Granola Prose XIX

The interaction with Gulliver had been so strange and fart-worthy Stubs had not noticed the tremors that had begun shaking the ground until they were so violent as to cause the television to jerk across the cave floor, its base making horrid little screeching sounds as it went. 

“We hasn’t the patience for a timequake. Does we, Samuel?” Gulliver bent his head toward his breast pocket and waited for a moment. Then he looked at Stubs. “We hasn’t.” 

Stubs was finding it difficult to maintain his balance as the cave floor began to pitch and buck. “What’s a timequake!” He had to yell the question, as the shaking was now accompanied by a roar that increased in volume with each passing moment. 

Gulliver responded by slapping forward to save his endangered television. “Must take television with us!” 

“For the love of mead!” Stubs yelped, as rocks began falling from the cave roof. “What is happening?” 

The tremors caused the perfectly-sized boulder to pop out of the hole and Stubs heard Tony and Edward chortle and wonk respectively. 

“Gotcha this time, you shitty dwarf!” Tony’s face appeared at the hole. It was menacing and gross. He squeezed through the opening and dropped to the floor with a good deal more aplomb than Stubs had managed. Edward sashayed through as if he didn’t have a care in the world. 

“Would someone please tell me what is happening! I’m about to lose my patience and hammer someone!” Stubs felt himself losing all sense of dignity. 

“We called in a little favor from a nasty wizard friend of mine,” Tony said. “He happens to be an expert in timequakes.” 

The cave was shaking so badly Stubs could barely hear anything the antagonist was saying. Even Edward’s piercing wonks were muffled by the roar. 

Just then a giant boulder detached from the cave roof and fell toward Gulliver, who was still attempting to steady his television. He was howling with fury at the interruption. “We must knows what happens to Don Draper!” Locked in the battle of his life, Gulliver failed to notice as Edward the Cookie fell out of his pocket and landed on the floor in a little cloud of lint. 

“Gulliver!” Stubs waved his arms, trying to warn the weird little dude of his impending doom. 

The boulder hurtled downward and Stubs braced himself for impact. It promised to be squishy and awful. Instead, Gulliver melted before the impact, as if the boulder were eating instead of crushing him. A rain of fragments showered the cave room, several of which struck Stubs on the legs and arms. The dwarf stared at the points of impact. The bits of rock had passed directly through his clothing and flesh, gone straight through, leaving pinpricks of emptiness behind them. As he stood there, frozen with disbelief, another piece of the roof fell. He looked up just as it dropped onto his right shoulder, which promptly disappeared without a trace. 

Stubs looked at Tony, fear gripping his throat. “By all the beards in Whimsidor, what’s happening?” 

“Your dwarf, doom! I mean, your doom, dwarf!” Tony said, barely able to speak between his snorting laughter. “The timequake will be your undoing!” 

“And yours too, it appears,” Stubs said, watching a chunk of rock eat away Tony’s left foot. 

“Ah, but that is the plan.” Tony grinned evilly and picked up Samuel. He blew off a bit of lint and then popped the cookie into his mouth. “The timequake spell dismantles everything in its target area down to its molecular level, transports it to another time and place, and then reassembles it! The beauty of the spell is that the person responsible for the spell always reassembles first. Aaaaaand, that would be meeeeeee!” Tony sang this last in a jolly tone quite unsuited to him. “That means when you finally reappear, I’ll be there waiting for you! You’ve led me on quite a chase, over hills and dales, through swamps and forests, past insane rulers sitting on thrones made of compressed clown wigs, and off the sides of cliffs. But now I will have my rev--” 

Just then the entire cave roof collapsed in a deafening rumble of rock and dust and magic.