Super Robot! 💖

Last time on Super Slap!: our intrepid protagonist (that’s me!), his best yet perhaps most useless friend, and a lookalike of his not-so-secret-admirer found themselves in a creepy abandoned restroom in the woods.

BUT THIS WAS NO NORMAL BATHROOM BREAK!

Just when the two friends least expected it, the real Snowball burst out of one of the stalls and made to flee! Will she succeed? Or will the two manage to stop her and finally get some damn answers around here? Just what in the world is going anyway? What secrets does this strange sequence of events hold? Is there even going to be a punchline to any of this? And perhaps most importantly of all, if a train leaves a station traveling east at 80 miles per hour at 11:00 a.m., and another train leaves the same station also traveling east at 100 miles per hour at 12:00 p.m., at what time will the second train overtake the first?

What was that? Go stick my head where? Geez, come on. I was just trying to get a little help with my math homework here. Sue me.

Ok, fine, back to the story.

Snowball made a break for the exit, pushing past her lookalike, me, and Fence in that order. Only just as she was about to get away…

… she ended up running straight into a wall instead.

“Oooof!”

She peeled off and fell backwards like some kind of cartoon character. Her face was as flat as a pancake. And also didn’t have her glasses on it, which explained a lot. Without those, she was practically blind.

“You ok, Snowball?” I helped her up off the floor in spite of myself, my better judgment, and everything she had ever done to me. As I did, I took mental note of her hand temperature: totally average. If anything, a little clammy-warm, actually. Nothing like her doppelganger’s abnormally frigid digits.

“I’m fine. Thank you, Comb. It’s just, I broke my glasses.”

“Relax,” I told her. “Here. Have this.” I fished inside my hoodie pocket for a second before whipping out a pair of glasses exactly like the ones Snowball always wore.

“Thank you, Comb,” Snowball said, putting the new pair on. “But where did you get these?”

Seriously? She didn’t remember? I flapped my sweater pocket a few times to hopefully jog her memory. “From this Superdimensional Pocket 💖 thing. There’s an infinite amount of space in here, remember? How could you have forgotten? You’re the one who made it for me.”

She had also asked me to store some of her stuff inside, “just in case,” she had said. That included, among other items, a spare pair of glasses, some loose change, a bundle of hair ties, a bunch of those plastic lace bracelets she liked wearing, a stick of chap stick, some machine components and chemicals that I hoped weren’t as dangerous as they looked, and a chocolate chip cookie the exact shape and size of Australia. “In case I get hungry and need a snack,” she’d said.

Personally, I’d just been using the thing as a portable trash can for the most part. Remember kids: littering isn’t cool, unless your litter becomes some of the first matter known to man to undergo dimensional flux, in which case it by definition is.

I opened the pocket up as wide as I could. Carefully, Snowball peered inside. Across her face spread a glow: the light of ten billion galaxies exploding all at once. Crap. I thought I had put that particular part of the pocket dimension in the other pocket. Really quick, I swapped it over.

“I do remember this pocket,” Snowball said quietly, her characteristic vigor gone completely all of a sudden. “But I’m not the one who made it.”

“What? Yes, you are. You gave it to me a couple of weeks ago. You put a bunch of your random jun— err, spare stuff in there. Don’t you remember?” Why was she acting like some kinda partial amnesiac all of a sudden? What was going on here?”

“Yes, I gave that pocket to you.” She nodded. “But it was not made by me.”

“Then who—?”

“That would be me.” Suddenly, the other Snowball spoke up from across the bathroom. She had been so still and silent until now that I had almost forgotten she was there. But there she was, glaring at the three of us icily, her eyes slivers. She clutched the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 tight to her chest.

“Whoa-hoa-hoa! Plot twist!” Fence seemed to be getting into one of his narrating moods again. Please no. Not now. “Gonna have to make sure the stream gets a good view of all thi— oh. Huh. My phone died.”

Thank god.

“You made this?” I pinched and pulled the pocket of my sweater as I asked.

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“So who are you anyway?” I asked. The question was long overdue. It was about time we got some answers around here. “Some kind of crazy science experiment gone wrong or something? A clone?”

She scoffed and lanced an accusatory finger at the real Snowball. “If anyone’s an impostor around here, it’s her!”

“Wait,” I said, “don’t tell me this is gonna be one of those situations where I have to choose which one of you is the fake and which one is the real deal. Cause if so, I already know. It’s obviously you.” With zero hesitation, I hiked a thumb at my Snowball. The obviously real one. The one the cold Snowball over in the corner had called an impostor. “You’re the real one. Well, you’re the one I’ve known up to now anyway.”

“Mhm.” She smiled. “Thanks, Comb. Thanks for believing me and not this big faker.”

“Big faker? Why you… why you…” The fake Snowball sounded like she was about to pop a vein. “That’s rich coming from a robot that I created!”

“Huh?” I gasped.

“Wha?” Fence’s jaw dropped.

“No way,” I said. “That can’t be true.” Absolutely not. I refused to believe it.

“Uh.” Snowball averted her gaze and scratched her cheek. “It’s true.”

“What?! Why did you never tell me you were a robot?” Frankly, I wasn’t even all that mad at being kept in the dark this whole time. More just exasperated at the fact that this perfectly exemplified Snowball’s usual shenanigans.

But then I thought for a second. Maybe she had good reason not to tell me. Maybe there was a rational, logical justification not to reveal her true identity as a robot until now. Yeah, that had to be it, I rationalized to myself, feeling just awful about ever judging her. “Wait,” I said, my tone suddenly defibrillated with a big charge of compassion, patience, and understanding. “Was it because you were afraid you wouldn't be accepted if anyone knew? Afraid you’d be shunned from human society and made an outcast?”

Poor girl. This was putting everything into perspective, fast. At that moment, I made a promise to myself that I would be nicer to Snowball from here on out…

“Huh?” She cocked her head to the side. “No. It was just because you never asked.”

… and then instantly took that promise back. Dammit, Snowball!

To be continued!