Chapter 7:
The World Is Ending And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It
E-Arth. The planet I love. I think there was a song they sung about it. How did it go?
Something like,
Boom de yada...
Boom de yada...
Boom de yada...
Boom de yada...
Would you believe me if I told you that I'm the reason why it's gone? Crazy right?
I didn't mean to do it, it just-
Well, one thing lead to another poof.
Luckily no one was hurt.
Well, luckily no one who mattered was.
Crazy right? Even I survived.
Oh wait. You don't know me.
My name is Butters Aramdillo. That's dillo pronounced like dio by the way. You might be thinking why I got such a weird name. Well, long story short, I landed in New Mexico, I was REALLY hungry and I thought the local delicacy was to take a stick of butter, rub it all over an armadillo, and tried to bake it in the sun. Unfortunately, that's not how cooking works. Especially when the armadillo is still alive and kicking and can run like the hell away from you! The locals found me and called me loko. They were really concerned how I managed to survive so long without knowing how to eat properly! I'm surprised myself after eating the planet's local delicacies! But I'm getting ahead of self. They took me in and fed me. It was AMAZING!! I believe what they gave was called, a tako. It was at that moment that I found that E-Arth food is the most amazing in the entire galaxy! Crazy right? You really wouldn't expect that from a planet of backwards people that haven't even figured out the technology to create warp travel; nobody believe it was easy as adding water, oil, and sodium into a bowl can create the fuel!
Anyway, after I had fixed my ship, they saw me off and I flew back to the nearest station and report my findings about the blue planet and was promoted to the food and travel guide researcher for the new and in the currently work-in-progress the Hungry Traveler's Guide to the Galaxy.
So it's my job to travel all around the planets and taste the local delicacies and describe it to the people back home! I've been told that my work is well read back home.
You must be asking,
"What is your favorite food?"
Man, that is a tough question. I can tell you what my unfavorite food is. But that seems kind of mean to say and I don't think you're hear to read about my burns about English food.
But I joke. As long as it is edible, all food is good.
The planet E-Arth as you know it, not a real planet.
Surprised? I know right!
It's completely artificial!
Essentially a travel agency was running out of planets to send bored tourists to on account of intergalactic wars destroying entire planets or turning them into factories to build weapons of mass destruction or clone armies. Once verdant planets suddenly became uninhabitable or undesirable because of the amount of poor neighborhoods that would litter a planet. Of course they could work to restore these planets to their former glory, but companies aren't exactly gaining a profit from saving a planet from the brink of destruction only for it to be trashed again in the next oncoming war. So instead they opted to create their own planets!
But I hear you saying, "That's impossible, there's no way that people can build planets! Only through a nebulous gas can do that!"
To which I say, "They can, they have, and they will." They've done it ten's of times! 42 to be exact as they'll be coming out with a new one soon.
"How do they build a planet?" A good question! They essentially go to old war torn planets, take a huge chunk of it that's still inhabitable and extract its resources. Albeit you get a few inhabitants and artifacts stuck in the mix that end up being fossilized. But you can't have a perfect process when you're working with a project so big. Then once they have the resources, they get started. They create a core, give it a spin, and start slapping the thing with heat and raw elements in the form of asteroid clusters. Then they wait for to cool and then send a bunch of people to get to sculpting! Then when they're done sculpting the essential shapes, they get to digging to wire the planet to explode! Why? In the case of a client not being able to pay off a commission, they find it better to destroy it rather than let it be repurposed in order to keep the value of creating planets high. Anyway, next they cover it up and start blasting it with liquids and gases. Afterwards they add bacteria and other micro organisms and wait for a few million years. You might think that this is very unprofitable since it takes so long to create a planet. However, this is made in space, so with the power of gravity they can actually speed up the process to force evolutionary growth and tectonic stability! If that wasn't crazy enough they apparently they inject an add additive into a few organisms to control evolutionary growth. I don't know how it works, but it ends up looking like us in a few million years! Then once it's ready, we find a suitable solar system and plop into a suitable yet convenient location to grow on its own. Ripe for tourism and travel.
By the way, you might be wondering, "Gee, that sounds pretty interesting and all, but how exactly do you keep the natives from pressing that planet destruction switch before you get to?" Another great question! They hide it in plain sight. They used to think that temples and facilities used to be a great idea to hide these planet destruction switches, but that actually invited more people to try and press the button! Turns out that these inhabitants sure love to explore places they shouldn't be exploring despite the number of deadly traps the companies put in them. They even wrote in huge letters, SERIOUSLY, DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON. YOU ARE GOING TO BLOW UP YOUR PLANET, SHITFACE! But that was an error on their part since it's most likely that the inhabitants aren't literate in our simple galactic language. So instead of building large ancient monuments, they instead put them in uninhabitable places that are out of the way of possible life or civilizations. In E-Arth's case, it was originally on the Easter Island, located on what they called, The Navel of the World. However this attracted more attention as people came to see this navel after a king put a rock on top of it! Luckily it didn't blow up the planet. So they moved it to El Paso, Texas and put it somewhere in the desert.
That's where I come in.
One night I was in the mood for tacos and so I decided to go to Texas. Then I drank a little too much. One thing lead to another and I stole a truck and drove myself over to El Paso to where I pressed the button. You might be thinking, "Oh if they made it that easy to press, then that's there fault." Well, not really. To push the button, you got do a bunch of complicated things like recite the Scandanavian alphabet backwards, eat a squirrel whole, achieve world peace, etc. I was really drunk so I managed to do all of that and suddenly the countdown to destroy the planet started. So I hauled ass out of there.
Unfortunately not fast enough since I got caught. Which turns out it was cool since the people who owned the planet were going to destroy it anyway, they were just on the fence about it seeing that it was eating money yet they wanted to keep it preservation reasons. But the downside to my drunken mishap was that I didn't give them enough time to clean house. So there was a bunch of scrambling to get things done and get things out.
SO they closed off the planet so that only tourists and spacecrafts can leave.
On my end however, I was really sad that this was happening. But there was literally nothing I could do about it since the company was really adamant about wiping the slate clean and starting over. So what did I do? Well, I ain't no hero, so I just had myself one last eating trip and headed to Vietnam. Say what you want about other places, but Vietnam has some amazing food! Food so fresh that it was alive moments before it reached your plate!
I'm gonna miss it.
I sure hope they make a comeback in E-Arth 2, whenever that may be.
Anyway, thanks for reading my travel blog!
Butters Out!
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