The Worst Danger Yet!

The first thing I did on waking up was gasp for air, mouth gaping open like a washed up fish.

The second was celebrate.

"GASP!… I'm alive… Wait, I'm alive??!! Hell yeah! I'm alive!" I pumped my arms in the air, just happy that I had arms to pump. "I'm not tapioca! I'm really not tapioca! Yes! I hate tapioca!"

An overreaction? Maybe. But give me a break. It's not every day you don't die. It's just every day except your last one. Lucky for me, it looked like I hadn't reached the end of my road just yet.

"Of course you're alive!" Snowball was there and she looked happy — if not particularly surprised — to see me alive and well. "Now eat up to regain your strength!"

Before I could stop her she crammed a large spoonful of something sweet and slimy in my mouth.

"Bleghggehg! Tapioca?!" I swallowed involuntarily. "Where did you even get that?"

"From them, silly."

She gestured to two people I had recently become familiar with in the most painful of ways. It was Harry, the volleyball player who had used my face as part of his new maneuver, and Sandy, the witch who tried to feed us to her jumbo-sized venus flytrap.

I took a moment to take in my surroundings. We were in some sort of shabby shack on the beach. There were three walls and where the fourth should have been was open, facing the water, which was now calm, no more pets surfing their hearts out. Was this random hut just built to provide shade? I guessed it was working. My entire railgunned-down body ached something ferocious, but at least I was out of the sun.

Now there were six of us: Fence, Snowball, Samson, Harry, Sandy, and me. Seven if you count the twitching, smoking corpse(?) of P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤. Samson was tending to it in the corner. It looked as worn out as I felt. Maybe firing off its strongest weapon juiced it, I thought. Hmph. Served it right.

Snowball explained what happened. After P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 fired off its railgun, everyone managed to dive to safety in time to avoid getting hit. Everyone but me. Classic. What had the railgun hit me with, you ask?

A little stuffed panda, that's what.

That's why the biggest injury I sustained was to my pride.

Anyway, I got knocked out, and that was when my friends brought me here to cool down and hopefully not die and everything.

"Thanks…" I said. "F-for saving me and stuff…" My face was blooming into a bright-red blush, so I turned away.

"Awww!" Snowball clasped her hands together.

Meanwhile, Fence just flashed me a crooked smile and a thumbs up.

Yeah… as annoying as my friends could be sometimes, I had to admit: they had my back in a pinch. And that was why, at the end of the day, they were the people that I lov—

"BWAAGHAGH!!!" I shrieked like a banshee as Snowball slapped my back. Hard.

"Don't mention it at all! It was actually these two who carried you to safety." She motioned to Harry and Sandy of all people.

"No problem, at all, brah." Harry flexed his muscles showoffishly. "Just doing my duty presiding over the surf competition and ensuring the safety of all beachgoers."

"And I couldn't let anything happen to my new friends." Sandy smiled her best evil smile. Seemed like she was still trying hard at the whole "nefarious witch" schtick for the sake of her pet plant, but her words obviously didn't match. Also, "friends" wasn't really the word I'd use to describe people I had tried to turn into a snack for my pet, but I was just happy she wasn't trying to do that anymore.

"Wait," I asked Harry, "did you say you were presiding over the surf contest? For the pets? Why?"

He flexed again, running through three different poses in quick succession. "Why wouldn't I be presiding, brah? I'm a lifeguard."

"A lifeguard?!" Could've fooled me, about 20 times over. I was so shocked I almost shot milk out of my nose. The only thing stopping me was I wasn't drinking any. Good thing too. I hate milk almost as much as I hate tapioca. "Then explain our volleyball match from earlier!"

I sincerely wanted to know what Harry had to say for himself. What kind of lifeguard swings the people whose lives he's supposed to be guarding around like a sack of potatoes?

Harry's answer was just a shrug and a "Hey, man. I was on break."

Oh come on! What kind of excuse was that?!

The kind I didn't have time to question, as it turns out. Because we were still in the dark about something even more crucial.

"Why didn't you tell us it was bring your pets to the beach day? Or about The Best Pet Yet surf competition?" I asked.

Another shrug. "You never asked." Harry scratched his cheek. "Practically everyone at Waxing Bay today knows it's pets day, so I assumed you guys did too."

"Well we probably would have if someone had their glasses on and bothered to read the ad copy right…" I side-eyed Snowball, gritting my teeth so hard they had more grind to them than your average MMORPG. In response, she just tilted her head and bonked it cutely with her tongue sticking out.

I mean. Uh. Bonked it annoyingly with her tongue sticking out. Yeah. Let's go with that.

"Yeah. Sorry about that," said Harry. He was idly rubbing the back of his muscular neck. "I thought you guys already knew it was bring your pets to the beach day cause of how we were helping out Fats McSlim."

"Fats McWho, dude?" Fence was as puzzled as I was.

"Fats McSlim, my pet bigfoot. Hairy little dude we were playing v-ball with? Yay high?" Harry got on his tiptoes and stretched his arms up as far as they would go to signify the "little dude"'s height. McSlim's.

"So his name was Fats McSlim… and he was a bigfoot," Snowball said. "That explains the hair."

"Yeah. And why we had to jump in and save him. Thanks again for that by the way. When his family showed up, I thought for sure they were going to find out how much of a v-ball rookie he still is."

McSlim's family must have been those people just as hairy as he was. The ones who showed up halfway through our match.

"If they found out that Fats McSlim still hadn't upped his volleyball game, they would have been in total despair," Harry explained. "Thing is, McSlim racked up a huge, nearly unpayable debt betting on local unsanctioned volleyball games. With his entire family on the line, he promised them that he would become a player himself to pay it all off. Y'know, make it to the big leagues and start racking up the big bucks and all that. Unfortunately, he's still at a beginner level even after all the practice he's done. But he's working hard every day, so I didn't want his family to see how far he still has to go. He's my one and only pet, so I wanted his family to be proud of the work he's putting in, y'know? And it worked, thanks to you all!"

Yeah, with a special shoutout to my volleyball-bruised face, thanks very much.

Still, at least it was for a good cause. I wasn't against taking a bit of a battering to help out a pet.

So in the end, it was all fine and dandy. Harry wasn't exactly apologizing to me, but I told him we could let bygones be bygones anyway, and he seemed to accept it. But aside from all that, there was still the matter of…

"You!" I jabbed an accusatory finger at Sandy the witch. "What about you? Explain yourself."

"What is there to explain?" As awful as ever at acting evil, Sandy was wearing a look of excitement as she gave a little hop. A little hop that sent two not-little, uh… somethings bouncing. She was wearing a t-shirt now, unlike when we first met her, but… *gulp*.

A-anyway! She continued: "What is there to explain? My Aphy is here to participate in the surf-off. Hang ten, Aphy!" She turned towards the water and made the hang ten sign with both hands at Aphy the oversized venus fly trap, who was waiting a short distance away on the sand. Apparently she was too big to fit inside the hut.

Hang ten? More like ten hanging heads lolling all around and snapping open and shut, I couldn't help but think.

"Aphy probably would have won too," Sandy said, "if we weren't interrupted halfway through by someone's pet malfunctioning."

That got Samson's attention.

"That's a total load of horse manure!" he said, flipping his hair over his left shoulder and then changing his mind and whipping it back over his right. The rest of us had to duck both times. "And you know it! Snowcube would never design a robot that could just malfunction out of the blue like that!"

I wasn't so sure about that, but P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 itself seemed to agree. It managed to stand up off its side, where it had been lying this whole time as Samson tinkered with an open hatch on its stomach (the one the rail gun had extended from), trying to diagnose the problem. It closed the hatch and began speaking robotically to Sandy.

"CORRECT. CORRECT. NO MALFUNCTIONS DETECTED. PRIORITIZATION WAS TO ELIMINATE ALL RELEVANT THREATS IN AREA IN ORDER OF PROXIMITY TO UNIT."

Snowball seemed to think for a second, then said, "Wait, is that why he fired on you?"

I shrugged. How should I have known?

"If that's true," she went on, "that means P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 recognized you as a threat. Why would that be?"

"That's what I've been trying to find out," Samson said.

"And, dude?" Fence asked. "What have you discovered?"

"Nothing. Nada. I have no idea why P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 overrode manual control and entered threat elimination mode. And I have no idea why the threat it was trying to eliminate was probably the least threatening, most pathetic person on the entire beach."

I decided to stretch the definition of literally every word of that sentence as far as possible and take it as a complement.

P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 used its stubby metallic arms to brush itself off and close the hatch to its mechanical innards. "SAMSON. IF REASON FOR RUNNING MOST RECENT THREAT ELIMINATION PROTOCOL WAS NEEDED, YOU COULD HAVE SIMPLY ASKED."

Samson just blinked a couple times. "Oh."

"PROTOCOL WAS EXECUTED BECAUSE TARGET SMELLED LIKE DANGER. DANGER DETECTED OLFACTORILY. DANGER DETECTED OLFACTORILY. DANGER. DANGER. DAN-D-D-D-DANGE-D-D-D—!"

Kaboom!

Black smoke erupted from every orifice P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 had on him. For a second, he froze, and as the smoke cleared, he toppled over.

"Shoot," Samson said. "Danger? What was P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 talking about?"

"I dunno," Sandy said, "but doesn't it look like he's pointing somewhere?"

She was right. Right before he collapsed, P4-ND4 Mk. II 🖤 had reached out to point right at where the danger he had identified — the danger I supposedly "smelled like" — was.

We followed the line his outstretched mechanical panda paw drew.

It was pointing to the water, now calm and serene with the surf contest interrupted and all the animals returned to the shore.

But one still remained. We could see it, out on the open blue. One pet still surfing, still at it after all the others had fled to safety.

It was the source of the danger, a danger so great it warranted firing a rail gun at something that just smelled like it. At me.

And that danger…

It was a pet.

My pet.

My pet genetically engineered chupacabra.

It was Matchstick.

To be continued!