Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity: Part III

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A young boy tugged on the bottom of his father’s shirt. “Daddy, daddy, it’s the Wheedle.”

He was wrong, of course, but Mr. Muxley did indeed look a little bit like the Wheedle. Without knowing the word, he took the comment as a grand compliment, and accepted the title with honor. He smiled at the boy and bowed. His father gave him a fiver.

“What is this?” he asked.

Monty looked at it. “That would be a five dollar bill. You can give that to someone, and they will give you something in return.”

“You mean you have a single set of currency to pay for goods and services?” Mr. Muxley looked confused.

“Well, there are several different kinds of currency. Countries tend to have their own. Much of Europe uses the same one,” Mervin explained. “How do you do it?”

“There is no standard currency,” Mr. Muxley said. “I once paid for a computer with 83 kilograms and 5 miles.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Did I not use kilograms and miles correctly? I looked them up in the land vehicle. I meant that I dragged the vendor’s heavy nephew across town, and in return, he gave me a computer.”

“Oh, well then you used it right.”

There was a screech and a howl behind them. Mr. Muxley went outside to find it. “What is that?”

Monty looked over the railing and watched in horror. “That would be a dinosaur.” A very large and angry dinosaur, possibly a Tyrannosaurus Rex, was barging through the city, knocking over buildings, and stumbling every which way. He acted like he was drunk.

“You just let your pets run around destroying your cities?” Mr. Muxley laughed. “That seems rather irresponsible.”

“He’s not a pet,” Mervin said. “He’s supposed to be extinct. He shouldn’t be here at all.”

Mr. Muxley nodded understandingly. “Ah, I see.” He pulled out a device of some kind. “What time period does he belong to?”

Mervin looked over to Monty who shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, we have no idea. At least tens of millions of years ago.”

Mr. Muxley nodded again, like he was just gathering a few extra and unnecessary facts. “That’s okay. It’ll take a bit longer, but I can scan him and map his origin.”

“You’ll what?”

They watched in amazement as Mr. Muxley pointed his device at the dinosaur. With one more tap, a beam of light shot out of the end and landed on the dinosaur’s chest. He flapped his little arms and tried to knock the light away from him, and roared with delight. What a fun game. After a few moments, the light expanded and overwhelmed him. He disappeared in a flash. “Okay, he’s home.” Mr. Muxley put his device back in his pocket.

The crowd clapped their hands together and cheered. Several tourists came by and patted him on the back. “What the hell are they are doing, making all this noise?”

“It’s an expression of appreciation,” Monty told him.

“You saved the city,” Mervin furthered.

“Oh, only because I was closest,” Mr Muxley scoffed. “Anyone could have done that.”

“Literally no one else on this planet is capable of that.”

“Okay, now I know you’re joking. This planet can’t be that far behind.”

“We are. We can’t travel through time.”

Mr. Muxley looked back and forth between them, waiting for the truth to come out. “Oh, come on.” He continued to wait. “You guys...quit messing with me. How do you go back and fix the past?”

“We don’t ever do that.”

“How do you write history books if you can’t check your facts?”

They shook their heads.

“You don’t go in the future and find out if you’re making the right decisions with your life?”

No.

“So when a tear in the spacetime continuum opens up, you just, what? Ignore it and keep walking? Like a bunch of animals? You’ve never investigated them and tapped into their energy?”

“That’s never happened before.”

Mr. Muxley bit his lower lip. “Let me guess. That thing about not having spaceships wasn’t a joke either.”

Mervin sighed. “Sure wasn’t.”

He seemed to finally be getting the idea. “In that case, I’m sorry it has to come to this.”

Monty looked skeptical and wary. “What does it have to come to?”

“I could try to explain to you the Oliyweth Gridwork; how all life in the universe is connected. I could go on and on about the achievement of enlightenment, and the importance of shedding the meaningless and the nuisances. But it would be a waste of my time. You won’t be around to use this new information anyway.”

“What are you going to do?” Mervin asked.

“I’m afraid that your planet will have to go.”

“You can’t do that!” Mervin cried out.

“It’s for the best. It’s like when you fall asleep in the middle of an eclipse and accidently forget to not grow a third arm. It might take some effort, but you have to cut off that third arm and feed it to the Lilthusned gods. Otherwise, you’ll be dealing with flicker demons for the rest of the month. And nobody wants that. You know what I mean?”

No, we don’t.

“It’ll be quick. One swipe and Earth blinks out of existence. I promise, you won’t feel a thing. Just give me a minute to send an authorization request to the Ateejehid Council.”

Monty pulled an object out of Mr. Muxley’s coat. It was a blowtorch sort of thing that aliens evidently used to light themselves on fire instead of eating, like a normal person. Mr. Muxley saw him do it, but didn’t seem to care one bit. After all, what’s the harm? Monty used the torch to destroy part of the barrier on the viewing platform. He then grabbed Mr. Muxley from behind and pulled him over the edge. Together they began to fall toward the ground. But Mr. Muxley sprouted wings and flew back up to the viewing platform. He watched with disinterest as Monty fell to the pavement and died.

“Did he just try to kill me in order to stop me from destroying your planet?”

“That’s exactly right,” Mervin confirmed. “We don’t want to die. He sacrificed himself for all of us.”

“Oh, you won’t die,” Mr. Muxley clarified. “It’ll be more like you never existed. As I said, this must be done. We cannot attain perfection with cavemen like you. We have to all be at the same level, and it would take far too much effort bringing you apes up to speed.”

Meanwhile, down on the pavement, a tear in the spacetime continuum opened up randomly and drew Monty into it. His body traveled back in time about 5,000 years. Ancient Egyptians recovered it, along with Mr. Muxley’s weird space torch. They reverse engineered the technology and altered history, propelling Earth into becoming the most advanced planet in the entire universe. Monty’s ghost explained to them what had happened in the alternate future. Eventually, Earthling forces traveled to Mr. Muxley’s home planet of Mekajs and destroyed it. Ya know...because it was for the best.

Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity: Part II

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Mr. Muxley sat impatiently in the passenger seat. “Why is this taking so long?”

“It’s a common land vehicle,” Monty explained. “It can’t even go a hundred miles an hour.”

“What’s a mile? What’s an hour?” Mr. Muxley asked.

“That bridge we passed a couple minutes ago is about a mile back that way,” Mervin said. “A minute is sixty times the length of time it takes for me to say...one mississippi. An hour is sixty times a minute.”

“I see,” Muxley huffed. “That is quite frustratingly slow.”

Mervin pressed the pedal to increase his speed by just a little. “We have things that go faster, like trains and planes. But this thing is cheap. We can’t all afford spaceships.”

“The spaceships we do have,” Monty furthered, “haven’t gone any farther than the moon, except for a few unmanned vessels. But it takes them a really long time either way.”

They were finally at their destination. They stepped out of the car and into the diner. There were a few other people in there. They took one look at the alien then went back to their meals. Despite having never seen an alien before, this was a ghost town, and people didn’t really care about anything. Monohon was small lake town that lived and died in the span of a century. In its place was a completely different city. A few decades ago, however, Monohon came back to life. If you drove on the streets, you would remain in Sammamish. If, however, you drove on East Lake Sammamish Trail while flickering your lights and keeping your radio on static, you would end up in Monohon. Half of the residents were dead; but half were alive, like Mervin. Why they chose to live there was kind of a mystery. Few people, Monty included, lived outside of the ghost town but were aware of its existence.

Miss Milly’s Mess Hall at the Mill was one of two major businesses in Monohon. The sawmill had burnt down and was rebuilt so many times, that people theorized that time itself eventually got used to the idea of the mill’s existence. Instead of waiting for someone to rebuild the town, it invoked the buildings on its own. The only people that worked at the mill were the ghosts. They never seemed to get tired. At the end of the day, they would eat dinner at the Miss Milly’s, and then eventually fade into oblivion. The next morning, they would reappear at the hotel and start all over again. On the weekends, they could be found fishing on Lake Sammamish. They would mouth words and pretend to talk to be polite, but were seemingly incapable of forming sounds. All the living residents worked at the diner, hotel, and post office. The train depot was completely out of use, but there were a few people, both living and dead, who wandered around and received payment to do nothing.

Mervin and Monty went over all this while they were waiting for their food, but Muxley was completely unimpressed by it. He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, it’s a pocket dimension. Whatever.”

“Is that what this place is called?” Mervin asked. “So, you’ve seen a ghost town before?”

“Yeah, of course. We have them all over the place. You were supposed to show me something interesting.”

Monty laughed. “Did we not tell you that we’re not really equipped to be tour guides of Earth?”

“No.”

“Oh, well. It should be pretty obvious. I thought we’d start with breakfast, and hopefully come up with something to try afterwards.”

“What does breakfast mean?”

The waitress set the plates down and smiled. “It’s when you eat food in the morning,” she said.

“Eat food?” Muxley asked.

“Yeah, you put it in your mouth and chew,” she said. “How else would you gather energy for the day?”

“We lather ourselves with the sap of the miulwebirkovel plant. Then we set our body on fire, and when all the sap has evaporated, we have enough energy for the rest of the week.”

The other three stared at him in silence. “We don’t have any...” Monty started to say.

“Miulwebirkovel,” the waitress assisted.

“...plants on this planet,” Monty finished.

“Well no, of course not,” Mr. Muxley laughed. “It only grows on Mekajs. But any sokugni class vegetation will do. I’m not picky.”

“We don’t have any plants that will help you if you set yourself on fire,” Monty revealed. “I hope you packed enough of your sap.”

“You’re telling me that you put objects in the same orifice out of which you speak every day?”

“That’s right.”

“Where does it go after that? How would it even evaporate?”

The two men looked away uncomfortably. The waitress went back to the counter and tried to forget the last five minutes.

“Answer me,” Muxley demanded. “What happens after you do this strange eating food thing?”

Two minutes later, Mr. Muxley burst out of the bathroom and ordered them to take him away from that wretched place. “I want to go somewhere I haven’t seen before and that doesn’t make me want to tear my ears off and erase my memories!”

Mervin sighed. “Let’s try the space needle,” he suggested. Click here for the next installment...