe. His name was Napoleon. I'm sure you've heard of him. In any case, everybody was pretty much helpless when it came to stopping Napoleon. The way my mom told it, things ended up working out though. Napoleon, who as a penguin was perfectly suited to the cold weather, kinda forgot that his human soldiers weren't so great with it. He decided to invade Russia, the weather went chilly, and - while the core group of PENGUIN operatives were fine - Napoleon's massive human army was devastated.

In any case, after Napoleon's little adventure, PENGUIN was forced to take on a human commander. The idea was that a human commander wouldn't want to take over the world for the benefit of penguinkind and that penguins wouldn't follow a human who would want to take over the world for his or her own sake. You follow me? Good. So, this system has worked pretty well for a long long time.

So you got my dad, a very important and mysterious missing person. And you got my mom, a PENGUIN Commander in Chief. And then you've got me - a 10-year-old kid who's got a lot to live up to. Thankfully, not everybody knows I have a lot to live up to. You see, almost nobody knows about PENGUIN, or my dad, or any of that stuff. A lot of effort is expended keeping things hush hush. The whole system would collapse if everybody knew about it.

So what about me, the 10 year-old kid who's got a lot to live up to? Well, I'm short (which is why people call me Short Eddy), I get beat up in school and, until a few months ago, I didn't have any friends. I spent my time biking around town, and doing my homework. Exploring and learning about stuff was my favorite thing to do. It still is. I guess it is something in my genes.

I have friends now though. Sure, they aren't normal human friends - but they are very very good friends in any case. They are all players on the international spying circuit - people like Thursday, a PENGUIN secret agent, and Bartholomew, a frog with a knack for getting places. While I like Thursday and Bartholomew, my very best friend is Sam the Elephant.

Sam used to live in a old warehouse in northwest Lakedale - a really industrial part of the city. He was hiding out there. He'd escaped from the zoo when he was just a baby elephant. He hated the zoo. Bartholomew also grew up at the zoo. He and Sam were good friends. Bartholomew helped Sam escape. And after Sam got out, Thursday helped him find a job crushing cars. It all worked out really well actually. You see, Sam was the one person who knew both Bartholomew and Thursday. This was important because Bartholomew isn't just a frog - he is a super spy who is known in the industry as 'The Source.' Because Sam knew both Bartholomew and Thursday, he was the perfect go-between. He could get information to Thursday without Thursday or PENGUIN ever figuring out who - or even what - Bartholomew was.

It had all been working pretty well until Grobar came along. My friends and I discovered that he had a factory that was going to mass produce his mind control drug. Worse, a bunch of drug lords were going to get the recipe and use it themselves. Sam ended up saving the day by destroying the factory all by himself. The thing was, after he destroyed the factory he got arrested. He was sentenced to life in the zoo - just about the last thing he wanted.

Before he got locked up, Sam and I became very good friends. That's why I visit him lots - I guess. I really like to talk to him - although he talks about food and wanting out of the zoo more than anything else. When he got sent to the zoo, my mom got him a secret two-part cell phone. The microphone is in his trunk and the speaker is in his ear. Nobody but him, me and my mom even knows its there. Sometimes when I'm visiting, my mom calls to tell me to come home to dinner and stuff.

I was actually visiting Sam on Sunday afternoon when the whole story of Squiggles Apocalypse actually began. Well, the story didn't actually begin then. That's just when I began to be a part of it. You see, Sam and I were just talking - I can't even remember what we were talking about, although I'd be willing to bet it was about Madagascar nuts, when his ear started ringing. He was just sitting there, his giant legs folded under him, when he stopped talking. He stuck his trunk up near his mouth and announced, in cheerful voice, "Sam here!"

He tipped his head a bit, as if leaning into the headset in his ear and said, "Hold on, he's right here."

I knew the drill, I ran up next to Sam's ear and grabbed the end of his trunk in my hand - just like I was using one of those old style phones. Microphone and headpiece in place, I announced, , "It's Eddy."

"It's Thursday," said the calm voice on the other end of the line.

"Hi, Thursday," I answered, "What's up?"

After a moment, Thursday, who was one of PENGUIN's top field agents, replied, "Eddy, we've got a situation here. A Code Nine. The Commander heard something land on the roof."

I knew what a Code Nine meant, it meant 'get to the safe room.'

It also meant something was terribly wrong at home.

"I'll be right there!" I almost shouted into Sam's trunk.

Sam barely got to say, "Be safe, Eddy," before I was in the Gryffin.

In less than a second, I was back home.

I was totally unprepared for what I saw when I got there.

Coming up in Chapter 4!
THE RETURN OF GROBAR!

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Chapter 2: The Origins of PENGUIN

2007-03-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

In 1241, the Khans, of Mongolia, ruled almost the entire world. They held China, the important parts of Russia, the bulk of the Middle East and they were about to conquer all of Europe. They hadn't discovered America or Africa, but the way they were going, it would only have been a matter of time.

The Khans - in particular Genghis and his son Ogodei - were the reason that PENGUIN was created.

In Roman times, just seeing the wealth of the Roman Empire was enough to set the barbarians looting and conquering and keeping Rome pretty much in check. However, this didn't work real well with the Khans. The reason was simple. The Khans, though users of the world's most advanced military technologies, *were the barbarians*.

It was into this gap that PENGUIN was born. Back in those days, there were only ten penguins in PENGUIN. They didn't have any high technology or anything. What they did have was the world's best martial arts training. They knew it all, from the silent assassination techniques of the Arabs to the bow shooting of the Japanese. The early PENGUIN agents were some of the best the world was ever to see. They were legends whose stories far outlasted their own physical lives.

Why penguins you ask? Well, let's just say that because they lived so far away from everything else nobody saw them as real threatening. People in the know allowed them to act against the Khan because they were confident the PENGUINs wouldn't take the Khan's place. There was another organization, an organization of secret agent polar bears, that could have helped out. But people who influence over such things figured that if the polar bears stopped the Khan, nothing would stop them from taking over the world.

So, without the fear of opposition, the original ten PENGUIN agents staged the death of Genghis Khan. Once the Mongolians were convinced that their Khan had died, they returned to Mongolia. For the time being at least, the world had been saved.

The thing was, the Khan hadn't actually died. No, he was simply spirited off to the PENGUIN prison - an icy cavern one mile beneath the surface of Antarctica. He spent the rest of his life there, making PENGUIN's first mission an unqualified success.

The next Mongolian to threaten the world - aside from Genghis' assorted relatives and descendants, a few more of whom had to be disappeared - was Grobar the Goat.

He too was brought to that icy cavern one mile beneath the surface of Antarctica (although it had been expanded some since the day's of Genghis Khan).

Unlike the Khan's though, jailing Grobar didn't help much. You see, Grobar had drugged hundreds of people all over the world. He could temporarily control any one of them. He could take a perfectly normal person, as long as they had been drugged, and make them do anything he wanted. Being in an icy cavern one mile beneath the surface of Antarctica didn't even slow him down - it just made him mad.

This time, PENGUIN needed help. Who did they turn to? Everybody they knew - including Short Eddy of Lakedale, USA. The thing was, Short Eddy had no idea what to do.

That was how Grobar the Goat, a dumb goat from Mongolia, got to be more troublesome than Genghis Khan himself.

Chapter 1: The Apocalypse

2007-03-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

"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.