Bobolous was growing steadily more uneasy about Carver's increasingly strange behaviour over the next few weeks, and often found his mind wandering to the whereabouts of the unfortunate silicone disaster known as Patricia, and whether someone genuinely was crass and blitheringly idiotic enough to create a subject called Paris-Hilton-ology. As reluctant as he was to doubt the young man who had taught him the true meaning of beauty...how to love...how to cherish...how to play Halo...
With a sigh, Bobolous joined his vacantly-staring friend at their desk in the form room one particularly lazy February morning, with the rest of the class looking as if a rather large and mysterious entity was pressing down on them, driving their heads into the wooden comfort of their desks, almost as if they were slowly sinking into the desk itself. Little Sangsun was curled up in a computer chair, making odd snuffling noises every now and then, Lettice Brockerlies yawned a colossal, gaping yawn, showing her snaggled teeth and white-coated tongue, before realising what she was doing, and immediately snapped her mouth shut, before re-applying her magenta lipstick. Bobolous wistfully hoped that Carver would be his old, lively, beautiful self today, and that this usual vacantness was from the contagiousness of the fatigue about the classroom.
Despite the weeks that passed after that worrying lazy day, Carver remained distant and distinct in his speech, answering curtly to any questions he was asked, and silently continuing his work. Even drama lessons had lost their flair now that Carver had lost his own flair, and Mr Van Vleet moved back to less exciting forms of music, spending many drama lessons monologuing about the likes of Celine Dion and U2. It was almost if the entire school was deflating, due to some extra-curricular presence, draining the pizazz out of the students, staff, catering staff, and most importantly of all, the school cats. Occasionally Bobulous would find himself drifting into the festering pool of uncaring, deep, crumbling boredom that he knew his peers were succumbing to, but Bobolous was strong, and fought the urge to tut loudly and proclaim that life was a female dog. He lusted for Carver's old character like an unobtainable drug, and vowed to himself to get to the bottom of this strange force draining the school of it's pizazz.
Meanwhile, Ben sat in deep reflection, trying desperately to even scratch the surface of the bizarre memories that Carver had triggered that fateful night. He found that if he could cause his mind to almost...flex, then he could summon a very distant memory which he could not quite put his finger upon. Meeting the man baby had changed his life so dramatically, Ben's previous years seemed as if they were from another life altogether. After nearly half an hour of franticly flexing his mind, Ben had a revelation. A disappointingly short revelation, but a revelation nonetheless. An image suddenly popped into his head; a small dark-haired young woman staggering through a muddy crowd, an empty beer bottle falling out of her hand as she ran away from him giggling, while he frantically scrambled after her in his designer wellies.
Ben was stunned at this recollection; a small dark-haired woman? It was somehow so familiar, but at the same time, so alien to him. Head pounding, he lay back in his multicoloured straw hammock, tentatively trying to recall more, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. And there she was again - he could see her much more clearly this time. She was small compared to the rest of the crowd, but tall for her age, because she was young, yes that was right, very young, in her teens. He could also remember that painful-looking silver bar going through the top of her ear, and her short dark spiky hair, with touches of red flashing when the sunlight illuminated her. He couldn't remember anything else about what she looked like, nothing but feelings and sounds after that. A squeal after hearing a bump from the attic, and wild footsteps. The spine-chilling jolt of the fright he got from someone jumping up behind him and throwing their arms around him. And of course, the day he got his ear pierced. How he could have forgotten that was beyond him. It showed to Ben how much he depended on the man baby, as well as how much the man baby depended on him. Ben thought to himself that he should show the man baby his dependence. Upstairs. Several seconds later, the empty hammock swung in the breeze of the afternoon.
Dear reader, you may be wondering what occurs in the rather magnificent life of Ben and the man baby's love-amphibian, the Presifrog. He was sitting on his presidential lily-pad in the White House during Ben's revelation (s), and Bobolous' worrying about the outcome of his dear friend, the slut, and perhaps the whole school. The frog was exceedingly proud of himself, as he lay back down on his lily-pad, sweating profusely. He had just managed to cover up the most newsworthy thing that had ever happened to the world, and not a single paper, magazine, or illicit website had managed to catch wind of it. The media would've had a field day with the stuff the frog had just managed to gloss over, so much so that I am afraid I will not be able to chronicle these astonishing events in as vibrant detail as I would like to, and I do apologise for this inconvenience, reader.
Toeing the line of what I am authorised to say about these events, I can tell you that a certain author by the name of Phillip Pullman was in fact found to be bona-fide genius, because an incredible phenomenon in one of his books was proved to exist. The only other thing I can say about it is that it involved a window, which wasn't stained glass. Naturally this kind of information should never be revealed to the public, due to the controversy, the abuse of it if it were ever accessible, and of course, the pure bizarreness of it altogether. The frog had to do a lot of favours for people he had never even met or heard of, a lot of things that he most certainly was not proud of, and of course, he had to deal with Diglet. As much as he respected Diglet's almost inhuman curiosity, and remarkable ability to cause an uproar. Diglet was often described by the CIA as the living embodiment of Frank Zappa's music. But Diglet was gone forever, nothing more than a memory now. No matter how much that freedom-fighter fought, Diglet would never get back to this world.
It was a tough decision to make, especially how it involved him brainwashing his father like that, to make him believe that there was no life before his other father. That was a difficult thing for the presifrog to do, but as all politicians do, he told himself that it was for the greater good. He could not let personal feelings get in the way of the catastrophic global crisis this would have resulted in. And more importantly, he could not let Diglet near his father again. But that wasn't just for the greater good, it was for his father's OWN good. He paced his presidential pond vigorously, up and down, casting the thought of Diglet and all the trouble caused by the Pullman theorem out of his amphibious mind.
"Bobolous? Come, comrade, where is my hailing for this morning?", a jovial voice declared into Bobolous' gill, and he raised his head from the desk in wonder, to be greeted by the most welcome sight he had seen in months. The sparkling, gorgeous blue eyes had returned, and the true Carver was there, in all his splendour. They embraced tightly, before entering into verbal exchange about the rapid decline in pizazz at the school, and Bobolous revealed his plan to find what was causing it. The more he spoke of it, the more uncomfortable Carver became.
"My dearest friend, I wish I could help you with your investigation. It is a very worthy cause, and I applaud your strength at being able to resist this hindrance, but I'm afraid that this may go deeper than you could possibly imagine,"
"What do you mean? Surely you know me well enough by now to know that I don't half-think things through. I have to do this, Carver. Do you have any idea how worried I was about you?"
"I'm grateful for it, honestly, and I have no doubt that you have thought this through thoroughly. But please, I'm begging you now, it would be much better for everyone if you stayed out of it," Carver paused, and sighed, "It happens to be something to do with me, in case you haven't guessed. But there are some things in life that you would be happier not knowing, and the last thing I want is for you to get involved with my problems. They'll drag you down, just like they've..." He stopped, a single tear forming at the corner of one of his angelic eyes, before Bobolous put his fin around the boy's shoulders, and held him close.
"I wish you would tell me, Carver. I'm sure I could help you, if I tried,"
"You wouldn't be able to, I don't even want to start explaining, it makes me feel ill." Carver then stood up, grasped Bobolous' fin for a second, before swiftly turning away. Suddenly he stopped, and slowly turned his head back, "I'm not from around here. Not from...this place, here...around here..." - his voice drifted and dwindled to a mumble, before he quickly walked away to his extra anger management classes.
They were selling hot chocolate at the tuck shop that day, to mark the end of winter. For fairly obvious reasons, Bobolous did not make his way down there; the thought of drinking powdered chocolate in hot water made his chocolately stomach churn. Instead, he sat at his desk, thinking that his mind should have been at ease after seeing Carver's old self emerge again. It wasn't, though. He doubted that he would ever see Carver the same way after that last conversation.
The next paragraph comes from far away. More far away than Bobolous, Ben, the man baby, Carver, Patricia, Mr Van Vleet, Mr and Mrs Wrinkles, or the Presifrog could ever imagine. It was another world. She sat on a rock, watching the sun set, twiddling her industrial ear piercing. That was the last time she'd ever dabble in politics, if all it had done was get her into the mess she was in now. It was a downright nuisance, being stuck here, but that backstabbing Presifrog had another thing coming if he thought he could keep her here. She would rain down on him in a storm of fire, she would lock him in a dark place so deep into a city that he would never see the sun, she would do everything in her power to make his life a living hell. But despite all her rage, she was nothing but a rat in a cage here. She needed salvation, an explanation for these bizarre series of events, and more importantly, an apology from certain parties. But above all else, she needed to explain something herself. She wondered what had become of her dear friend now, whether he had met the man baby of his dreams as she had predicted, before growing to wonder if her psychic powers worked between worlds. If they did, then perhaps he got her messages. It was difficult to search for his memories; she assumed that that dastardly presifrog had wiped his memory blank of all things to do with her. Such a cruel punishment. To be able to remember everything about a person who didn't even remember your existence. And there was no one there to even mention her name, to trigger a glimmer of that revolutionary friendship. A single tear welled up in her eye, before running down her face, leaving a thin glistening line down her left cheek.
She was worried, though. That blasted window wasn't closed up in time for her to catch the whole reason for the interference with the government, and the reason she was stuck here. She hoped to a God, if there was one, that the presifrog had grown a brain in the last several years, and made it a national duty to catch the lemon. She didn't even want to think about what would happen to her old world if the lemon got out of where she was now. She sent out a single worded thought, one word was all it needed, and she prayed with all her might that someone would hear it.
"Diglet."
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