The Island of Doctor Quilldancer
She: “Hey! I thought you were the mad scientist around here!”
He: “Ah, no. Place where I work frowns on the bwa-ha-ha stuff. Bad for fundraising.”
She: “So I’ve got to do it?!?”
He: “The fundraising? No, we’ve got experts to … oi! Put .. the .. lab .. coat .. down! Do I wish to know where this is coming from?”
She: “The island!”
He: “The one we live on?”
She: “Not this island! That island! The one with all the animals on it!”
He: “The critters we’ve got aren’t good enough?”
She: “Not for the military. They wanted something special.”
He: “Special forces?”
She: “Exactly!”
He: “Such as?”
She: “Well, cross a chimpanzee with a mouse and you get something really small and really smart. Perfect for espionage. And their sense of humor helps with training and esprit de corps.”
He: “Cool. Did it work?”
She: “Not really. It’s hard to spy on people when they’re standing on tables and screaming.”
He: “Should’ve crossed the chimps with starlings. Aerial reconnaissance.”
She: “Worked fine until the chicken hawks showed up. Then they figured out that, screw the bananas, screw the esprit, they could get killed out there! And they went AWOL.”
He: “You would expect them to be intelligent.”
She: “And then there was the cross between the rhinoceros and the cheetah.”
He: “Woot! Fast biodegradable armor!”
She: “Fast biodegradable dumb armor. How do you control a tank that can run you down at 60 miles per hour and eat you, whether you’re friend or foe?”
He: “Well, what did you expect? You were cheetahing! Did no one call you on this?”
She: “Why would they? We were taking gorilla warfare to new levels!”
He: “And then you woke up?”
She: “Um, well, yeah!”
He: “Good. I was wondering how I was going to get a security clearance on short notice so you wouldn’t have to kill me for listening to this.”
She: “You know what’s weird?”
He: “Weirder than AWOL flying chimpanzees?”
She: “Here I am, designing all these beasts and doing the mad scientist thing, and at the same time I’m the gal jumping up and down yelling this is a really dumb idea! Shouldn’t that be, like, two people?”
He: “It’s a dream. You can do whatever you want, be whatever you can, ah, dream up. Just don’t try this at home, huh?”