The Sub Zero Space Marine Cometh (Patreon)

The Bostonian Monsoons came.

Weather so wet that the city will be ringing itself out for months to come.

Washing me and my several day old hoodie out to parts unfindable on a map,

I found myself, much to my surprise , within a gnoll clutch beneath a Circle K in a town that has more syllables in the name than people in the population.

And lo, I discovered the evils of Hard Sunny Delight.

So after an intense game of Battle Charades , loser drinks a case of Hard Sunny D, I emerged 49 hours later tasting like the NASA program in the early 1950’s and bounding over the territories in a fashion that would make people think that Stanley Kubrick filmed me in slow motion.

I awoke midnight with a head full of angry furbys and a stomach that was waiting for the right opportunity to strike. That’s when I saw her. She had a body like Smaug and a voice like Dolores Umbridge. She belched an offer that I couldn’t refuse, go on a little chocolate milk run for her or she was going to devour me, and not in the fun way that earns you a home cooked meal afterwards.

How could I refuse.

The job was simple: parachute naked into UpperWesternEastNothAnvilania , take out the dictator and his cronies with a titanium spork, and signal the ridiculous ruler had been corpsified by sending an email from his personal Hello Kitty laptop stating that he was becoming a professional mime and that the government of UpperWesternEastNothAnvilania was to become a democracy that insured the rights of all by electing its government by gameshow.

Easy enough…. Or so I thought. The parachuting was brisk, the fight was fierce, my spork sang of death that day, and once I stood triumphant, I went to email the UN, but alas it was not to be, for the moment I began typing the email ( all keystrokes on the keyboard of the Hello Kitty Laptop meow, it’s adorable ) I tripped over a unfortunately, placed collection of garden gnomes, which Our now deceased dictator, apparently collected in order to make him more relatable to the population. My feet failed me.

My body tumbled, and I fell into a cryogenic ball put, which, apparently he had been developing because weird science crap is always the purview of every would be world ruler, who starts out in a small, fake country in Western Europe. my body slumbered Time stood still, and my mind cried out to the universe that I was most assuredly missing the Ahsoka series, starring Momma Rosario Dawson

I awoke semiconscious as they began to bolt the armor to my body. I could hear the chanting of war priests, and the playing of Mahna Mahna on repeat in the background. I did not draw my first active breath and open my eyes until they placed the 8500 pound memory foam pillow into my now powerarmored hand, they told me that I would go out and set right what the emperor wished. I would ensure peace in the universe. And I would do so by laying waste to the Sock Puppet Hordes. As the stars bled in streaks of white past the hull of the haunted creaking cathedral, they showed me the ways of their enemy, and my core grew cold in ways it had not even been in the ages I was in ice.

For in the centuries since I had accidentally slumbered through the conquest of humanity by a man seemingly god like, his introduction of warp travel, and the emergence of The Sock Puppet Horde. A ravenous horde of savage sock puppets with googly eyes, angry construction paper eyebrows glued on, acidic blood, and felt teeth . Every human they sunk into fell instantly, only moments passed before the hands of the fallen became occupied by two more socks ready to devour the life from forever. I watched the videos, seeing the masses run in fear on world after world, chased into extinction by body dragging over the surface of each world face down , as the socks march.

The Emperor had attempted to quell the bloodthirsty infestation, but had been nearly mortally wounded, and so it was left to me. Still frozen but conscious, armored and wielding a weapon that could stun the monsters long enough for me to tear their cotton knit skin off of their forearms and hands, which instantly caused them to retreat just below the camera frame, and never to return.

80 years I tore through the cosmos , pillow pummeling in the black snow of Sulusin Volcanus, sock stripping in the Jungles of Wendell, cold and emotionless in the void of the Exeter Belt, feeling only remorse that I finally had the means to decimate the Grimace, and yet he had eluded me even now.

The day finally came when I reached the edge of the home world of the Sock Puppets, Lint Ball, and confronted their CEO, the lost sock hydra. I stared in wonder , recognizing that upon this desolate planet , every lost sock that had ever been gathered together, grew in strength and spite, and finally struck out into the universe seeking revenge.

I faced the Sock Hydra, my pillow wearing and heavy, every time a sock would be cleaved from the pack two more would emerge. As the fabric softener ran fell and the static cling thunder tore the skies of the uninhabitable planet apart, I saw it. The dryer void. The miniature rift in time and space that led from dryers throughout time and space to this lint ball of a celestial body. I had grown weary, my heart was like stone, and my hope died like it did during the last season of Game of Thrones.

I knew what I had to do, and so I closed my eyes, ran at the Sock Hydra, and cried out “ Saint Bea of the Arthurian order PROTECT ME !” and carried the sock hydra into the dryer void with me. I saw the sock puppet hordes fall. I watched every episode of Charlie the unicorn played at 6x speed ad infinitum, the universe let me slid into its DM’s and then …. Nothing.

And that was when I tumbled out of Miss Curb’s dryer with two armfuls of socks that came from I know not where.

“ Good morning, Nik, said Miss Curb, “ hitting the Sunny D again?”

“What year is it,” I spouted wild eyed

With that Miss Curb chuckled and nodded her head while my feet led me out of the laundry room.

In the quiet after I left, Miss Curb made eye contact with a Rick and Morty sock that made her furrow her brow and turn her head. Considering that it couldn’t belong to anyone else , she reached for the lone sock.

And the lone sock reached back.

Epilogue - the camera sits just high enough off the floor, so that adults can lay on their backs and stick their arms into frame. The laundry room is dark it rains and thunders outside, and somewhere the sounds of Radiohead can be heard slowly, as if draining, primal rage from the very linoleum floor beneath it rises a yellowed Rick and Morty sock with a pair of googly eyes that have had angry eyebrows glued to them and felt blood red fangs in its mouth. After coughing up a couple of lint balls it orders its children to rise in a raspy voice. Is joined by other of socks, with equally angry, googly eyes, and fangs of felt in several different shades of red. The first sock standing taller than the rest, declares to its brethren that their time has come, and they find themselves in a new age of conquest, just as Thom Yorke declares at the crescendo that now we are one

https://youtu.be/Bf01riuiJWA