Read Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow Page 54
Just Maybe...
The Epic-Log:
Excerpts from the
Dishwashing Chronicles
(as Accurately Quoted from a Tattered 14th Grade Edition Clug Raddo History Textbook)
The Dishwashing Chronicles are what define all memories and stories of the half-planet Clug Raddo. Long after the planet itself has gone extinct, the only remembered piece of information about Clug Raddo will be the reason it lost its northern hemisphere. The event of the dishes.
It was during the year of Clug Raddo's 724th revolution in the 419th millennium of this particular galaxy when it all began.
Clug Raddo was once a popular planet in the Kroonum galaxy. At the peak of its heyday it sometimes surpassed Lincra in total daily visitors. The two planets were each so popular, and close in distance, they naturally became violently bitter rivals of the tourist market. While Lincra and the rest of the Kroonum galaxy was owned by the KULMOOG, Clug Raddo was owned and operated by the Blue Splotch Restaurant Corporation. They retained their control through a very rare and highly coveted Anti-KULMOOG loophole.
No other restaurant or food distribution service was allowed to conduct business on Clug Raddo. If you wished to eat on Clug Raddo, your only choice was to visit a Blue Splotch. The other option was to bring your own food from off-planet, only it's an illegal act with severe enough punishments to ensure that no one ever considered eating from anywhere but Blue Splotch.
If you were a permanent resident of Clug Raddo, you found work at a Blue Splotch.
One of the locals was a Grelkian alien known as Blok Mardem. He worked as an underpaid dishwasher at one of the many chain locations of Blue Splotch. It was chain restaurant #1790 to be exact, but it didn't matter because all of the Blue Splotches were the same, and had been specifically designed to be the same. Consistency was the vital factor of life amongst the Blue Splotch staff. If chain store #3092 was serving three scoops of coleslaw per order while store #9985 suddenly started serving two and a half scoops, management would have to immediately step in and bomb both of these locations. It was better to just start afresh than to risk any gamut of originality. Enough digression.
On the busiest recorded day in Blue Splotch Diner #1790, Blok Mardem reached his breaking point. Recordings indicate it was so busy that Blok, the only dishwasher working that evening, was completely unable to keep up with the onslaught of dishes. The sinks were brutally clogged with soggy, half-eaten food. There was no time to unclog the drains, so instead Blok let the sickly, orange-brown 'water' full of unknown congealed matter mercilessly overflow onto the floor, creating a deadly skating rink on the tiles. The dirty water also poured into the dishwasher. Now that the water in the dishwasher was of this variety, the dishes were coming out dirtier than when they went in. Behind Blok there were several walls lined with deep sinks, all of which were full to the brim with piping hot pans scalded with blackened over-fried teriyaki sauce and metal inserts horribly caked with burnt-on, chunky tomato soup. The serving staff, in their frantic busy-ness, had lost all interest in sorting the constant wheelbarrow loads of plates and utensils that were being cleared from the tables. Despite there having once been a time when each different type of plate was sorted into its own separate stack, they were now being tossed together in random, teetering card-house piles of butter-slathered glass, coated with crusted cheese dips and half-devoured, soggy, broccoli, all of which was routinely splashed into Blok's face from the required high water-pressure of the rinsing hose. Blok made the classic mistake of spraying into a ladle, the perfect tool for water rebound. He was struck square in the eyes with the scalding water. A server then viciously threw a handful of spoons into a cutlery bin, effectively splashing Blok with industrial-strength, corrosive chemicals. He was partially blinded for the remainder of his shift, and probably suffered some sort of life-long side effect.
Blok was going to have to stay late for hours after the restaurant closed if he had any hopes of finishing. He was expected to do exactly that, only he didn't feel like it. He wished there was some way he could get rid of the dishes. Not just the dishes at Blue Splotch #1790, but all the dishes on the planet. He liked the idea so much he devised an ingenious plan which he thought would allow him to get away with the non-washing of all dishes forever. Some say he took his plan too far. Your opinions on the sympathetic qualities of Blok Mardem will be one of the primary essay topics on the final exam.
When not washing dishes, Blok Mardem was aspiring to be one of the leading alchemical-scientists in the galaxy. He had become especially adept at the conjuring of vortexes. What was beyond the gateway of the vortexes he created was unknown, but one thing was certain, if you threw something into the vortex you would never see it again.
Blok dispatched his plan only to the dishwashers. The plan went like this:
The dishes were to be deposited into a series of tunnels, all of which would flow into the underground of the northern hemisphere. This particular dish-filled half of the planet would be amputated and aimed into the vortex. How exactly this half-a-planet would be separated is a point that we are nearly arriving at. But first, how Blok rallied together the dishwashers:
More of Blok Mardem's hobbies and skills included computer hacking and a knowledge of coded languages. He used these skills to hack into the system of the Blue Splotch payroll distribution program. Through this program he arranged for a coded message to appear on the backs of the Blue Splotch pay-cheques for the Dish department.
Blok's message announced his plans and gave an address in which the dishwasher could reply if interested. The response was unanimous. Every dishwasher on Clug Raddo agreed it was a very good idea to banish the dishes. Blok sent out charts, time-lines and blueprints, instructing each of the dishwashers to begin digging a tunnel system beneath their respective Blue Splotch restaurants.
This was not an overnight rebellion. It took years for the dishwashers to work out a properly functioning tunnel system. Amidst maniacal delusions, Blok did not think about how the population of people living on the northern hemisphere would be affected when they were sent careening into a black hole.
He also did not realize that getting rid of the dishes was a ridiculously moot point, as new dishes could be immediately delivered from Glassvexx on any day of the solar revolution.
An epic-scale vortex was conjured just outside the orbit of the planet. As impressive a display of Blok's talent as the vortex was, many of the dishwashers were still sceptical he could succeed. Luckily Blok had another hobby that would prove useful.
Aside from Blok's skills in vortex conjuring, computer hacking, dishwashing and message coding, he also had knowledge of Zhoteps, the name for the type of frightening bombs used only during mass-planetary reconstructive surgery. Blok had in his apartment a highly illegal collection of such explosives.
The dishwashers then set in motion wiring the entire equator of the planet. This was followed by prompt detonation. The blinding flash of the blast-wave can still be seen travelling through space, only just now arriving at locations untold light years away.
The dish-filled hemisphere detached and drifted into the nearby vortex. As of this writing, it has never been seen again. Miraculously, against all logic, the southern hemisphere of Clug Raddo does not careen into oblivion but continues a functional orbit with life-sustainability.
There are many myths regarding the apparent locations of the missing half of Clug Raddo. Some say the two halves were made to be the parts of a universal, god-like skeleton key, and that if the planet was ever repaired it would bring about either great prosperity or terrible doom, depending on which camp of conspiratorial-crazies you belong to.
The Bonus Short Story, or:
How We Colonized Jupiter and Cleaned up Garbotron
As collected from the Cutting Room Floor,
(shortly before I decided to distance myself from Rip and Wilx.)
(with a title full of spoilers at no additional surchar