Post by galaxyofstars on Aug 3, 2009 17:33:32 GMT -5
Hi - there are 6 chapters to this: I'm going to post the first 3. I'll put up the second half in a couple of days.
Any comments at all would be appreciated!
Part 1
Chapter 1: “The Swamplands”
It had been eight years since the fateful events that had led to Randall Boggs being banished into the human realm. It was a warm, humid evening. Randall was practising rapid, eight-legged martial arts moves and yoga positions on a rock in the middle of the Louisiana swamps. Alligators floated like logs around him, while he spun and twisted, practising the Way of the Dragon.
For most of his adventures on the Earth plane, Randall survived by blending his colours, camouflaging himself to match his environment. In this way he could live in the human realm and be invisible. However, it felt good to dwell among the swamp creatures in his true purple, blue and scarlet hues. Although, it had to be said: the Earth realm reptiles were rather stupid, at least compared to what he was used to, back in the Monster realms.
“But you aren’t nearly as dumb as most humans!” said Randall, addressing himself to a nearby gecko, who blinked at him and licked its own eyeball in response.
He sighed, “It really is too bad that you guys can’t talk back. It feels as if I’m talking to myself. But then again, I always enjoyed intelligent company.”
Randall unflexed himself from an elaborate pretzel-shaped knot. He stretched and shook each one of his eight legs. He smoothed the fronds on his forehead. Suddenly, he shifted his colours, blending into stealth mode, and tasted the air: he smelled food. He leapt and darted over the swamps, jumping over the alligators that did not bother to complain.
He approached the nearby trailer park and went towards the nearest trailer: he poured his invisible, flexible, silent body in through the window. He crept past the humans inside and snatched up a plate of food from the table while they stared at the floating plate. He slipped out again, taking the food with him, leaving the occupants to exclaim:
“Ma! There’s that poltergeist again! We need another exorcism!”
Randall devoured the edibles back in the swamp surrounded by his scaly friends, who all ignored him, and instead went about their daily survival routines while he talked at them about Monstropolis and his bygone life there.
Sometimes, when he became especially lonely, he would camouflage himself, creep into a human’s home, and turn on the tv set to watch re-runs of Steve Irwin’s “The Crocodile Hunter”.
“Now there was a human who loved scaled skin,” he informed a small lizard, as it munched on a grasshopper.
Perhaps his favourite therapeutic pastime was basking under the light of the night sky, looking at the stars, surrounded by the croaking of noisy swamp frogs.
“I wonder what ever happened to Monstropolis,” Randall reflected, “Did the Energy Crisis sort itself out? Did the Company go under? And, most importantly, what karma worked itself on Snot Ball and Fuzzie? I hope that they are miserable, wherever they are.”
That thought made him smile. Randall nursed his vengeance throughout the night, while crickets chirped and fireflies buzzed in the undergrowth. Eventually he fell asleep.
Chapter 2: “Alien Alligator from Mars”
Randall thought often of the day when he had been thrown headfirst into the human world. Sometimes the memory troubled his dreams. He would envisage the lady coming towards him, brandishing that blunt metal object in her hand. Was it a saucepan? (Bang) Was it a shovel? (Bang) – It hardly mattered. The concussion was the same.
Something new that Randall had learned that day was that strikes to the head made his scales shift into the most unusual colours. He had tried to blend his colours to escape, but every blow had turned him another vivid pattern, and he had been knocked out cold before the lady in the trailer and her inobservant son had realised that they were killing no ordinary alligator. It was only then that they had actually looked at what they were beating half-to-death. The unconscious Randall had turned red-and-green tartan, and he clearly had eight legs.
So the humans did what anyone would do under the circumstances: they phoned the newspapers and sold their story. In less than an hour, Randall was front page news, photographed and branded variously as “a mutant caused by toxic pollution”, “a throwback from the Age of the Dinosaurs”, “Swamp Thing,” and “a space invader from Alpha Draconis”. (All wrong of course. Couldn’t the adult humans remember the reality of monsters? Couldn’t their imaginations stretch back that far?) His trailer-park attackers were already booking chat show appearances with their newly appointed Hollywood publicists, and then – the Men in Black arrived, captured his unconscious body, and confiscated it for government research.
So it was that Randall awoke in a vehicle taking him to Area 51 for an alien autopsy. Guessing that most humans were fairly dim-witted, Randall shifted to match his surroundings, and managed to fool his human captors into opening the door to check if he was still there. Grabbing his chance, he fled, and he never looked back.
In many ways, he was perhaps the most fortunate of the monsters who had been banished to the human world. After all, while the Yeti, Bigfoot and Nessie were unable to hide what they were from human beings, and had to keep out of sight, he could simply cloak himself, and then travel freely wherever he chose. So Randall roamed the human world, and went many places, and did many things, but eventually he found himself back where he had first arrived, at the trailer park, and (strange as it may seem) the place felt like home.
So he had stayed, and plagued the trailers with ‘poltergeist’ activity (which amused him), and made friends with all of the mute alligators who lived in the swamps nearby. But he knew he could not stay this way forever. He had unfinished business. He had to return to Monstropolis.
Chapter 3: “Portal”
“Any closet door would do,” Randall informed the pet iguana, “Just so long as it belongs to the closet of a child of monster-scaring age, and it hasn’t been put through the shredder. Or at least that’s the theory. What do you think?”
The iguana stared out at him from its glass tank: it belonged to the humans who owned this house, a house that Randall had invaded since the owners were out for the day: he meant to put Operation “Return to Monstropolis” into action at once. The iguana bopped his head in a threatening way that meant “get away from my tank!”, and Randall nodded back in response, as if he were having a conversation with it.
“Yes. I see. You think I should stop thinking about it, and just do it? You are probably right. That’s what I like about you, Ziggy, you are always so positive. Thanks for the advice.”
Randall turned away and trespassed throughout the empty property – he had a plan, a plan he had been nursing for a very long time. The family had a kid, and a kid meant a monster, and a monster meant a closet, and a closet…
“…Means a ticket to Monstropolis!”
Or at least that was the theory. He had not actually put it into action yet. One thing that concerned him was the power factor – would a door on this side of the multi-verse be open? Surely that was a snag?
“Only one way to find out,” Randall murmured to himself, and he bounded up the stairs, sprang into the kid’s room, and pulled open the closet door.
A football fell out. A rack of clothes swayed slightly. No Other Dimension. No Monstropolis. It was just the inside of an ordinary closet.
Randall sighed. He visibly deflated. He closed his door in disgust, and tapped his suction-cup fingers on the wall. He was doing this wrong, wasn’t he? What was the problem? What did a portal require to make it open?
“Of course!” he exclaimed, snapping his fingers, “Cast your mind back, Randall! Remember the chase against the Lime Fruit and the Blue Carpet along the conveyor belt of doors?”
Of course, all of that door-skipping had been because all the doors had been activated by the child laughing and powering them on at the same time (“laughter did that?”). That had been an unusual circumstance. Doorways were not active all of the time.
Usually a door would only be open when it was powered on by a Scarer’s assistant in the controlled environment of a Scream Factory, and then, when the Scarer had done his or her job, the door would be closed, powered-out, and then filed back in among the Archive of Doorways, to wait until the next night’s scaring. The door was only active during that tiny window of time, that little time-space rift that allowed a monster to travel between dimensions.
“So there it is,” said Randall, talking to himself again (and not even realising it), “That’s what I’m going to have to do. I’m going to have to cloak myself, wait for the time when the child’s monster comes through, and then run through the portal, unnoticed, into whatever Scream Factory the monster came from. Simples.”
He hid under a pile of laundry, blended, and bade his time. It was only as the hours drew on that a variety of concerns began to play on his mind: what if this wasn’t how the Monster Realm worked any more? What if the energy crisis was still on-going? What if the Monster Realm had shrank into oblivion from a lack of power, and no longer existed? What if he fell asleep and the kid’s mother loaded him in with the washing?
Night fell: the family came home, and the child went to bed. At about midnight a tell-tale crackle of energy buzzed around the closet doorframe, and Randall launched himself across the room, and pressed close to the wall, ready to slip through the portal. A familiar monster walked out with a microphone, but Randall did not pay him any attention as he leapt through the wormhole and found himself, invisible and unnoticed, on the Monsters Inc Scare Floor.
It had worked! His brain rejoiced as he dived into the shadows. This place looks much the same, and yet, so different; I really must explore.
He took some deep breaths, absorbing familiar sights and sounds, and then he replayed a memory from a few short minutes ago. Wait, that wasn’t Wazowski, was it? Then he saw the Eyeball himself walk back out through the doorway, laughing and flipping a microphone. The Blue Rug was spinning out yellow canister after yellow canister of power, and the two of them hit a high five, laughing, then broke for lunch.
Well that’s strange, thought Randall, feeling a sinking feeling. The sinking feeling doubled when he saw the enormous portrait of Sullivan hung in the hall.
“Sullivan? The CEO? No way!” Randall exclaimed aloud, shifting to a fire-engine red to match his mood.
It was only then he realised that he had de-cloaked in broad daylight in front of a shocked audience of old work colleagues. He grinned, blended again, and threw himself out of the nearest window to escape across the Monstropolis streets to anonymous safety.
Things had certainly changed around here. He would need someone to give him a debriefing on events. He decided to track down his old assistant, Fungus. Information was what he needed. That, and for somebody somewhere to say: “welcome back!” – even if it was someone as despicable as Fungus…
*
Part 2 coming soon...
I hope you like it so far.
Any comments at all would be appreciated!
Part 1
Chapter 1: “The Swamplands”
It had been eight years since the fateful events that had led to Randall Boggs being banished into the human realm. It was a warm, humid evening. Randall was practising rapid, eight-legged martial arts moves and yoga positions on a rock in the middle of the Louisiana swamps. Alligators floated like logs around him, while he spun and twisted, practising the Way of the Dragon.
For most of his adventures on the Earth plane, Randall survived by blending his colours, camouflaging himself to match his environment. In this way he could live in the human realm and be invisible. However, it felt good to dwell among the swamp creatures in his true purple, blue and scarlet hues. Although, it had to be said: the Earth realm reptiles were rather stupid, at least compared to what he was used to, back in the Monster realms.
“But you aren’t nearly as dumb as most humans!” said Randall, addressing himself to a nearby gecko, who blinked at him and licked its own eyeball in response.
He sighed, “It really is too bad that you guys can’t talk back. It feels as if I’m talking to myself. But then again, I always enjoyed intelligent company.”
Randall unflexed himself from an elaborate pretzel-shaped knot. He stretched and shook each one of his eight legs. He smoothed the fronds on his forehead. Suddenly, he shifted his colours, blending into stealth mode, and tasted the air: he smelled food. He leapt and darted over the swamps, jumping over the alligators that did not bother to complain.
He approached the nearby trailer park and went towards the nearest trailer: he poured his invisible, flexible, silent body in through the window. He crept past the humans inside and snatched up a plate of food from the table while they stared at the floating plate. He slipped out again, taking the food with him, leaving the occupants to exclaim:
“Ma! There’s that poltergeist again! We need another exorcism!”
Randall devoured the edibles back in the swamp surrounded by his scaly friends, who all ignored him, and instead went about their daily survival routines while he talked at them about Monstropolis and his bygone life there.
Sometimes, when he became especially lonely, he would camouflage himself, creep into a human’s home, and turn on the tv set to watch re-runs of Steve Irwin’s “The Crocodile Hunter”.
“Now there was a human who loved scaled skin,” he informed a small lizard, as it munched on a grasshopper.
Perhaps his favourite therapeutic pastime was basking under the light of the night sky, looking at the stars, surrounded by the croaking of noisy swamp frogs.
“I wonder what ever happened to Monstropolis,” Randall reflected, “Did the Energy Crisis sort itself out? Did the Company go under? And, most importantly, what karma worked itself on Snot Ball and Fuzzie? I hope that they are miserable, wherever they are.”
That thought made him smile. Randall nursed his vengeance throughout the night, while crickets chirped and fireflies buzzed in the undergrowth. Eventually he fell asleep.
Chapter 2: “Alien Alligator from Mars”
Randall thought often of the day when he had been thrown headfirst into the human world. Sometimes the memory troubled his dreams. He would envisage the lady coming towards him, brandishing that blunt metal object in her hand. Was it a saucepan? (Bang) Was it a shovel? (Bang) – It hardly mattered. The concussion was the same.
Something new that Randall had learned that day was that strikes to the head made his scales shift into the most unusual colours. He had tried to blend his colours to escape, but every blow had turned him another vivid pattern, and he had been knocked out cold before the lady in the trailer and her inobservant son had realised that they were killing no ordinary alligator. It was only then that they had actually looked at what they were beating half-to-death. The unconscious Randall had turned red-and-green tartan, and he clearly had eight legs.
So the humans did what anyone would do under the circumstances: they phoned the newspapers and sold their story. In less than an hour, Randall was front page news, photographed and branded variously as “a mutant caused by toxic pollution”, “a throwback from the Age of the Dinosaurs”, “Swamp Thing,” and “a space invader from Alpha Draconis”. (All wrong of course. Couldn’t the adult humans remember the reality of monsters? Couldn’t their imaginations stretch back that far?) His trailer-park attackers were already booking chat show appearances with their newly appointed Hollywood publicists, and then – the Men in Black arrived, captured his unconscious body, and confiscated it for government research.
So it was that Randall awoke in a vehicle taking him to Area 51 for an alien autopsy. Guessing that most humans were fairly dim-witted, Randall shifted to match his surroundings, and managed to fool his human captors into opening the door to check if he was still there. Grabbing his chance, he fled, and he never looked back.
In many ways, he was perhaps the most fortunate of the monsters who had been banished to the human world. After all, while the Yeti, Bigfoot and Nessie were unable to hide what they were from human beings, and had to keep out of sight, he could simply cloak himself, and then travel freely wherever he chose. So Randall roamed the human world, and went many places, and did many things, but eventually he found himself back where he had first arrived, at the trailer park, and (strange as it may seem) the place felt like home.
So he had stayed, and plagued the trailers with ‘poltergeist’ activity (which amused him), and made friends with all of the mute alligators who lived in the swamps nearby. But he knew he could not stay this way forever. He had unfinished business. He had to return to Monstropolis.
Chapter 3: “Portal”
“Any closet door would do,” Randall informed the pet iguana, “Just so long as it belongs to the closet of a child of monster-scaring age, and it hasn’t been put through the shredder. Or at least that’s the theory. What do you think?”
The iguana stared out at him from its glass tank: it belonged to the humans who owned this house, a house that Randall had invaded since the owners were out for the day: he meant to put Operation “Return to Monstropolis” into action at once. The iguana bopped his head in a threatening way that meant “get away from my tank!”, and Randall nodded back in response, as if he were having a conversation with it.
“Yes. I see. You think I should stop thinking about it, and just do it? You are probably right. That’s what I like about you, Ziggy, you are always so positive. Thanks for the advice.”
Randall turned away and trespassed throughout the empty property – he had a plan, a plan he had been nursing for a very long time. The family had a kid, and a kid meant a monster, and a monster meant a closet, and a closet…
“…Means a ticket to Monstropolis!”
Or at least that was the theory. He had not actually put it into action yet. One thing that concerned him was the power factor – would a door on this side of the multi-verse be open? Surely that was a snag?
“Only one way to find out,” Randall murmured to himself, and he bounded up the stairs, sprang into the kid’s room, and pulled open the closet door.
A football fell out. A rack of clothes swayed slightly. No Other Dimension. No Monstropolis. It was just the inside of an ordinary closet.
Randall sighed. He visibly deflated. He closed his door in disgust, and tapped his suction-cup fingers on the wall. He was doing this wrong, wasn’t he? What was the problem? What did a portal require to make it open?
“Of course!” he exclaimed, snapping his fingers, “Cast your mind back, Randall! Remember the chase against the Lime Fruit and the Blue Carpet along the conveyor belt of doors?”
Of course, all of that door-skipping had been because all the doors had been activated by the child laughing and powering them on at the same time (“laughter did that?”). That had been an unusual circumstance. Doorways were not active all of the time.
Usually a door would only be open when it was powered on by a Scarer’s assistant in the controlled environment of a Scream Factory, and then, when the Scarer had done his or her job, the door would be closed, powered-out, and then filed back in among the Archive of Doorways, to wait until the next night’s scaring. The door was only active during that tiny window of time, that little time-space rift that allowed a monster to travel between dimensions.
“So there it is,” said Randall, talking to himself again (and not even realising it), “That’s what I’m going to have to do. I’m going to have to cloak myself, wait for the time when the child’s monster comes through, and then run through the portal, unnoticed, into whatever Scream Factory the monster came from. Simples.”
He hid under a pile of laundry, blended, and bade his time. It was only as the hours drew on that a variety of concerns began to play on his mind: what if this wasn’t how the Monster Realm worked any more? What if the energy crisis was still on-going? What if the Monster Realm had shrank into oblivion from a lack of power, and no longer existed? What if he fell asleep and the kid’s mother loaded him in with the washing?
Night fell: the family came home, and the child went to bed. At about midnight a tell-tale crackle of energy buzzed around the closet doorframe, and Randall launched himself across the room, and pressed close to the wall, ready to slip through the portal. A familiar monster walked out with a microphone, but Randall did not pay him any attention as he leapt through the wormhole and found himself, invisible and unnoticed, on the Monsters Inc Scare Floor.
It had worked! His brain rejoiced as he dived into the shadows. This place looks much the same, and yet, so different; I really must explore.
He took some deep breaths, absorbing familiar sights and sounds, and then he replayed a memory from a few short minutes ago. Wait, that wasn’t Wazowski, was it? Then he saw the Eyeball himself walk back out through the doorway, laughing and flipping a microphone. The Blue Rug was spinning out yellow canister after yellow canister of power, and the two of them hit a high five, laughing, then broke for lunch.
Well that’s strange, thought Randall, feeling a sinking feeling. The sinking feeling doubled when he saw the enormous portrait of Sullivan hung in the hall.
“Sullivan? The CEO? No way!” Randall exclaimed aloud, shifting to a fire-engine red to match his mood.
It was only then he realised that he had de-cloaked in broad daylight in front of a shocked audience of old work colleagues. He grinned, blended again, and threw himself out of the nearest window to escape across the Monstropolis streets to anonymous safety.
Things had certainly changed around here. He would need someone to give him a debriefing on events. He decided to track down his old assistant, Fungus. Information was what he needed. That, and for somebody somewhere to say: “welcome back!” – even if it was someone as despicable as Fungus…
*
Part 2 coming soon...
I hope you like it so far.
Ah well.
