Chapter 12: 12. Bone-a-fide Breakdown: The Misadventures of Two Little Splinters

“An unfamiliar ceiling.” Mu had just woken up in a bed she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Vanessa’s bed in the horizon, and it was not her wooden bed in the cave back in Mafia Town. She seemed to be in some sort of cabin.

The last thing she remembered was passing out from the pain in her broken leg after Snatcher left her alone back in the Horizon.

Oh, that was right, she had fought Mecha Boss, and lost. Without her soul, she had very little power to fight back others.

She tried to move her legs, but the pain in her left made her stop right away.

“Agh! Peck!”

“Do you think she will recover?” She heard Moonjumper close by.

“Yeah, in this dimension, diseases don’t exist, we just need to give her enough food from this place and she will recover in no time!”

“An entire dimension where no diseases exist, that is pretty amazing.”

She looked around to see who was speaking, and she saw the floor of the cabin a few meters below her feet, as if she was stuck to the ceiling.

“AAAAH!” That was not the ceiling! That was the floor of the room itself!

“Yeah, the bad thing is that gravity is all inverted here.” A person with a TV for a head mentioned.

“Indeed.” Moonjumper answered while she smiled at Mu.

“What is going on?!” Mu asked the two guys at her side, but despite both looking at her, none of them were paying attention.

“And since everything is so huge, you could guess that also presents a problem.” The TV headed guy answered, his arms looked weird and deformed, he had a buttoned vest and gray pants. His voice sounded mostly normal and in TV on his head only static showed in.

“That is true, how interesting.”

“Guys? Guys!” She tried to move around, but the pain in her leg stopped her

“At least, since we are ghosts, it doesn’t affect us in the slightest.”

“Yeah, that is pretty convenient.”

“Where the hell am I?!”

“How did you say you found this dimension?” Moonjumper turned around to the guy at his side.

“Oh you know, I was just zapping.” The guy shrugged.

“I see.”

“Can somebody please tell me what is happening here?” She insisted.

“Do broken legs even count as diseases though?” Moonjumper scratched his head.

“I dunno, they should be.”

“HEY! YOU! YES, YOU!”

“It seems she is talking to you, man.” Moonjumper said while looking back at her.

“Do you think so? I think she’s talking to you, besides, I don’t know how to deal with kids myself.”

“WHAT, IS, THIS, PLACE?”

“Well, I don’t know how to deal with kids either.” The floating corpse shrugged.

“That’s fair.”

“Moonjumper! I am talking to you! Moonstruck rotten pile of meat!”

“See? That’s you.” The TV guy looked back at him and Moonjumper finally got closer to Mu, floating closer to the girl.

“What do you want, kid?”

“Can you please, please, tell me where we are? Pretty please, with sugar on top?”

“I don’t know, when I went to go and check for you you were barely conscious and kept complaining about your leg. I don’t know any child doctors so I looked for help and this guy…” He pointed towards the guy with the TV on his head.

“Hello.” The man waved back.”

“...took us here. You should recover if we stay here for a while, if you don’t mutate into something beyond our comprehension.”

So the blue ghost had taken her somewhere else to recover. She would have preferred going to a hospital, but she didn’t have the money to cover it.

“Why is everything upside down?!”

“Beats me.” Moonjumper shrugged. “It’s a really pretty place though, I would put your bed at the side of the window but I don’t want you to fall right towards the sun if you lose your balance.”

It was horrible, not only did she feel dizzy, but she could die any moment if she wasn’t careful.

“The ceiling of this house should hold on pretty well… I think.” The man with the TV added. “Just don’t try to move that bed too much.”

“Right, as if I could! I feel like I'm about to throw up! Get me down from this place!”

“Oh come on, cheer up, minion! Consider it a small vacation, and then we can go back into action!”

“I’m not a minion!”

“I mean, you kinda are.” Moonjumper added.

“Yeah.” The Narrator nodded somehow.

“Didn’t you find any health pons?”

“Health pons? What’s that?!” Moonjumper titled his head. Mu facepalmed.

“In my experience, health pons are good to help you recover energy or stamina, but they won’t help you fix severely broken bones.”

“And who are you anyway?” Mu turned around to face the guy but went back to look at Moonjumper after getting creeped out.

“He’s just a friend of mine. I can assure you he knows more about this than what it looks like.”

“Friends? I didn’t think a monster like you could have any friends!” She looked back at the girl with the screen on his head.

“Oh, kiddo! You hurt me deeply! Do you really think I’m that much of a hermit?”

“Allow me to present myself.” The Man got closer to the both of them and did a small bow. “I am The Narrator, it's a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

“The Narrator?” Mu looked at the man from top to bottom now that he was closer this time.

“He has a radio show thing going on.”

“Shouldn’t you have taken me to a doctor instead?”

“I’m a doctor.” The Narrator interrupted. “If you look at your leg it is all in a cast.”

Mu looked back down and saw her leg covered in a white plaster.

“Think of it as a cast-on for a knitting project, but for your leg.”

“How long will I have to have this stupid thing anyway?”

“Most fractures like this take about 3 to 6 months to heal.”

“WHAT?”

“But if we stay here while you recover, it could be a lot less… probably.”

“Great!” She laughed sarcastically. "Just great! I might be stranded here in the middle of nowhere, but at least I know that I have a real doctor here to take care of me. Who just happens to be a radio host! Ha, ha!"

“I’m also a plumber and a kart racer.”
“Really?”

“No.”

She scowled, she would probably try and get more answers about the both of them, but having found out where she was and what had happened, she just wanted to go back to sleep.

“Hey, Moonjumper. What did happen with the Mafia after I passed out?”

“Uh…” The ghost had a flashback back to when the kid had died.

“You kinda… kicked the bucket, kid.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I had to go and ask Snatcher to fetch your spirit, life force thingy.. I don’t know, he accepted but I had to do something else for him.”

“Really? Does that mean I have my soul back?!”

“I don’t think so.”

“But…”

“I know, I know. It’s complicated.”

“And what happened with the Mafia?”

“Oh, they left, I kicked them out of the forest. They shouldn’t come back to bother unless you go and show them you are not dead anymore, I think...”

Mu looked towards the ceiling for a moment. Mafia Town had been her home since she had been born. Her whole life until that point had been spent there, and now, she couldn’t go back… or people would hunt her down again.

“Do you think I will ever be able to go back there one day?”

“Where?”

“Back to my hometown. I still… I still want to go and fix things, I have to make things right! The Mafia can’t stay there forever!”

“Oh, hard chance kid, I think most people in there hate your guts now, besides the Mafia won’t probably forgive someone they lost a lot of people for.”

“What? How many people die?”

“I don’t know! A few thousand would be my guess.”

“Thousand?!”

“Pfft! No? Hahaha!” Moonjumper started laughing loudly.

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“There were several Mafia Men that died in the invasion, but they will probably respawn once you reload their level.” The Narrator added in the middle of their conversation.

“What?” Mu raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t pay attention to him, he says stuff like this sometimes. Still, I wouldn’t go back there if I were you kid, at least not by now while the heat is still on and all that.”

Mu sighed, there was nothing else she could do. With her vanishing from her home, unwelcome in basically everywhere, stuck doing jobs for two moody ghosts and stranded in the middle of nowhere with a broken leg, she apparently had died for a moment, she had lost. At that moment, it felt as if she had hit rock bottom.

She closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep.

***

Hatkid woke up in the bed of her spaceship. She still felt the pain from her left arm and her mouth was completely dry.

She tried to move her arm but stopped when she felt the pain. She had gotten hurt when clinging to her hookshot, one of the rockets had pushed her way forward and probably dislocated her arm. Hatkid tried to slowly open her eyes when she saw Snatcher smiling at the side of the bed.

“Ahh!”

“Hello there kiddo! You are finally… uh, how do they say it? You have finally woken up! Yes! That’s it!”

“Wha…”

“I thought we had lost you there for a moment! Good thing you still were able to count with me! Or you would have died for good there!”

“Uh…”

“But don’t take the wrong idea! I saved you because otherwise, I can’t catch your soul. I mean, I could, but if I don’t make you fight then where is the fun in that? Am I right? I can’t let all the stuff I prepared for your Death Wish challenges go to waste!”

“Well, at least she’s awake now, that will make the recovery a lot faster in the longer run.” Someone else said she turned around at the other side of the room and saw Cooking Cat along with an owl wearing a white coat.

"Pardon the intrusion in your home, miss. The spooky ghost asked us to help and we wanted to check that y'all were alright." Cooking Cat waved her hand in a greeting gesture.

“See? I even got you a doctor to check on you in the meantime!”

“For the last time, I’m not a doctor! I’m a scientist!” The owl interrupted Snatcher.

“Well on MY time if you dedicated yourself to science that meant you were focused on ALL sciences! And you better make sure this kid ends good as new if you want to get your soul back!”

“Yes, sir.” The Science Owl resigned.

Hatkid turned back to face Snatcher, raising an eyebrow.

“I know what you are thinking, kid.”

“You do?” Cooking Cat asked.

“Yes, when you work with someone who doesn’t open her pecking mouth to say anything, you have to get really good at understanding their body language!”

“Ah…”

Hatkid pouted while still staring at him, trying to get a grasp of the situation.

“So, I don’t know if you remember but you were abandoned by the no-good Moonjumper down to the bottom of the well!

You seemed to be about to kick the bucket, kid, you were totally going to bite the dust! I don’t know how you aliens work or anything, but your arm was moving kind of funny and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with you. For a moment I thought I would just make a new body made of burlap, stick your soul there and call it a day.

I obviously wasn’t going to ask Moonjumper, that phony only meant trouble and of course I wasn’t going to waste my time talking to him. So, I came here to your spaceship and started looking for anything that might help us out, maybe you would have some alien machine to fix you all up from top to bottom, but no.

At the end, I went back to the Forest and I saw some Mafia Goons still wandering around lost at the edges of the forest and I, in my charming and charismatic tone of course, asked them to take me to a doctor…”

***

“HAHAHA! FOOLS! You totally screwed up yourselves! You are going to die here in my forest if you don’t get home soon!”

“AAAH A spooky ghost!” The Mafia Goons screamed in terror at seeing the spook coming out behind them.

“I would take your souls here and now, but I don’t have much time, I need you to take me to a doctor! Preferably an alien one, if not, any will do!”

“Mafia doesn’t know of any alien doctors!”

“Mafia is doomed! Mafia should have never never gotten separated from main group!”

The Mafia Men were trembling from fear, covering themselves away.

“Listen–” Snatcher tried to calm them down for a moment, but he was interrupted by a tin can that had been thrown away to his face by a Mafia Goon.

“Go away you ghost!” The man screamed.

“Yes! Leave us alone!”

“You know what, you guys are useless!” Snatcher floated away from the forest with Hatkid still in his arms.

Snatcher followed the trail of the Mafia right until he arrived at Mafia Town. There, he kept looking for a doctor asking every person he found, but no one seemed to want to listen to him.

“AAA! It’s the legendary spooky noodle! He came to spoil me pasta!” A Mafia Man who was just cooking threw a pot at him.

“No! I just need some help!” He covered Hatkid with his claws so the pot didn’t hit her and left.

“It’s a scary snake!” A small seller ran away from him the moment he saw him.

He kept floating through the town, he had seen the Mafia take some of his people to an ambulance back in the forest, but now he didn’t seem to find any sort of medical attention center.

“A creepy onion!” Another goon left running away when Snatcher appeared in front of him.

“Wait, listen, I just need a doctor for this brat!”

The Goon dug a small hole in the ground with his hands and hid his whole head inside. He then started mumbling, but Snatcher couldn’t understand what he was saying

“What?”

The man just kept mumbling.

“Isn’t there really anybody on this forsaken planet that can help a little, useless child?!”

He turned around and saw Cooking Cat staring at them, she had just left the Casino and was now going right back home, when she saw Hatkid being carried away by Snatcher.

“You!” Snatcher looked back at her and pointed right at her.

“Kyaa!” Cooking Cat bristled with fright at seeing Snatcher get close to her.

“You are the one who is going to help me solve this! I have a kid here who is about to die and needs medical attention, soon!”

“But–”

“No buts! We need to save this kid, and now!”

Cooking Cat couldn’t stop trembling with fear, but still felt worried by the girl in the ghost’s arms.

“Is that the alien kid?”

“Huh, you know her?”

“I mean, I have been in her spaceship before, but I still don’t know anything about alien anatomy, Mr. Scary Ghost.”

“Call me Snatcher, also, I don’t care! If you don’t know how, then is there someone who does?”

“Well…” Cooking Cat thought for a moment, she knew some vets who specialized in cats just like her, but she had never met a human or alien doctor in the past, but then, she remembered about seeing an owl who had been acting as a scientist when she was recording some specials for her Cooking Show back in Dead Bird Studios, at the end, the owl actor turned out to be a real scientist. “I think I know someone.”

***

“And that’s how we all ended up here now! Wasn't it just a beautiful, touching story?”

“I was reached by Cooking Cat and Snatcher when I was working at the studio. My specialization is not in medicine but I accepted help because I haven’t had the chance to study alien biology before.”

“And you have barely been of any use at all! You just put her arm in a white cocoon and called it a day!”

“I told you, the cast is important so the arm can heal properly, nothing can move while bones heal each other.”

“Anyhow! Since most of what you have here is that creepy alien food I decided I would make the Cooking Cat lady to help and make some meals for you! Trust me kid, I have seen her show before, what she cooks is always pretty good.”

“Thanks again, Mr. Snatcher Ghost.” While Cooking Cat appreciated the compliment, she didn’t like to have spent her time with a frightening host just like Snatcher was, it could make her bristle constantly. “Just keep in mind that they might call me one of these days in case we start a new season for the show soon–”

“Yeah, exactly, the Cooking Show! It is pretty good isn’t it? And that Ribeye steak recipe! Oh my, that Ribeye steak recipe! Oh, and the bacon dish! If I just went back to life so I could taste all those plates again!” Snatcher ignored her last remark. “And how could I forget the iconic catchphrase? ‘Now that we have finished this dish, Cooking Cat has served his mission!’”

“I think you are remembering wrong Mr. Snatcher Ghost. It’s ‘Cooking Cat has served her mission!’" Cooking Cat frowned but then stopped right away. For a moment it seemed she had gotten upset.

“Wait, but...."

“Miss Alien Kid, do you think you are ready for some food now?” Cooking Cat ignored Snatcher and decided to ask Hatkid instead.

“But… I was sure that…” Snatcher muttered, but Cooking Cat wasn’t paying attention to him anymore.

Hatkid was about to shake her head off when she heard her stomach grumble.

“I will take that as a yes. Now if you excuse me, I will go to the kitchen for a moment.” Cooking Cat left through the small hallway, making sure to not hit her head off with its small ceiling.

“So… are you doing okay?” The Science Owl replied. “Does it hurt too much?”

Hatkid tried to move her arm but she groaned when it started to hurt.

“Alright, I will go and get some painkillers as well.” Science Owl left, but he could still be heard muttering in the hallway. “What could work for painkillers for an alien anyway? Maybe a horse sedative? No, not at all. Although, an elephant’s sedative on the other hand…”

Hatkid looked back to Snatcher, who was now back into reading a book at the side of the bed. There was still something she wanted to know after what had happened in the forest a few days ago.

“What is it now, kid?” Snatcher felt the presence of her eyes looking back at him and lowered the book. He saw Hatkid holding a lock of her hair in her upper lip.

“What? Do you want to know about that red hooded, mustache girl?”

Hatkid nodded.

“I have no idea.” He returned back to read his book. “As far as I know, she is probably dead.”

“WHAAT?!” Hatkid yelled so hard that it could be heard all across the Spaceship.

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