Past Future Travesties of Confection and Science Part 2

If you haven't read part one, it is directly below this one.  Stop being lazy and scroll down lest the Ministry find out your actions.

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            “Sir, we have reports of Shenanigans.”  The young man in the suit handed a dossier to the older man in the exact same suit who sat behind an unnecessarily large oak desk.  The Ministry of Shenanigans was full of expensive, beautiful rooms stuffed with cheap, inefficient bureaucrats.

            The old man sighed.  “Shenanigans, in this day and age.  Well, let’s have a look-see.”  He opened the file.  Inside was a single sheet of grey paper.  “…What is this?”

            “Well, sir, it used to be a photograph of the Peacerary in Harmony Square.  It’s since faded, and our top scientists are detecting some sort of scientific stuff happening in the space time thing.  I don’t really know what they said; I’m a bureaucrat, not a physicist.”

            The old man nodded.  “Mhm, mhm.  Right.  Well, what do they suggest?”

            “Their exact words were, ‘Take this up to that idiot, Jack.  And when Cosgrove asks what we suggest, tell him we have the tools he’ll need down here.’  Also, they said something about a time machine and the destruction of the world as we know it, but I was feeding a banana to a monkey.”  Jack smiled a faint smile and chuckled as Cosgrove grunted his way to his feet.  “Been sittin’ in that chair too long, boss.  It’s about time we got some action again!  Get to Peace Ray some jokers!”  Cosgrove groaned and left towards the Science Department, a terribly underfunded department filled with the most brilliant minds in the world.

            Twenty minutes later, Cosgrove and Jack were in an empty basement millions of years ago.

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            “Looks like you hit some poor feller’s dawg, Leeland.”  Jerebiah was still munching on peanuts as he looked at the unconscious raptor.  He nudged it with his foot and it reflexively moved its foot.  “Aww, it’s havin’ a little dawg dream.”

            Llewellan was less idiotic than Jerebiah, but his education was overshadowed by the human brain’s ability to adapt to impossible situations by ignoring them.  “Where’s my kitchen?”

            “Huh.  Dunno.”  Jerebiah looked the entire part of the slightly bored spectator.

            It would be helpful to explain their view.  Behind them, the basement descended into the grassy earth, with only a small ramp of brickwork and a wooden door breaching the surface.  Next to the door was an unconscious raptor.  Off in the distance was a smoking volcano being circled by pterodactyls, and, significantly closer, was a pair of larger raptors charging out of a tree line a few hundred feet away.

            They fled inside.  Jerebiah rescued the dog.  Llewellan placed it back outside before closing the door and locking it.

            “That wasn’t my house or my neighborhood.  That wasn’t my wonderful corn state!  And I still can’t get reception!  What is going on here?!”  Llewellan’s hysterics were interrupted with a loud thump on the door.  He ran down the stairs, grabbed a chair, and used it to brace the door.  Jerebiah was, for some reason, cautiously waving his hand around a corner of the basement.

            Llewellan ran over to the Device.  “I don’t think this worked, Jerebiah.  I think I teleported us or something, I don’t know.”  He started hitting buttons and turning dials, but stopped when a loud crash resounded from the top of the stairs and a raptor fell down into the basement.  Both of the humans froze as the raptor rose to its feet, and a standoff ensued.

            A long uncomfortable moment passed before being broken with the sound of struggle and a voice shouting out of the ether, “I keep telling you that I saw somethin’ back here!  We shoulda checked out that basement before you went pushin’ more buttons!”

            A deeper voice responded as a golf-cart sized shape began to emerge from nowhere in particular and materialize in the basement corner.  “I’ve never traveled through space and time before!  I just wanted to see what all our options were!  And I really think that Paris is just a lot nicer place than some crummy old basem— Is that a raptor?  Is he here to fill out a report on the case already?”

            Cosgrove and Jack climbed out of the Science Brand Time Machine and walked over to the very confused raptor.  It backed away, snarling.  Llewellan and Jerebiah stayed frozen in their respective corners, Llewellan wishing to be invisible and Jerebiah wishing for another peanut.  He decided to eat one anyway.

            The raptor had apparently had enough of Cosgrove and Jack’s disrespectful attitude toward what it saw as the Proper Order of Things.  Snarling once more, it leapt toward them, almost making it off the ground before the other raptor fell down the stairs on top of it.  As they struggled to disentangle from each other, Llewellan ran to the nearest flingable object and started launching it in the direction of the raptor pile, which had been joined at this point by the baby raptor.  The baby had the benefit of separating the parent raptors, however, they were still annoyed, terrified, and suddenly being hit with a rain of candy corn.  This battle lost, they fled up the stairs.

            Llewellan, body pumping with adrenaline, grabbed a sack of the sweet missiles and dashed up the stairs, yelling an assortment of different types of corn (“Sweet corn!  Golden kernels!  Crispy cobs!  Blue maize!  Popped corn!”) with each toss.  Cosgrove and Jack watched, dumbfounded, before turning to Jerebiah, who was shaking his empty peanut bag.

            “Hey, you!” Cosgrove shouted.

            Jack looked at him.  “That… really wasn’t very striking, sir.  Let’s try this again.”  He turned to Jerebiah and aimed his Peaceful Ray.  “Stop what you’re doing!”

            Jerebiah looked at them and dropped the bag.  “’Kay?”

            The silence that overtook the basement was occasionally broken with another type of corn being shouted from above and the haunting cry of a baby raptor weeping in the distance.  Cosgrove and Jack kept glancing at one another, and, finally having enough, Cosgrove stepped forward.

            “What’s your friend doing attacking those businessmen?!”

            Jerebiah shrugged as Jack leaned in to whisper, “I think those were prehistoric dinos, sir.  Remember, time travel?”

            “Right.  What’s your friend doing attacking those dinosaurs?!”

            Jerebiah shrugged again, sending the two agents into a frenzy of discussion.  In the meantime, a now empty-handed Llewellan dashed down the stairs, dove over the recently fallen podium boxes, and slammed the same big, square, blinking, green button in the center of the control panel from the first trip.  The humming stopped and lightning began tracing its way up the machine a second time and eventually the room was once again filled with disco and electricity.  The Ministry agents panicked, dove into their own machine, and quickly disappeared, back to Paris if Cosgrove had his way.  Worriedly watching the doorless exit, Llewellan muttered wishes for the machine to hurry up as Jerebiah pulled a chair over to his corner and took a seat.  Mid-sit, time seemed to—

               – stop.

            And once again it was over.  The hum returned, revealing the replacement of a wailing baby raptor with the soft bubbling of a stream and the chirp of birds.

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            People have always wondered what happened to the dinosaurs in our time.

            At the dawn of time, the Universal Mechanist was employed to create, repair, and maintain Life and the Universe.  Even for a universal being, this was a large task.  In fact, the task was so large that eventually it quit, roughly four thousand years ago, and retired, eventually rejoining the workforce in Hollywood under the assumed name of Bruce Willis.

            And everyone knows Bruce Willis’ stance on candy corn.

            This hatred originated during the Clean-Up of the Dinosaurs.  After the departure of the time travelers, the bags of candy corn that Llewellan had left above ground before fleeing from a particularly large herd of raptors were opened.  It turns out the vile rocks were just radioactive enough to alter the evolution of dinosaurs, resulting in a change from middle-class businessmen/hippies as the two forks in the evolutionary tree to a finale of malpractice lawyers/mimes.  The Universal Mechanist tried, but the evil contained in the candy corn was too terrible to be altered, and so it did the only thing it could: it destroyed the dinosaurs.

            This led to a series of drastic changes in the world, and was the first act of slaughter that the Mechanist had to do, but not the last, and certainly not the last due to candy corn.  While it may have been buried beneath the rubble on Earth, it continued to reappear through time…

            This is also why Bruce Willis donates one-fifth of his income to the annihilation of Candy Corn Producers.

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            “Paris looks different.  A lot less buildings, a lot more mountain peaks and angry yeti.  I kind of like what they did with the place.”  Jack was leaning out of the time machine, which was leaning precariously over a ledge deep in the Himalayas.  Cosgrove was very silent and very still, but his eyes were both loud and active.  “It’s pretty cold, too.  Did Paris ever get this cold?  Cosgrove?” He turned around and sat back down, causing the cart to wobble disconcertingly.  Cosgrove panicked, reached forward, and, as the cart began falling forward, he hit the Button, resulting in the plummeting vehicle disappearing.