Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

I leaned my back against my recently slammed door. I could still hear the woman’s sobs outside. I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, my eyes bulging with disbelief. She was the third one that morning, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. The first one, the day before, hadn’t set off many alarms. Oh it’s fine, she’s just a crazy lady. Easy. But now there were four.

There was a tentative knock at my door. I peered though the peep hole and saw a new stranger on my doorstep. This time it was a man. Being sure to keep the security chain in place so he couldn’t force his way in, I cracked the door.

“Yes?”

“Darren?” he asked, his voice shaky. He glanced sideways at the crying woman, the one I’d just tried to send away. All I could see was her long black hair draped over her hands where she’d buried her face.

“How do all you people know my name?” I asked.

“You don’t remember me?” he asked. His lower lip trembled. He was large, with dark skin and bright eyes.

I furrowed my brow and recoiled a little. “Maybe I’ve lost my mind,” I said. “I don’t know who any of you people are, and yet you all know my name, and so far four women have claimed that I am their husband, or that I was in another life.” I rolled my eyes. “Look, I don’t know who any of you are, and…”

The big man’s eyes shimmered and a tear rolled down along his round nose. “You don’t remember me?” he asked. His whole face quivered. “We… we…” he choked and swallowed. “We got married.”

I let out an exasperated gasp that probably sounded more like a groan to him and slammed the door shut again. “Oh my goodness!” I exclaimed, pacing wildly into my living room. “What on earth is going on?”

The man’s raspy, hairy wailing easily penetrated my front door and filled the whole house. I turned around and stared at the door, my mind reeling.

Just then a brilliant flash of light shot out at me from the corner of my eye. I turned to face the source and saw a little man emerging from my bathroom. “Terribly sorry,” he said nervously with a low, smooth voice. He was no more than half as tall as me with pale blue sin and bright red lips. He wore something akin to a black suit with a silky shirt underneath, but no tie. I couldn’t see any hair leaking out from under the bulbous hat he wore. In fact, I couldn’t be sure the hat wasn’t just a very large pimple atop his head.

He looked up at me with brilliant yellow eyes that wore the lines of an embarrassed apology all around. I jumped back, my heart racing while I gasped for air. I must have tried to scream, but my chest simply couldn’t provide the requisite airflow through my tight vocal cords.

“Mr. Darren, sir, if you’ll come with me I’m sure we can get this all sorted out for you. I do apologize for the horrible rift in the Omnidimensional Entertainment Empire’s episodic separation veil.”

I stared at him, unblinking, juggling his words around in my head without making any sense of them. “Huh?” I managed, my face contorted into a twisted, painful mess.

“Please come with me,” he said with that smooth, velvety voice. He extended a hand and motioned toward the bathroom.

“To the… bathroom?” I stammered.

“Well you can’t exactly activate the Tub Teleportation Network from the living room, can you?” He rolled his eyes and smiled.

I let him step forward and take my hand, dragging me into the bathroom where he climbed into the tub, tugging me along behind him. I stepped inside and looked down at him, utterly confused.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Don’t want our superstar going blind from a routine tub transit event!” He grinned like a politician.

I did not close my eyes.

A brilliant, painful flash of light knocked me off my feet. I sprawled out, grasping for the shower curtain or anything that could break my fall, but there was nothing there. After a moment I realized that the falling sensation was lasting longer than it should take to slam into the hard bathtub and I contracted into the fetal position, holding both my burning eyes with one hand and fighting the temptation to suck on my other thumb. I whimpered and howled without an ounce of dignity while my inner ear continued to spin wildly through space, frantically trying to work out where “up” had gone.

After what felt like a brief eternity I plunged gently into a thick, puffy goo that wasn’t really there. I was lowered softly to the bottom of a tub where the small blue hands of my guide patted my rear end.

“It’s OK Mr. Darren,” he said smoothly. “We’ve arrived. You can open your eyes now.”

He climbed out of the tub while I blinked my eyes open. They hurt like crazy and my vision was full of dark burn marks. After a moment my sight was restored enough for me to look around.

The inside of the tub was familiar enough, but as I got to my feet I could tell I wasn’t anywhere near my old bathroom. I was now in a gallery of assorted bathtubs, all of them arranged in concentric circles stretching out into a vast space. There didn’t appear to be any ceiling as the dark sky overhead was full of stars. I leaned over the side of the tub and saw a radial pattern of bathroom tiles down below, whose arcs swept out along the curved rows of bathtubs.

My jaw dropped.

“Come with me Mr. Darren,” the little man said, tugging at my hand. “Let’s get this mess sorted out for you.”

In a daze I let him pull me along as he wove us toward the center of the arrangement of tubs. There he stood with me on a platform that yanked us down into the floor at impossible speeds without making me feel as though we were falling. With a whoosh of air we landed in the middle of a brightly lit room with cluttered walls. Everywhere I looked there were screens, buttons, levers, blinking lights, and various devices jutting out at odd angles.

“Where are we?” I asked, hardly expecting an answer.

My guide jerked me forward but with a new sense of pride in his step. “We are at the Omnidimensional Entertainment Empire’s headquarters,” he said, smiling.

“What are we doing?” I asked. My grip on reality was long gone, but out of habit I found myself wanting answers.

“Well,” he said, glancing up at me nervously. “As I mentioned before, the episodic separation veil has developed a minor rift and we…” his voice trailed off and he stopped walking. He turned to face me for a moment, cocked his head, squinted at me, then shrugged. “As you have no doubt realized, several of the individuals you’ve married on air have managed to find their way to you. The veil is no longer keeping them or their memories of you at bay.”

“On air? What are you talking about?”

The little blue man laughed, or at least I hope that’s what he did. He made a terrifying, spastic whooping sound that could have sent a vicious pride of ravenous lions running from an easy meal. “Why you are our biggest star,” he said. “You’re the most eligible bachelor in the universe, silly. We’ve married you off hundreds of times over the course of the last ten seasons of the show.” He chuckled to himself with a whirring, shrill noise the seemed to spiral its way into my ears. “You bring in our highest ratings. Viewers love you.”

I guffawed and scoffed, blowing a wet fart through my lips. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not an attractive guy.”

“That’s what makes the show so wonderful,” he cooed. “People adore seeing such an average guy fall in love with a dizzying array of individuals. You’ve married everyone from lazy losers who still live with their parents to the hottest supermodels who ever lived. You’ve gotten the girl next door, the shy nerd, and the hopelessly depressed goth. Let me tell you Mr. Darren, your escapades keep people absolutely glued to their screens. Advertisers plaster your face on everything these days.”

I gawked, my eyes wide and my jaw slack.

“Unfortunately, with the failure of the episodic separation veil, we’re going to have to perform a bit of a reset.” He smiled and looked over his shoulder. Two figures closer to my size approached wearing opaque helmets and something like a sleek biker’s getup in a nice baby blue color.

On either side of me they took me by the arms and began to drag me backwards toward a door that had opened in the wall nearby.

“Wait,” I cried, suddenly nervous. “What’s going on? Where are they taking me?”

The little blue man’s head pimple jiggled as he giggled to himself. “Well we can’t have you remembering all of this in your isolation reality. That would be ridiculous! We’ve got to wipe your memory while we repair the separation veil. Standard protocol.”

A sense of panic consumed me. “Wipe my memory? How much of it?”

The guards had hauled me through the doorway into a small dark room and the little man was getting hard to hear. “Don’t worry,” he yelled out. “It doesn’t hurt too much!”

The door closed and the new room went pitch black. I felt my guards shoving me into a restraining device, strapping my limbs down tightly. A clamp was tightened around my head. I wriggled and writhed, but I couldn’t budge any part of my body. Even my torso was strapped down.

In the darkness a tiny pinprick of light blinked on at the end of a slender wavy probe that disappeared into the darkness. A soft hum accompanied the light and all I could do was follow it nervously with my eyes as it snaked its way toward my face. My heart was beating viciously and sweat trickled down my neck. I went cross-eyed as the tiny light came to a stop near the bridge of my nose, then I screamed and passed out as it plunged into my right tear duct.

[Reddit Post]