The Snibbs Guide to the Galaxy
7:20 p.m. on 2005-09-26
Snibbs goes intergalactic! Ready for the thrilling new installment? Here it is!
The Snibbs guide to the galaxy has this to say on 'short stories':
Short stories are ALWAYS written by one of three types of people. The first is people with nothing better to do, the second, people without enough talent or imagination to write a REAL story, and the third is Mr. Snibbs. A good example of a short story is the following:
THE SNIBBS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
‘An intergalactic adventure’
I was sat at my school desk, considering whether to start listening to the sorry excuse for a teacher, but decided I was probably too far out of the “groove” of the lesson that learning was out of the matter. Instead I chose to stare at my two friends, BK and Madhouse. Both had the same, puzzled expression, so I tried to guess the number of brain-waves running through their heads to give them that expression, and I decided that BK was probably working over about seven, at least three if them about what colour pants (if any) he had decided to wear that morning. My guess for Madhouse, however, was none at all.
Curiously enough, none at all was also the amount of suspicion that my sassy friend Cypher was about to beat him in the head with a plank of wood with a nail in it… and a bricked nailed next to the nail.
Madhouse fell to the floor in a pool of his own blood.
“Hey! I thought I was gonna be in this story!”
I shrugged.
“Sorry, I’ll write you in later…”
“You rotter!” he choked, vomiting up a partially digested brain.
BK winced.
“Hey! I’m still alive! Does that make me a main character in this one?”
“Yeah, why not?” I muttered.
A poison dart flew across the classroom, BK ducked just in time.
“Hey! You’re trying to kill me off!” he yelled.
I chuckled.
“Sorry, It won’t happen again.”
A second dart flew across the room.
“Hey!” said BK, swatting it away with a ruler.
I shrugged. Suddenly, a great rumbling shook the building. A great ‘whoosh’ swept around us, and white smoke and multi-coloured lights filled the room.
“Is this the best you can do?” I yelled to Steve, who is in charge of special effects in the tales of Snibbs. He shook his head.
“We spent the rest of the budget on cats.”
“Cats?”
“Cats. On trampolines.”
I nodded, it all made sense now.
BK, Cypher and myself found ourselves in a giant metal enclosure, the size of a big factory. It was full of other people, all looking confused, and in one corner of the room, by the roof, a giant plasma-screen crackled to life, displaying Zid’s face, which he peeled off revealing an alien face. (Conviently , it looked exactly the same, but he had to prove he wasn’t human.)
“People of Earth!” he droned. “Your planet had been evacuated, and we are taking all it’s resources. You are currently aboard Ark 262-B. Also, you’re all being sold off as slaves. Good day.”
I cursed.
“I knew Zid was up to this!”
Cypher sighed.
“No, you didn’t. Not a single soul did.”
I sighed. It was hard being a hero with Cypher around…
We were led by winged insectoids into a small gateway.
“What happens now?” I asked one, before stepping in.
“Simple.” Grumbled the beast. “A company in need of slaves buys a certain number, we just lead you all in here until that number is filled. Then we work on the next order, see?”
I nodded.
“That’s pretty clever. I’d appreciate it more if I wasn’t wandering into a lifetime of slavery caused by my backstabbing alien friend.” I turned to Cypher and BK. “Stay close, and chances are we’ll be in the same shipment.”
BK scowled.
“Why should I follow you? You’ll try and kill me again!”
“Just do it.” I growled.
All three of us stepped into the particle displacement unit, and were sent flying across space in sub-atomic form.
(NOTE FROM STEVE: For this effect, I sprinkled some glitter in front of a picture of space then turned it 90 degrees.)
We stepped out into the deck of a rather shoddy looking space-ship, and were greeted by three tall, skinny aliens dressed in robes with flowers behind their ears.
“Greetings, friends. We are workers for the intergalactic charity ‘Green-Stars’. As our protest -painting stars green- went so horribly, horribly wrong, we’ve taken to raising funds through raffles and then buying as many slaves from each slave auction as possible, to set them free. We would like to invite you to come and live on one of our farming planets, where peaceful times are available to-”
I cut in.
“I thought you said we were free.”
“You are, we merely suspected that after such a hard, perilous, heart-breaking emotional journey, as the one you’ve just suffered, you might want the option to relax somewhere safe…”
This time Cypher cut in.
“Actually, it’s barely been five minutes since we left our planet... And we’re not the farming type.”
“But- ”
I pushed the middle alien back, and he fell into a waste disposal unit. We ran along the thin walkway, towards a port in the wall labelled “escape pod”. We clambered inside, and set off, through the vastness of space.
Inside the cramped pod, I noticed an insect on BK’s shoulder.
“BK! That’s the deadly space moth! Look out! They say one bite is so hideously venomous it makes a man- ”
“It’s a normal moth, Snibbs.” Cypher cut in. I silently cursed.
(NOTE FROM STEVE: For this scene, I used a small cupboard with three chairs in it and a moth.)
“So…” I queried. “We gonna stop Zid’s evil scheme?”
“Okay.” Said BK. “But where is he?”
“I can help you there!” said a mysterious voice.
It was the ghost of Madhouse!
(NOTE FROM STEVE: For this scene, I painted Madhouse blue, ate a banana for lunch, then turned on the light.)
“I have the co-ordinates right here!”
He threw me a small white object.
“Um… Madhouse? This is a marshmallow.”
“No, that’s just what the disks look that the people that built this ship use. Feed it into the computer and see.”
I did so, and a cyber face appeared in the middle of the display screen.
“<Disk is not acceptable…
Is in fact…
Marshmallow>>…>>”
Madhouse’s ghost looked embarrassed.
“Oh… No, wait, here’s the REAL disk.”
(NOTE FROM STEVE: I ate that marshmallow.)
He threw me an egg. I sighed. The egg worked, and turned out to be a disk after all. Cypher spent the rest of the journey catching Madhouse’s ghost in a bottle, when asked about this, she said she planned to sell it on “the intergalactic equivalent of eBay”. I spent the rest of the journey trying to kill off BK.
Finally, we reached the great hull of Zid’s evil ship. Rather than enter the cargo bay, and have to fight or sneak past many, many armed guards, (which, considering the size of the ship, would’ve taken a good few years) we chose to enter the entrance that lead straight into Zid’s quarters.
“Give us back our planet!”
“Sorry…I can’t do that.” he replied. “How about lots of money instead?”
Cypher and myself pondered over the proposal. BK, however, was not tempted by such an offer.
“Never!” he yelled, heroically. “I’m off to the direction room right now, to crash this ship and save other planets from your evil scheme!”
However, as he ran through the doorway, a faulty circuit caused it to shoot straight down, crushing BK instantly and squirting his innards everywhere.
(NOTE FROM STEVE: For this scene, I tied some plastic bags full of bacon and ketchup to a mop, then replaced it with BK at the last possible minute.)
We all stood silently watching the mangled corpse.
“So… about this money?” I asked.
Two months later, Cypher, bottled-Madhouse and myself were lying around the edge of our golden swimming pool, by our golden mansion, on our golden planet.
“Well, that was a productive venture!” I yelled, breaking the long silence that had formed since the end of the last paragraph. “Why is Madhouse still with us?”
“No-one would buy him… not in the whole galaxy…” sighed Cypher.
The bottle sniffed.
“Why do you say such mean things?” it whimpered.
“Quiet you!” hissed Cypher.
I sat back on my dolphin/throne hybrid.
“Yup… My kind of adventure…”
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