Barry Kramer woke up. He wasn’t
sure why, because it was 4:17 AM, but then he heard something. There was a
small metal clinking noise every few seconds. Slowly, he sat up in bed. He
could see a something glinting in the light coming from under the door. Barry
decided it would be alright if he flipped the lights on to get a better look.
There were five knives on the ground, their points facing away from the door.
There was a grunt from the other side. Then another knife poked out from under
the door.
“Jon?” No response. Then another
knife slid in. Barry took a step back.
“Jon, it’s four in the morning.
What are you doing?” Then the knives did something peculiar. There was quite a
bit of rattling, and then they all snapped vertical, standing on their points.
“Jon! Whatever you’re doing, stop!”
The knives rose slowly into the air. They formed a small circle and began to
rotate around a center point. Faster and faster they spun, and all Barry could
do was stand and watch.
Suddenly, the knives stopped. Barry
blinked, but apart from that, nothing seemed to have happened. He blinked
again, and the knives were gone. Barry felt a new weight in the pockets of his
pajama pants. Since this was not a normal occurrence, Barry decided it was a
good idea to check. From his pockets he pulled out a sack of socks, three quarter
halves, a can of Febreeze maybe one third full, the handle of a pickaxe, and
thirteen clementines.
After that startling discovery,
Barry decided to look around. He was no longer in his room. This new room
lacked any furniture besides a pair of torches that cast a dim light over the
room. There were two doors in front of him, both quite large. One was labeled
“JON (100)” and the other “ARIN (1).”
Feeling suspicious, Barry decided
to tie the sack of socks to the pickaxe handle. He used the best knot he can
remember from Boy Scouts. As the doors stood there ominously and the torches
flickered, Barry wondered if the knot would hold. Thinking on his feet, Barry
sprayed a liberal amount of Febreeze onto the sockmace. Now if he hit something
it would at least smell nice.
Speaking of smelling nice, Barry
realized there was still a baker’s dozen of clementines at his feet. Barry
hated clementines. He decided the best way to eliminate the problem was to step
all over them, until all that was left was a mangled pulpy pile on the floor.
That
spices up the room, I guess, Barry thought to himself. All the stomping he
did called Barry’s attention to the fact that over the course of these events
he came to be wearing boots. Not letting it bother him too much—who knows what
he could have picked up if he had been barefoot—Barry decided to make the pulpy
pile look more orderly. He bent down and used the flat parts of the quarter
halves to squish the pulp into a neater lump.
Now that all that silliness was
over, Barry reasoned he had better figure out what was behind these doors. He
walked toward the door labeled “ARIN (1)” in his tangy boots, and before he
could reach the doorknob he heard a loud click.
Below his citrus-tinged boots was a large panel of wood that Barry assumed was
a switch. He looked up just in time to see Arin Hanson falling from a newly
opened hatch in the ceiling. Barry sidestepped away, noting that Arin seemed to
be sized more like his roommate, Jon Jafari. Barry didn’t have the time to
think about how he noticed such a minute difference, because his sidestep
landed him right on top of another switch. This one, in front of the “JON
(100)” door, opened another hatch, revealing one hundred Jon Jafaris that
seemed just a bit taller, probably the height of Arin.
Speaking of Arin, the
Jon-sized-Arin fell flat on his face as all of this transpired. Barry felt this
would be a good place for the sockmace. To cheer Jon-sized-Arin up with the
memory of happier days spent frolicking in meadows, he hefted the sockmace over
his shoulder and gave Jon-sized-Arin the best lavender-scented smack he could
muster. Jon-sized-Arin got up and walked around with a silly grin on his face
while the Arin-sized-Jons hopped out of their hatch, one at a time.
Jon-sized-Arin snapped out of his
reverie and grabbed the first Arin-sized-Jon he saw. He pitched him the idea
for a YouTube channel, and they walked out of the room through the “ARIN (1)”
door, chuckling.
Barry still had the problem of the
99 Jons, but he wagered he could handle them without Arin being there. However, these Jons looked like they were on
the verge of becoming grumpy, so Barry had to think fast. He grabbed one of the
torches from the wall and set it on top of the pulpy pile. It was aesthetically
pleasing enough for twenty of the Arin-sized-Jons. They began to crowd around
the pile.
One of them wondered aloud, “what’s
this nice pile of squished fruit doing in this dank-ass cavern?” Barry laughed,
but the seventy-nine other Jons were not as amused. They still looked at him
with disapproval.
Suddenly, one of them broke off
from the group and barreled toward Barry. Possibly because he was unused to the
gait of someone Arin’s height or perhaps because he just had poor balance in
general, this Arin-sized-Jon careened past Barry, missing by quite a large
margin, and proceeded to fall flat on his face.
Barry laughed again and said “Ha!
Look at that guy.” Not really disposed to laugh at their own
self, the Arin-sized-Jons looked at the poor attempt of an attack and tried to
devise a better option. Thirty of them broke off and began a discussion of the
pros and cons of continuing an attack. They eventually digressed into a more
philosophical discussion about their motivations, but were hindered because not
a one of them could remember Aristotle’s name. It bugged them for quite a while
after that.
The other forty-nine
Arin-sized-Jons decided to take a more direct approach, and they began to form
a tight circle around Barry. Thinking he should have remembered this a long
time ago before he got into any of this mess, Barry began to casually speak a
few letters aloud.
“X. Y. Z. Z. Y.” And with that,
Barry was instantly warped away, to a new spot in space. This room was lit by
two lamps instead of torches, and there was a black leather couch in the center
of the room. Jon-sized-Arin and one of the Arin-sized-Jons, presumably the pair
from before, were sitting on the couch, holding a piece of paper. Barry tripped
over a cat walking over to them, and this caused Jon-sized-Arin and
Arin-sized-Jon to look up. Then, coming from not too far away, was the sound of
ninety-nine Jons screaming “"WhaaaaaaAAAAAAAT!??!"
The piece of paper the two men on
the couch were holding had three things written on it, but all of them were
crossed out:
Brushing himself off from his minor
scuffle with the floor, Barry grabbed the pencil from Jon-sized-Arin and wrote
“Squidward” at the bottom of the page. Arin-sized-Jon considered the new
addition.
“Dude, hang on.” Then hurriedly he
motioned for the pencil, eager to put his idea down on the page. Barry noticed
the door at the back of the room when he heard the noise of a confused crowd
coming from that direction. With cautious regard for the door, Barry handed Arin-sized-Jon
the pencil. While Barry was still looking at the door, Arin-sized-Jon sribbled
furiously on the page.
“Okay, dude?" said the
Arin-Sized-Jon. Barry looked down at the page. The “ward” of “Squidward” had
been crossed out, and now it said “SquidGrumps.” “This is literally perfect,”
continued Arin-sized-Jon. Jon-Sized-Arin nodded in agreement.
"Totally, man. It's like,
exactly what we were looking for."
Barry didn’t have the chance to add
anything to the conversation before a hard knock came from the other side of
the door. Barry opened the door quickly. A single Arin-sized-Jon stood there,
startled that the door was actually opened. Behind this Arin-sized-Jon, Barry
saw the torch in the pile of clementines. Barry was amused that his spell
didn’t take him very far, but that amusement turned into disappointment when
this particular Arin-sized-Jon looked over to the left and shouted,
“Hey guys! I found him!” Behind Barry,
the SquidGrumps became worried, and they stood up from the couch.
“Shit, dude,” said the
Jon-sized-Arin, “you’ve gotta get out of here.” Barry dug into his pockets to
see what was left. His hand emerged with the tangy quarter halves. Barry thrust
the thirty-seven and a half cents of citrusy currency toward his antagonizer. This
particular Jon-sized-Arin looked down in confusion at the coins. Then, the
Jon-sized-Arin just shut the door. From the other side of the door, Barry
heard, “uh, never mind guys. It was a bird. Like, a really big bird,"
followed by ninety-something irritated sighs.
“Huh,” said SquidGrump Jon, sitting
back down. “That was easy.”
Barry stood there at the door,
admiring how much his quick thinking had done for him so far. Once he finally
had a moment to himself, Barry realized he still needed to get home. It seemed
there was no imminent danger, so Barry gave a casual scan of the room. The room
actually had more than the one couch and one door. There were a few empty
bookcases along one wall, and a large portal on the other side of the room. The
portal had a large neon sign on top that said “OFF,” with additional tubing to
switch to saying “ON.” There was a coin slot on one side of the portal. Barry
walked over to the portal to give it a closer look. The portal was about six
feet in diameter. Unfortunately, it was completely empty in the middle. The
coin slot on the side said “25 Cents.”
Unsure of what to do next, Barry
turned to the SquidGrumps. He looked at Arin-sized-Jon and asked, “How much ass
do you think MegaMan gets?”
Arin-sized-Jon paused for a moment.
"Huh." He began to do some math on his hands. Barry caught bits of
his mumblings, "One, two, three, four..."
"What was your favorite
Megaman?" he asked Jon-Sized-Arin.
"Uh.. probably 7."
"That could be it."
"How much ass Megaman
gets?"
"Yeah." Arin-Sized-Jon
laughed.
"Did you ever play Megaman
7?" asked Jon-Sized-Arin.
"...No?"
"Dude. We should totally play Megaman 7."
This moment felt historic to Barry.
He stood there, wondering what all of this would come to, but then he had to
return to business. He took a closer look at the couch. Barry decided it would
be worth it to fish between the cushions, so, pushing the two SquidGrumps
apart, he dove into the couch. Barry emerged with two dimes, four pennies, a
pencil, and four Pogs. So close!
Barry figured his luck had been
alright to this point, so, sighing, he used the pencil write “Legitimately 25
cents” on one of the Pogs. As he wrote “Legitimately” across the top in his
best American handwriting, Barry wondered how long ago it was that he actually
enjoyed playing Pogs. As he wrote “25 cents” across the bottom, he realized he
was not able to remember a time when he did. Crossing his fingers for luck,
Barry slid the counterfeit coin into the slot on the portal. The neon sign
switched to the “ON” tubing, and the middle of the portal filled up. In the
haze, Barry could see a blurry vision of his house.
Barry could not believe how happy
he was to see it. Home. Even if Jon was going crazy back home, it couldn’t be
much worse than what was going on… wherever he was. In one final act of
defiance, Barry did his best Charleston, and he followed that up with some
moonwalking around the room. The SquidGrumps, taken over by Barry’s elation,
also took to the dance floor. There were many sweet moves involved.
When it finally came to an end,
Barry and the SquidGrumps flopped onto the couch, laughing.
Arin-sized-Jon placed his hand on
Barry’s shoulder. "Hey man," he said, "before you go, I just
want to thank you for not beating me up with your socksack thing."
"He didn't beat you up?"
said Jon-sized-Arin. "He totally hit me, like, right in the face. With his
sack."
Arin-sized-Jon began to laugh
hysterically. "Oh, I'm sorry, what did he hit you with? Cause it sure sounds
like you said he hit you with his sack!"
"Oh you know that's just the
kind of thing that happens when you hang around bad parts of town for a while—just
walk around and get hit with sacks, like it just..." SquidGrump Arin trailed
off into improvised silliness.
Barry laughed with them, but he had
to go, because he did not know how long his counterfeit quarter would last in
the portal. As he stood at the threshold, the SquidGrumps waved goodbye. They
looked quite jolly, despite what inconsistencies there may have been with their
new name. Barry did not dwell on this. He needed to get home. He waved back.
Then, there was still the portal.
Barry wasn’t sure of its reliability, but he puffed out his chest anyway and
took a step into it. The trip, if one could call it that, was instantaneous,
but Barry felt incredibly uncomfortable. The sun was beginning to rise on the
horizon. I wonder how much time I spent
in that dungeon, Barry thought to himself. Succumbing to the dizziness,
Barry fell face first into the grass. The morning dew woke him up a little bit.
With not much dignity left, Barry considered just sleeping out on the lawn. At least
I’m 24 cents richer, Barry thought to himself. The last thing Barry heard
before collapsing from the extreme dizziness was, “Thank you for using ACME
Portals. Please pick up your emotional baggage on the way out."
***
Barry Kramer woke up. He couldn’t
remember where he was for a moment. Then a piece of grass tickling the inside
of his nose reminded him. Barry let out a groan and rolled over. Jon Jafari—Jon-sized-Jon—
was standing over him, wearing one of his black button down shirts and a pair
of boxer shorts. Jon looked down at Barry in silence for a moment, and then he
said,
“Where the hell have you been?”
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