Thursday, March 5, 2009

Albert

Once upon a time, there was a small boy.
His name was Albert. Actually, his name was Fagface Doucherson, a common enough name in his home land, but grossly inappropriate in his new home. He needed a manly name. Albert was more manly. Having a manly name was important to Albert because he was weaker than the plot in an episode of "Saved By The Bell".

Albert also had one other problem.

He was an alien. Not the "my parents came here from Mexico" kind of alien. No. He was the "my parents came from a moisture farming planet in the Andremeda Galaxy and they had come to Earth to make a killing off the vast amount of liquid water available" kind of alien.
Unfortunately, the hyper-space computer on the craft had a slight miscalculation and landed 65 million years after they sent that asteroid to the Yucatan peninsula.
This was a problem because Albert's family came from a farming planet. The people there were modest and hard-working. They are not prone to schemes or grand plans. Albert's family had a grand scheme; to steal the water from a planet with no intelligent life and come back rich in water, never having to moisture-farm again. Their fellow citizens scoffed at them and told them they should just enjoy their simple life and be thankful for what they had. Albert's parents called their neighbors short sighted, cowardly and small.
They started talking about all of the things they were going to buy with their new found wealth. An extension to their house, a new space ship, maybe even a place on the ocean-planet, Mojito, with it's alcoholic seas.

This did not go over well with the other "dirt farmers".

So when their water ship crashed and they ended up 65 million years late, the planet was no longer inhabited by dumb reptiles. It was inhabited by viciously bureaucratic mammals. They had a written language and that is all it takes to be considered intelligent, so by galactic law they could not steal their water.
You would think that after this failure they would tuck their tail between their legs and head back to their planet, and they did.
After all the noise they made about coming back rich, and the 65 million years it took for them to get back, this family had become a bit of a legend, and not the legend you want to become. They were a cautionary tale told to adventuresome youth about the folly of leaving on adventures. There was also a series of off-color jokes about them. The kinds of jokes that Earthlings tell about pollock and southerners after a couple of drinks.

That did not make for a pleasant homecoming. Every time they walked into a bar, the place would erupt with laughter. A restaurant would cause snickers. Their vehicles were constantly graffiti tagged and life was generally miserable.
After a few weeks of that, even Earth and it's primitive primate population started to look good.

So Albert was now in a class with a bunch of super strong but super stupid monkeys who smelled bad, who ate terrible food, who were so innately bureaucratic it made his head spin.
All Albert wanted to do was farm moisture back home on Aridia, but he was stuck here on Earth with smelly monkeys.
What will Albert do?

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