The Meteor Team Book III: Love Knows No Barriers, but Evil Cuts the Cheese.

The Meteor Team
(co-starring Dorilla and the Friendly Dragons)
Book III: Love Knows No Barriers, but Evil Cuts The Cheese.

Chapter One: Trouble Is Brewing

Well, well, well, now isn’t this nice? I peek through my time/space spyglass, and what do I see? A buncha of lizardy and snakey things trying to mess up my latest bootaliciously evil plan for the Tricycle Time. This really sucks! I’m gonna hafta do something about this right away… *snarf* … oh, ok, lovely tummy, after I’ve had my lunch.

Or so thought a certain tiny pachyderm, who had recently been given early release from Death Island Security Prison, although no one can figure out why.

“Mama Elephant, what are we having for lunch?”

“Why your favorite, dear; turkey sandwiches and prune juice,” a sweet voice responded.

The allegedly reformed and no longer evil (HA!) Baby Elephant heaved a great sigh.

“Sorry, Mama, but I gotta go right now. It’s a matter of strife and mess.”

“Don’t you mean ‘life and death’?” asked the puzzled parent.

“Whatever. Usually ends up being the same sorta thing when I’m involved,” chuckled her lunatic offspring, even as she tromped out the front door on her stinky, dinky feet.

Chapter Two: The Diabolical Dr. Moo Is Deeply Disappointed

Although she absolutely refuses to admit it, Baby Elephant is somewhat smaller than normal elephant youngsters – by about two thousand percent – and is currently showing nary a sign of tusk development -- which she also refuses to admit, often sticking bleached carrots in her cheeks to fake people out. As a result, she doesn’t require much space for a secret hideout. This bothers her enormously.

Therefore, she is now “office-sharing” a barely impressive laboratory with the Diabolical Dr. Moo, a dairy obsessed maniac who, for the past twenty years, has attempted to turn her many imaginary enemies into cheese. She has been surprisingly successful in this endeavor, at least if one counts the number of mysteriously appearing cheese balls in the yard. Sharing a reasonably significant working space with such a certifiable nut job makes our dim yet insubstantial pachyderm feel like a player, which, of course, she is not. Instead, she is more like a rat dropping floating in the cereal bowl of life.

At any rate, at this fine noontime, Baby Elephant, who always sounds as though she has a thunder god living in her bottom, skipped over to the secret science lab /“Den of Despair” that she splits with Dr. Moo. It is cleverly camouflaged as a gardening shed; such a disguise, although otherwise pointless, allows the neighbors to believe that any horrible odors are the result of compost and mulch…not B.E.’s “chocolate coating” or Moo’s cheesy experiments.

“Hey, Doc, what’s up?” snarfed the minute behemoth, clumsily slamming her way through a hidden door and into the laboratory section of the “shed.”

“Oh, for the love of lactose, not you again. What do you want this time? You’ve devoured every single sweet-tasting chemical in my supply cabinet, and I’ve given you enough moldy agar from my Petri dishes to choke, well, an elephant…Say, you do know you’re not supposed to eat that stuff, right? Right? Oh, never mind. Here’s an anthrax culture. Have at it.” The weary blonde mad scientist slumped into a chair and folded her
arms over her face. It had been one of those mornings. It was, she feared, about to become one of those afternoons. She was right.

“Nah, I don’t want no more Jell-O (at least not right this second). I jes’ want ya to crank up the ol’ time transpooper and send me back to the Tricycle Time again. That meddling Meteor Team – you know, Jet, the genius Leopard Geeko, Hotwheels, the super fast Cornsneak, and Sawtooth, the Breaded Dragon with unbreakable teeth -- and their friends -- Dorilla, the mutilated Commando Dragon, and the six Fiendly Dragoons -- are about to ruin my master plan to trash all them dino-sours and prehysterical dragoonamathingies.

“First of all, you mean Time Transporter. Second of all, you desire to return to the Triassic Period. Third of all, as for your enemies, Jet is a Leopard Gecko, Hotwheels is a Cornsnake, Sawtooth in a Bearded Dragon (which is a type of lizard), Dorilla is a mutated Komodo Dragon (which is a type of huge and dangerous lizard), and the six Friendly Dragons are actual flying, fire breathing Dragons. Fourth of all, it’s dinosaurs and prehistoric dragons that you want to pulp via your “cunning” plan. Fifth and last of all, you are a mindless blockhead. Got it?"

“Got what?”

“Just get in the big, purple tube over there, yes, the one right by the plutonium cheese grater,” Dr. Moo hissed.

“Where’s da seatbelt?”

“I took it out the last time you came back safely.”

As the diminutive annoyance settled into the time machine’s udderly unprotected seat (which is, nonetheless, nicely plush and spotted like a Holstein cow), the evil genius of all things curdled quickly flipped the time transport switch before her passenger could change its tiny deficient mind.

Sadly, all the readouts told Dr. Moo that her runty lab mate had arrived in the past without a hitch.

Chapter Three: Some Dinosaurs Are Not Dinky

    “Oh, wow, this is really weird. I don’t think I’ve ever been back to the Triassic before. What happens next? Should we talk to those rare species of Diplodocus over there? Should we watch for suspicious comets? ” The eager young corn snake Hotwheels, a proud member of the Meteor Team, could barely contain his excitement.

    “Slow down there, sonny, this can be a dangerous place for an amateur,” crankily snapped the elongated sea dragon, Siunid. He was probably in a bad mood due to the unavoidable absence of crispy, cheese flavored snacks in olden times.

“Ahem,” interjected Jet, leader of the Meteor Team, “I’d hardly call us amateurs, besides, if you don’t trust our judgment, Si, why did you ask for our assistance in the first place? If you recall, it was the Friendly Dragons’ idea to go back in time, not ours.”

    Jaws, the leader of the Friendly Dragons, was a massive green beast with a hypnotically sing song voice. He attempted to sooth everyone down with an inspiring speech.

    “Now, now, you rascals, there’s no need to fuss or fight. It’s like I tell my beautiful wife Aryna, ‘life will be grand so long as you don’t eat too many of your friends’ kiddies too often.’ See? It’s just a matter of compromise. The way I figure it, what goes around comes around. The acorn, you know, never falls far from the oak tree. After all, a frown is just a smile turned upside down. Come on now, you should whistle while you work and don’t forget to tell everyone you meet to have a nice *Graaghh*.”

    After prying Arnya’s claws loose from her husband’s jugular, Si panted out his sincere apologies to Jet and Hotwheels. So, thankfully, this little disagreement caused no lasting harm to the congenial relations between the Meteor Team and the Friendly Dragons, although Arnya did insist on a trial separation from Jaws (however, as she had been demanding one for the last five hundred years, I don’t believe that counts). In the meantime, tiny spotted Dorilla, tired of being left out of the action and wanting to be referred to immediately, decided that now was the appropriate moment to transform into a humongously huge lizardy thingy.

It was not, needless to say, the appropriate moment to transform into a humongously huge lizardy thingy. Indeed, popular opinion has it that there is never such a moment. Nonetheless, Dorilla suddenly grew so monstrously tall and so proportionately vast that he caused all the local long necked dinosaurs to spontaneously stampede right over the Meteor Team’s time portals, hopelessly crushing the delicate machinery to bits.

“Oopsy-Daisy,” the rapidly shrinking Dorilla remarked with a tentative smile.

“Dogpile on the tiny, stupid, spotted lizard! Dogpile on the tiny, stupid, spotted lizard!” yelled everyone else, wearing expressions ranging from mild annoyance to unrelenting fury.

It was all too clear; with their time transportation devices looking like mechanical spaghetti, our heroes were now trapped in the Triassic.

    Chapter Four: A Snarfing We Will Go

“Ahhhhhh.”

Heaving a sigh and wiggling her undersized toes, Baby Elephant pushed her fat little bottom even further into the volcano vent. She had discovered the nice toasty mountain fissure only minutes after arriving in the Triassic Period, and she wasn’t about to give it up any time soon. She particularly enjoyed the way the stuff inside the rock aperture trembled and shook, burping up red and melty bubbles. For some reason, whenever she “burped” with her hindquarters, the shaking sensation grew much worse.

    After a while, though, the novelty of the sensations wore off, and the dreadfully dinky dumbo trundled off in search of her targets, those meddling twenty first century reptiles. Now, mind you, she had absolutely no clue how to stop them, but, as always, she trusted her native intelligence to produce a wily plan when the occasion warranted it. That would be a first.

Having wandered aimlessly around lush, verdant meadows full of grazing dinosaurs, Baby Elephant climbed a small incline to the edge of a cliff and finally caught sight of her prey. In the valley below, the Meteor Team and the Friendly Dragons were sadly surveying several bits of twisted metal, wire, and glass. In the extreme distance, a herd of Diplodocus could be seen running full tilt across the basin floor. The panicked group of herbivores was closely followed by a tiny, spotted lizard that looked somewhat squashed.

Chapter Five: An Inconvenient Dragon

    With their transport back home lying in rubbish at their claws, the Meteor Team was at an uncharacteristic loss over what to do. In contrast, one member of the Friendly Dragons gave the impression of having a vital task to perform.

“Um, what are you doing, Arnya?” Jaw’s voice seemed uncharacteristically timid. Either that, or his throat still hurt from his mate’s last reprisal.

“I’m nesting,” replied the female mountain dragon, pushing ferns and horsetails into various positions and carefully scrutinizing the results. She did not appear satisfied. In fact, she sported an expression much like the one she wore on her honeymoon.

“Nesting? Aw, honey pot, you know you can’t mean that. Jeesh, be reasonable, you only nest right before you lay an egg…”

“That is exactly what I mean.” She gazed at him with all the warmth and affection of a boiled codfish.

“Heavens to Betsy,” moaned Jaws, who was equal parts shocked and reproachful. “You really can’t be doing that right now. We’re in a teensy bit of a crisis…”

“Do you want to try and stop me?” Aryna’s tone would have intimidated a dead man with no ears.

“Maybe we should leave Ms. Arnya alone for a while,” urged the shamelessly eavesdropping Dorilla. “You know, like immediately? Before she gets any strange cravings for the rest of your neck…”

“Good riddance,” Aryna snarled at the two rapidly retreating reptilian rumps. To her mind, it was a great pity that pregnancy prevented her breathing out great blasts of fire and incinerating said scaly bottoms and their worthless, insensitive owners. Returning to the task at hand, she only paused in her nest-building labors to sneer again and again at the widely held theory that PMS (i.e. Pre-ovulating Monster Syndrome) could negatively affect ones personality.

Chapter Six: Back to the Future

    Things weren’t going so much better ahead in the twenty-first century. The cheese fixated villainess, the diabolical Dr. Moo, continued to pace up and down in her cheesy smelling lab. She was distraught by Baby Elephant’s completely safe arrival back in the Triassic. The same poignant lament ran over and over through her tortured mind: where was a leaking O-ring when you needed it most?

Even as she pondered this and similar profundities (such as, where were the faulty ceramic tiles when you needed them most?), a gentle but firm knock sounded on the shed’s front door. In spite of this, the not-so-good doctor was so deep into her blue funk that she almost missed hearing it. But heard it she did. Silently cursing her addiction to Thin Mints (a weakness ruthlessly exploited by Girl Scout troops up to fifty miles away), she launched herself at the wooden door and heaved it open. In intense anticipation of her next “essential lab supplies” delivery from the green-skirted little thugs, she very nearly overlooked the small Leopard Gecko with a chunky, formidable tail perching on the threshold. It smiled up at Dr. Moo and then politely addressed her:

“Excuse me for interrupting your gardening and please allow me to introduce myself; my name is Delgado, and I’m trying to find an old friend. His name is Jet, and he too is a Leopard Gecko. Do you happen to know if he lives anywhere around here?”

    It took the resourceful Dr. Moo only a split second to recover from the fact that this reptilian pest carried no minty, dunkable cookies on her miserable person. The paranoid genius’s next thought was that, nonetheless, if properly handled, perhaps her unexpected guest could be of use in some other way…

    “Ahem, why don’t you come, er, Delgado? You can make yourself comfortable in that nicely plush seat with the black and white spotted covering. My name is The Diabolica…Oops, I mean, heh-heh, Dr. Moo. Can I offer you a milkshake?”

    “No, thank you, Doctor. I’d really just like any information you might have about the whereabouts of Jet.”

    “Well, let’s see now. First, may I ask how you came to believe that I might possess such intelligence?”

    “I had been hearing rumors that Jet lived in this neighborhood. As a result, my next step was to knock on all the doors hereabouts and hope I’d get lucky.”

    “So you stopped here out of sheer coincidence?”

    “Um, no, that’s the strange part. That nice lady elephant down the block sent me here. After I knocked on her door and questioned her, she told me that her daughter, Baby Elephant, had a secret crush on Jet, the leopard gecko superhero (for the record, what Baby Elephant actually stated was that she would like to secretly crush Jet, the leopard gecko superhero. However, unfortunately, Mama Elephant’s hearing hasn’t been the same since she took a ground zero blast last holiday season of “Noi Noi Bells”). Accordingly, Mrs. Elephant thought that B.E. might be found playing with Jet and his “nice young reptile” friends at their house, Meteor Mansion.”

“But when I went there,” Delgado continued, “no one was home. So I followed Mrs. Elephant’s alternate suggestion, to check out her daughter’s ‘playhouse,’ and so here I am. By the way, what’s with all the cheese balls on the grass? Some kind of lawn ornament?”

“My enemies are everywhere,” darkly muttered the mentally unstable scientist and would-be dominator of the world’s dairy resources. “It is my personal warning to those who would challenge my supreme authority or try to leave me religious pamphlets. Cross Dr. Moo, and you become a pleasant tasting spread for crackers, bwhahahahaha… ahem, sorry about the smell; my would-be foes are getting a bit ripe in this hot weather. I really should do something about that. The accursed city might actually dare to issue me a nuisance citation, the meddling swine...”

“Yeaaaah, right, um, I think I’ll be going now. You’re obviously far too busy to help me out at the moment, so I’ll show myself to the door, all right?” Delgado stood up and edged backwards toward the exit.

“BE SILENT AND RETURN TO YOUR SEAT, FOOL OF A LIZARD!!” Dr. Moo shouted abruptly. A moment later, she continued in a tone only slightly less reminiscent of a child-molesting Republican Senator with minor dirt on an outspoken liberal colleague, “I indeed have the knowledge that you seek. But it will come at a price.”

“You really do know where Jet is?” replied the excited creature, ignoring the tingling of her Leopard Gecko senses.

“Not ‘where,’ my little Eublepharis macularius,” leered the tall blonde in the bizarrely splotched lab coat. “But ‘when’…”

to be continued...

Post By Lisa offers this tale free of footnotes, but loaded with Moo. (via Visionary) Wed Feb 14, 2007 at 01:29:58 pm EST	Subject The Meteor Team Book III: Love Knows No Barriers, but Evil Cuts the Cheese.

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