CHAPTER 44
Grebular
When we finally arrived at the shape-shifting planet Grebular it was in the form of a sheet of paper. It promptly shifted into a paper-airplane and glided three orbital patterns to the left.
We found Rip patiently waiting with his newly formed friends, the Proto-Star hoppers.
“Thanks for the help!” he yelled to the extreme-sports junkies as they transferred him over to our ship and zoomed off in search of the Next Great Cosmic Ride.
Wilx was the first to confront Rip.
“You selfish frazzleplork!” he yelled. “You left us there without a word!”
“I did leave a note.”
“You shouldn't have ditched us. You wouldn't believe what we went through... there was these robots, and--”
“Does it matter? We're all here now, so it worked out. Let's just carry on with our mission... what was our mission again?”
“We're here to collect Crabbits,” said Wilx. “So we can use them to kill Reg, who is ridiculously undeserving of being the king of Lincra.”
“Oh yeah,” said Rip. “I knew we were on a good mission. Why don't we send out some pods with vacuum function to collect the Crabbits? That way we don't have to go to the surface and risk the planet shifting into a slide or something that sends us drifting into open space. Either way, I need a rest. We seem to only be capable of visiting the most gruelling planets.”
No one spoke of the events we had just seen on Hroon. Instead Wilx programmed some pods to scour the surface of Grebular for at least a dozen or so of only the hungriest looking Crabbits. The planet shifted into a swinging pendulum and dodged the arrival of the pods.
“Did you see that?” said Rip. “This planet is cursed.”
“We'll try again,” said Wilx.
The pods once again attempted to land but the planet chose that moment to randomly morph into a stale tortilla shell laden with the visage of Jesus.
“It's one of those Jesus tortillas I always heard about on Earth!” I said excitedly. “You can sell them for a lot of money.”
“Maybe you could have sold them for a lot of money on Earth a million years ago,” said Rip. “But here in present time, in the rest of the universe, everybody has seen a Jesus tortilla on more than one occasion. That same face has been appearing on tortillas ever since their invention. Nobody can figure out why, or who the face truly belongs to.”
The planet shifted into a bluish spherical shape.
“Look!” yelled Wilx. “The planet has shifted back to its original state! Quick! We only have a short window of time before it changes into something incomprehensible!”
Wilx sent the specimen-collecting pods to the momentarily normal surface of Grebular. The overly efficient pods collected up a baker's dozen of the most aggressively hostile Crabbits on the entire planet. We spent no more time at one of the many planets Rip still believes to be cursed.