Inspired by Scoot and his brilliant Notes adventure, The Search for Mervin Prangle’s Treasure, I attempted my own variation. This was the result. My thanks to Scoot , who started it all, all the others who joined in, including John Ward , Florian G. R. Hartmann, Architectonic and The Casual Writer, who reminds me of a particular caution I have before we begin: DO NOT GOOGLE THE GRUE. What follows includes references to the classic grue monster of the Zork game, which by definition lurks in pitch darkness and is therefore unknowable; of course someone had to go and draw it in some freaky way or other and ruin the whole idea. Anyway. Moving on.
The entire story follows, with such commentary in footnotes as I have.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
You shouldn’t have done that.
There is a sudden roar as the earth quakes under your feet and then, too late, you realize that it’s you who’s moving and not the earth, as an inexorable force, stronger than gravity, stronger than anything you’ve ever known takes hold of you and pulls you right inside the mailbox!
It is bigger on the inside, but somehow that brings no comfort.
It is pitch black.
You know what comes next.
Prepare to Fight/ Wait, What Comes Next? 3
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. You aren’t aware of this unfortunate fact, however, nor do you know what a grue is. What you do know is that you are not going to go gently into that good night! You’re going to live on! You’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!
But today is not July 4th, and you don’t have an international coalition of fighter planes with rockets backing you up, alas. Instead you frantically check your pockets, hoping for something, anything to fight with. In the darkness around you, there is a definite low growl. Something’s out there. And it sounds hungry.
All you find in your pockets is, of all things, a silver-colored metal square, a plastic card with characters on it in a language you don’t recognize, a bootlace, and a very small remote control with one single button.
Which do you use against the whatever-it-is that lurks in the dark?4
As the whatever-it-is rumbles in the dark, possibly preparing to pounce, you know instinctively what you must do. As unerringly as if 7 of 14 people had advised this course while the rest had divided their choices between three other options, you seize the remote control and without any hesitation, push the button.
There is a brilliant flash.
When it clears, you find yourself aboard a rickety metal bus. Outside the windows you see curving reddish-pink walls. There’s some sort of liquid outside as well; are you underwater? You’re not entirely sure.
“Oh, hey,” someone growls from up front. “You finally got here. Well, strap in. Tour’s startin’ in five.”
“Tour?” you ask uncertainly.
“Yeah,” the man says. “Sid’s Magical Bus Tours. I’m Sid.5”
“What exactly are we touring?”
The man sighs. “Every time. Every time I tell ‘em read the flyer, and still I get people signing up who don’t read the flyer. I get no respect. Look, we’re microscopic, okay? We’re inside of something’s blood vessel right now, we’re gonna take a look-see, then we’ll go somewhere else. I don’t know where, I don’t ask, I just drive the bus. That’s what they pay me for. Look, you got anything else? I got work to do.”
After all, you think, how often are you going to get a chance to see the insides of a blood vessel, up close and personal? This is an opportunity to learn! Make discoveries! Take chances, make mistakes, get-
“You gonna monologue all day or you gonna sit down and pay attention?” Sid barks at you over the bus intercom. Duly chastened, you sit and listen.
“Right,” Sid says as the bus lumbers past a purply-red blood cell, “This ‘ere is a blood vessel, specifically a superior mesenteric artery. What that means is, we’re goin’ to the gut.”
“The what?” you say.
“Yep!” he says happily. “We’re headed right to the digestive system, and not just anybody’s digestive system, oh no! We’re going in to the gut of your basic grueius zorkii, order cryptica, family tenebrosidae!”
He looks very proud of himself, having said all those words, and now he pauses, clearly waiting for a response.
Yeah, Bus Driver Sid! Yeah science!7
You give Sid an enthusiastic cheer, and rush to the window, eager to learn about the wonders of the digestive system of one grueius zorkii, aka your common household grue. Sid steers the bus onwards. After a while he begins talking again, giving you various scientific facts about what you’re seeing.
Pretty soon you’re lost, aswim in highly technical scientific language, and soon you tune out Sid and stare out the window, watching as the red blood cells swim by. It’s almost beautiful, in a way, you observe, how they dive and turn, floating and gliding along, like a vast microscopic ballet never before observed…
“Oh dear,” Sid says, “This could be trouble,” and you realized you probably should’ve been paying more attention.
“What’s going on, you ask?”
“That,” Sid says.
Something that looks like a blue balloon looms in front of us, but balloons usually don’t bristle with spikes, nor do they emit an eerie hum. “That’s a T cell. In humans that thing helps you fight infection.8 Same goes with grues.”
“Okay, cool,” you say.
“Not cool,” Sid says. “An infection is something that’s inside you what’s not supposed to be there, yeah? Right now, that’s us.”
You look back out at the spiky blue balloon, and now you see it’s brought its friends. There’s a lot of balloons out there, and they’re not happy.
“You sure about this?” Sid asks.
“Yes!” you say, although with some hesitance, as befitting a vote count that went 4-3-1-1, which technically means that more people voted against the option you’re going with than for it. You feel very conflicted!
“Okay then,” Sid says, and flips a switch. A hatch opens on the bus outside and a torpedo flies out and strikes one of the T cells, which explodes. The others back off “There. Satisfied.”
“Um…”
All at once more blue balloons appear, then more, then more. The bus fires missile after missile. For every balloon you detonate, five more arrive. Then an alarm sounds.
“What’s that?” you ask.
“Oh,” Sid says, and for the first time he looks worried. “That? That means we’ve caused a cytokine storm. Basically the immune system is gearing up so much to kick us out, it’s overheated and now everything’s going to shut down.
“You mean everything like-”
“Yeah. As in everything.” Sid waves generally around.
“That’s good, right?”
“We’re still inside!” he says. “What do you think’s going to happen to us if the grue dies while we’re still in it?”
“Oh”, you say. That’s a problem. What to do?
AHHHHHHHHH!
AHHHHHHHHH!
AHHHHHHHHH!
Well, now that’s done. Now what?
Run in Circles! /Save the Grue’s Life!9
You run around in circles, confused by your dilemma! How to save the grue’s life? You also feel compelled to sing a funeral dirge for the poor dying grue, to the tune of “Poor Jud is Dead” from Oklahoma:
The grue is dead,
The poor grue is dead,
All gather ‘round its coffin now,
And cryyyy….
It lived all in the dark,
Even so it had a heart,
Oh, why did such a monster have to die?
As you’re running, and singing, you accidentally step on a button embedded in the floorboard! Instantly a large speaker emerges on the outside of the bus! It begins playing the one song in all the vast musical catalogue of humanity likely to convince the army of gathered T-cells that you, Sid, and the bus are friends and not invaders! What is that song?10
And so that’s what you do: with all your might and main, you launch into the parts you can remember from the classic song, mainly the chorus:
“HANDS, HOLDING HANDS, TOUCHING ME, TOUCHING YOUUUUU….
SWEET CAROLINE
BUM BUM BUM
GOOD TIMES NEVER FEEL SO GOOD
I’VE BEEN INCLINED
BUM BUM BUM
You don’t remember the rest but it doesn’t matter anyway: the army of T-cells are humming right along with you! They’re won over! Convinced now that you’re a friend, they move on down the bloodstream, the slightly less eerie humming of Neil Diamond echoing away in their wake.
Phew, you say.
“Yup,” Sid says. “Well, on with the tour.”
You wonder if perhaps you should give the rest of the tour a miss. Perhaps you’ve done enough near-harm to this poor grue.
You decide you’ve had enough adventure for one day: you have, after all, explored the bloodstream of a grue, and saved its life in the process! (You decide not to think about the part where you endangered the grue’s life in the first place). And so you head home, flying magically on Sid’s rickety old bus out of the grue and away, as the last chords of country music play wistfully in the background. You wonder what might have happened had you chosen other paths. Ah, well, you decide, tomorrow is another day! End
I hope everyone had fun on this: I certainly did! Thanks for reading, and voting! If you want to read anything else I’ve written, subscribe below!
Like Scoot, I begin with the classic Zork opening. I never played it back in the day: someone on Substack, I forget who, pointed me to a site where you can play it now. I’ve given it a couple tries; I have never won. So it goes.
The other three paths were, in order, Cozy Sci-Fi Mystery, Space Opera, and Tolkienesque Fantasy. But no, you mad fiends, you went with Open Mailbox, and so you got, according to my notes, “Eaten by a grue: fragment of consciousness awakens in grue digestive tract [sci-fi]. Muwahahaha.
This is really where I started making it up as I went along; I hadn’t exactly planned on a tie, so I figured I should explain what a grue was, for those unfamiliar with the classic Zork game. Again, do not Google this.
I thought I might, with these options, offer a chance to choose any of the other three paths I’d outlined: if you’d picked the bootlace I would’ve switched gears to the Tolkienesque Fantasy genre, the metal square (which was the best I could do at describing gold-pressed platinum) would’ve been sci-fi, and the plastic card (a credit) would’ve been a space opera. But once again you hit the remote control, so we stuck with the grue story. Whee!
Sid, as you might’ve guessed, is no Ms. Frizzle.
I had very briefly considered going inside somebody ala the Ralphie storyline in Magic School Bus, but I figured it’d be funnier to stick with being inside the grue. Anyway. This is the part where I had to start doing significant scientific research checking Wikipedia.
[insert Jesse Pinkman meme]
It’s supposed to, anyway; there are certain genetic mutations where they don’t. Unfortunately our daughter has an extremely rare variant of those. The pandemic’s been an interesting time, let’s just say. Prayers always welcome, if you would.
A tie! This posed a challenge. I had to think about this one.
The “River of Jordan” scene from Airplane indubitably cracks me up. It’s one of the few scenes in film that never fails to make me laugh: that, and Ballerina Man from “Mystery Men”. Also the entire “Turkeys Away!” third act.
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